Few of my middle school memories are as distinct as the ones involving a pull-up bar. To be more specific: the ones of me avoiding the pull-up bar at all costs. To this day, after 200-plus hours of yoga training and far too many hours test-driving workout trends, I still cannot do a single pull-up. While that failing no longer affects my life in any substantial way, in seventh grade, the shame was palpable. That's because I was one of the millions of American kids subjected to the public humiliation otherwise known as the Presidential Fitness Test, a battery of physical feats designed to assess the health of school-age children. The test has since been retired and replaced by the less arbitrary and more forgiving physical fitness test (known as FITNESSGRAM), but it left a significant mark on scholastic history. It all started in the early 1950s when fitness activists Dr. Hans Kraus and Bonnie Prudden administered exercise tests to thousands of kids throughout the United States, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.
U.S. kids came up shockingly short: 58 percent of them failed the tests, compared to just 8 percent of the European kids. President Dwight Eisenhower wasn't pleased. He took action by forming the President's Council on Youth Fitness in 1956 to seek out strategies for improving American kids' fitness scores. Concern mounted by the time John F. Kennedy took office. In 1960, he penned a Sports Illustrated op-ed about the perceived problem. The test was totally backward," physical education teacher Joanna Faerber told the outlet. "We knew who was going to be last, and we were embarrassing them. We were pointing out their weakness. And why are teachers still "testing" kids at all? While the current program continues to focus on specific areas of fitness, there's a decidedly less militaristic approach to all of it. For Titan Rise Review instance, Visalli says there are different options for each of the five categories that are tested.
For cardiovascular fitness, kids can either run 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) or do the PACER (Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run) test