Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and believe it or not, I was never particularly the athletic type. I have vivid middle school memories of being administered a standardized fitness test during gym class. I don't recall ever being taught how to do pull ups or curl ups, but I sure remember being tested on how many I could do in front of my class.
The Presidential Fitness Test was a battery of physical feats designed to assess the health of school age American children. The test has since been retired and replaced by the less arbitrary and more forgiving physical fitness test known as Fitness Graham, but it left a significant mark on scholastic history.
It all started in the early nineteen fifties, when fitness activists Dr Hans Krauss and Bonnie Prudent administered exercise tests to thousands of kids throughout the United States, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria. U S kids came up shockingly short. Fifty eight percent of them failed the tests, compared to just eight percent of the European kids, and then President Dwight Eisenhower was not pleased. He took action by forming the President's Council on Youth Fitness in nineteen fifty six to
seek out strategies for improving American kids fitness scores. Concern mounted by the time John F. Kennedy took office in nineteen sixty he penned a Sports Illustrated op ed about the perceived problem an expert, in a very real and immediate sense, are growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness is a menace to our security. And so in nineteen sixty six, the Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge commenced, a competition of sorts designed to get kids excited about physical
fitness as it related to military service. The challenge included activities like a softball throw along jump, and that dreaded pull up, all meant to mimic military tasks like grenade throwing and ladder climbing. To earn the coveted physical fitness awards, kids would have to place in the top eighty five percentile based on national standards. The problem with all this testing, which by the way, was usually done in front of one's peers, was that, according to experts, it didn't resemble
the Krauss Webber tests. In any way. Rather than focusing on core and arm strength and improved flexibility, the Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge simply reflected the goals and priorities of the country and people who had formed their fitness philosophy during training in World War Two years later, in twelve, the test was finally abolished and replaced by a more comprehensive fitness program designed to support individual goals rather than
prescribe as standard fitness regimen. The change was the result of decades of negative feedback from both students and teachers. Physical education teacher Joanna Faber told NPR the test was totally backward. We knew who was going to be last, and we were embarrassing them. We were pointing out their weakness. So where does that leave us now? And why are teachers still testing kids at all? We spoke with marisolv Zzali, a San Francisco Bay area physical education teacher and massage therapist.
She said, the reason for the tests, I believe is basically to collect data so the state knows fitness levels of different demographics and counties, schools, cities, et cetera. But we teachers do our best to turn it into goal setting and teaching students about their bodies. We also turn it into awards for students with the most improvements are best scores to create some buy in and get them
motivated to be fit people. While the current program continues to focus on specific areas of fitness, there's a decidedly less militaristic approach to it. For instance, Fizzali says there are different options for each of the five categories that are tested, cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance, muscular strength, flexibility, and
body composition, which is muscle to fat ratio. These options acknowledge different types of fitness far better than the original test did, taking into account the different ways kids bodies work based on age and sex, and acknowledging that fitness is a spectrum. So how many kids do well on this test? Azali said the number of kids that pass
usually depends on the school. In Burlingame, California, for example, where I teach, most kids pass, I'd say, but that has to do with a lot more than just are awesome physical education teachers. She explains that the kids in her community are really active outside of school, whereas in poorer areas the number of kids that passed could be much lower. For many reasons, children might not be active outside of school due to lack of local programs, time,
or funding. Punishing and humiliating tests certainly aren't the way to get kids in shape, but encouraging physical activity of some kind is important, since it's been shown to help kids build cardio fitness, strong bones and muscles, and even
reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, only twenty one point six percent of six to nineteen year old children and adolescence in the United States get sixty or more minutes of moderate vigorous physical activity at least five days per week. But don't be discouraged. Any activity is better than no activity. There are lots of guides online to making fitness fun, even for the less coordinated among us. Today's episode was
written by Michelle Konstantinovski, produced by Tyler Clang. From on this and lots of other fitting topics, visit our home planet pastoff works dot com. H