The Presidential Physical Fitness Test

The program's roots go back to 1956, when President Eisenhower established what was first called the President's Council on Youth Fitness out of concern that American kids were falling behind on physical health. In 1966, under President Lyndon Johnson, the council introduced the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, tied to a standardized battery of fitness tests given in schools. For the next several decades, that once-a-year test was a rite of passage in American gym classes.

The events are burned into a generation's memory. You ran the mile, cranked out curl-ups while a classmate held your feet, and ran the shuttle run back and forth grabbing wooden blocks off the floor. There was a flexibility test — the sit-and-reach box, and in some years the V-sit reach — and, most dreaded of all, the pull-up bar, with the flexed-arm hang as the fallback for anyone who couldn't manage a pull-up, performed in front of the whole class with nowhere to hide if your arms gave out. (The test's early decades had featured a 50-yard dash and a standing broad jump, but those were long gone by the '90s.) Scores were stacked against national percentiles, and only kids who landed in the top tier — the 85th percentile or better across the events — earned the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, with lower awards (National and Participant) for everyone else.

The payoff was the certificate and the patch — a coveted embroidered emblem you could sew onto a jacket or gym bag, proof you'd out-pull-upped almost everyone. For plenty of other kids the annual test was less triumph than mild dread, a public accounting of exactly how many pull-ups you could or couldn't do. The Presidential Physical Fitness Test in its classic form was retired after the 2012–2013 school year, replaced by a program focused on personal health rather than ranking kids against each other — closing the book on the pull-up bar and the sit-and-reach box that defined a generation of gym classes.