Experts: Fitness Test Revival Won't Fix Sedentary Kids
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- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the structure of the revived presidential fitness test at an Atlantic City event on Monday alongside WWE star Paul Levesque (Triple H), following a presidential executive order signed last year that established a White House task force chaired by golfer Bryson DeChambeau with Levesque as vice chair.
- The test includes a timed run, upper-body strength test, and core test with benchmarks set by age and gender; all participating children receive certificates for participation or meeting goals, and HHS says several states have agreed to include it in school curricula without specifying which.
- A 2023 CDC survey found only about 1 in 4 U.S. students met the daily 60-minute physical-activity recommendation, a trend experts attribute to screen access and parental time constraints.
- Avery Faigenbaum, professor of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey, told STAT that "measuring fitness does not create fitness" and warned that public testing can embarrass children and turn them off from exercise.
- A 2018 study co-authored by Purdue University Northwest's Matthew Ladwig and published in the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine linked negative school PE memories — with embarrassment as the leading indicator — to sedentary habits later in life.
- Kennedy told NewsNation that "failure is a part of life" and compared fitness-test setbacks to WWE wrestlers losing fights, though the article notes WWE fights are scripted.
- Adam Annaccone of UT-Arlington and Faigenbaum both said the test must be paired with fun, multimodal programs, safe noncompetitive activity like recess, and positive role models if it is to keep children moving.
Why it matters: For U.S. schoolchildren in participating states, the test is arriving in classrooms amid a real inactivity crisis — only 1 in 4 students meet the 60-minute activity guideline — yet the 2018 study cited in the article identified embarrassment as the leading negative PE memory tied to lifelong sedentary habits. Kennedy's relaunch raises the issue's profile, but without fun, multimodal programming alongside it, experts argue the test risks reinforcing the very inactivity it targets.
