Remember the Presidential Fitness Test? You likely had to take one of these physical assessments in elementary, middle or high school — think running laps while your gym teacher holds a stopwatch and straining for a sit-and-reach test measuring your flexibility. The test was phased out during the 2012-2013 school year — but now it’s back.

At the end of July, President Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the five-part exam. We’re now months into the 2025-26 school year and, while most public school systems haven’t done so, Mississippi and Virginia have opted to bring it back.

What many of us at Yahoo remember about the test was that it was hard. But was it really that bad? And could it actually help the more than 70% of school-age kids who don’t get enough physical activity moving? Or combat theU.S. childhood obesity epidemic? To find out, we spoke to experts and put the test to the, um, test.

What is the Presidential Fitness Test?

It’s a five-part test that was designed to assess the fitness levels of children between the ages of 6 and 17. It consists of a one-mile run, push-ups or pull-ups, sit-ups, a shuttle run and sit-and-reach. Children are ranked based on how their performance compares to that of others of the same sex and in their age group.

For kids aged 10 and up, there was the opportunity to get a “Presidential Fitness Award.” If they ranked within the top 85th percentile for their age and sex, they would receive the Presidential Fitness patch and a certificate signed by the president.

Looking back at the old standards of the test, they strike us as very difficult to meet — even as adults. So, our intrepid 33-year-old producer Luke Brooks tried to score high enough to qualify for a “Presidential Fitness Award” for a 13-year-old boy. His mission:

Do 53 sit-ups (also called “curl-ups”) in one minute.

Do a 9.5-second shuttle run.

Reach 3.5 inches past his toes in the V-sit-and-reach.

Run a mile in six minutes and 50 seconds.

Do seven pull-ups.

Brooks managed to match or beat the scores for all of the exercises — except one: the dreaded one-mile run. He came in at seven minutes and 11 seconds, meeting the mark for 12-year-olds but a little too slow for the 13-year-old standard of six minutes and 50 seconds.

But he has nothing to be ashamed of — that is fast. Only the top 1% of men between ages 17 and 41 who take the Army Physical Fitness Test can run a mile in under seven minutes. And that test is a fitting comparison, considering the Presidential Fitness Test was designed to be compatible with military training standards. Indeed, it was conceived in the Cold War era after 1950s research showed Americans were in poorer physical shape than their European counterparts.

The test was implemented as a way to “kind of whip kids into shape to someday fight Russia or something, which is kind of problematic motivation anyway,” Tom Filline, an Illinois physical education teacher known on TikTok as “The Angry Gym Teacher,” tells Yahoo. And a 2009 study found that fitness testing plays a “questionable” role in promoting healthy lifestyles and physical fitness.

Why was it phased out?

In the 2010s, Michelle Obama, who was first lady at the time, spearheaded the “Let’s Move” campaign, which shifted the focus of physical education to individual improvements over time and teaching kids healthy, sustainable habits. During the 2012-13 school year, the Presidential Fitness Test was replaced with new assessments.

“Students were given a personal fitness score and encouraged to improve on their own,” Filline explains, rather than climb the national rankings, a system he says “encouraged them to compete against each other.” The new metric, the FitnessGram PACER test, involves many “of the exact same activities, but it’s all about the framing,” he adds.

Instead of asking kids to be in the top percentile of all students their age, Filline encourages students to “try to do one more curl-up [then] you did last time.” The only person a child is compared to is themselves. While Filline doesn’t believe there’s “inherent trauma” to teaching and testing kids on physical competence, his goal is to nurture a positive, personal relationship with physical activity.

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That’s especially important when trying to teach kids sustainable habits, Leah Robinson, director of the University of Michigan’s Child Movement, Activity and Developmental Health Laboratory, tells Yahoo. “One negative outcome of the [Presidential Fitness] Test is that it focused on fitness and athleticism rather than health behaviors and outcomes in children and youth,” she says.

Robinson is happy to see the Trump administration’s interest in adolescent health and activity levels but says more than just a test is needed. “Having an assessment is great, but it’s not getting at what’s changing children’s health, activity and physical skills,” she says.

Robinson herself remembers how difficult the test was, especially the pull-ups or flexed arm hang (an alternative for students who couldn’t do pull-ups). “That was the one I dreaded; I would hide in the back of the line,” she says. “That’s something else the test did: It rewarded those high performers, not the people who are middle or low performers, and that’s very detrimental,” she adds, because it discourages the kids who may need physical activity the most from engaging in it.

Robinson and Filline are just two experts among many who have criticized the test for emphasizing competition with others over individual health and improvement. That might be why many people on social media have shared horror stories of being “traumatized” by the test.

“The test wasn’t really doing its job, and a lot of people have traumatic, embarrassing memories from the shuttle run, push-ups or pull-ups,” Filline says. He adds that “there were a lot of body image issues” that he believes may have stemmed from both fitness testing and bad practices in physical education more broadly. “Why were we forcing all these kids to compete against each other instead of teaching them about health? That’s what it should have been about.”

Filline was not a particularly coordinated or fit kid, he says, and he hated the Presidential Fitness Test. But he started lifting weights and became a “gym rat” in college. Now, he takes pride in devising his own fun skill assessments and challenging his students to see if they can beat their own personal bests.

Will the Presidential Fitness Test become the national norm again?

It’s hard to say. Filline, who teaches in a public school, says he’s heard nothing from state or federal officials about instituting it in his school. He’s glad for that; he doesn’t think fitness assessments serve much purpose for the elementary students he teaches. For now, it’s up to states to adopt the test, as Mississippi and Virginia have done. Only time will tell if others follow suit or if the federal government issues any further mandates or guidance.

But, if they do, both Filline and Robinson hope the test will come with additional efforts to improve the physical health of children. “If you want to invest in kids’ health, there’s a lot of ways you can do that, and they all cost money,” says Filline. “So show me the money … and let me do my job.”