The Presidential Fitness Test Is Back. Most Madison Kids Will Fail Push-Ups.

Sixty-six years ago, John F. Kennedy wrote an essay called “The Soft American” for Sports Illustrated. He thought American kids were getting weak. The country agreed. Six years later, we built a national fitness test for kids. We ran it for 46 years. We scrapped it in 2012 because public scoring was humiliating kids in front of their classmates.

On May 5, the White House signed a proclamation bringing it back. Push-ups. A timed mile. Pull-ups.

If your kid is in fourth grade, they have probably never been timed in a mile run. They have never been counted on push-ups. They have never tried a single pull-up at school. The test is back. The kids are not ready.

I run a kids BJJ program here in Madison. I am not panicking about this. But it is worth a real conversation. The news is moving faster than the school district, and parents are the ones who have to decide what to do at home.

The cycle, in four dates

1960. JFK writes “The Soft American.” His argument is short and stings. American kids are sitting still, eating worse, getting weaker, and the country is going to pay for it.

1966. Lyndon Johnson rolls out the Presidential Physical Fitness Award. For the next 46 years, kids do sit-ups in front of their classmates while a teacher holds a clipboard. The top performers get a patch.

2012. The Obama administration scraps the old test. They replace it with the FitnessGram model out of the Cooper Institute. The reason was simple. The old test ranked kids on a percentile and pinned an award on the top performers. A lot of kids walked out feeling like garbage. PE became the worst hour of the day for the slow kid, the heavy kid, the kid who could not do a pull-up.

2026. The test is back.

That is the cycle. We ran the experiment for 46 years. We stopped because it was hurting kids. The kids kept getting weaker anyway.

The 1985 kid would beat your kid on every event

This is the part to focus on. The 13-year-old in 1985 could plank longer, run a mile faster, and crank out more pull-ups than the 13-year-old next door today.

The data is loud.

A study in JAMA Pediatrics tracked aerobic fitness in 12-to-15-year-olds. In 1999, 52% of them met the basic standard. By 2012, only 42% did. That is one in ten kids dropping out of the “in shape” column in twelve years.

A 2024 American Heart Association meta-analysis pulled together 137 studies of kids ages 9 to 17. Cardiorespiratory fitness, which is just a long word for how long you can keep moving, dropped more than 7% from 1981 to 2014. The kids in the 1980s were, on average, in better shape than your kid is today.

And the 2024 US Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth , published by the Physical Activity Alliance, gave American kids a D-minus. Only 20 to 28% of kids ages 6 to 17 hit the recommended 60 minutes of activity a day. The other 72 to 80% are short.

Now look at what the test asks for. A 13-year-old boy is expected to plank for 134 seconds, run a mile in 6:50, and crank out 7 pull-ups. Those are the benchmarks the original test was built around. They were normal in 1985. They are not normal now.

Read that twice. American kids are, by every measurement we have, weaker and slower than the kids the test was originally built for.

What the test actually measures

The test asks kids to do one thing from each of three buckets. Core: curl-ups or a plank hold. Cardio: a one-mile run or a 20-meter beep test. Upper body: right-angle push-ups or pull-ups.

For now the Department of Defense Education Activity has made it mandatory at 161 schools on military bases. Public schools, including Madison, are voluntary. Wisconsin’s PE standards say nothing about it. Madison Metropolitan School District has not released a public statement.

So the test is real. Whether your kid takes it at school is a coin flip.

The RFK quote and the asterisk

Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. has been pushing the test as a national security issue. He said, “77 percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.” The number is real. It comes from a Pentagon report.

Here is the asterisk. That 77% includes kids disqualified for weight, mental health diagnoses, substance use, low test scores, and a list of medical conditions. Pure fitness is one slice of it. So when you hear “77% can’t serve,” that is not all push-ups. It is push-ups plus everything else going on with American kids right now. Both things are true.

Avery Faigenbaum at the College of New Jersey said it plain in Scientific American this week : “Fitness testing is not going to improve the health and well-being of American youth.” He is right that test day in front of classmates can humiliate kids who are already struggling. The test is a measurement. The measurement is not the fix.

Madison’s quiet middle ground

I have not seen a public statement from MMSD or the state on whether Madison schools will adopt the test. So your kid might do it next fall. Or never. Either way, the question is the same. Is your kid in shape?

Madison parents already know the answer for a lot of kids. We covered the motor skill decline in April, and the phone bans eating into recess and free play. The story under all of it is the same. Kids spend less time on their feet, less time pulling and pushing and wrestling, less time in the kind of play that built strong bodies for free.

The fitness test does not change that. It just makes it visible.

Where BJJ fits in

I am not going to pitch you that jiu-jitsu replaces PE. It does not. But I will tell you what I see on our mats every week, because the brief on the test asks for things our kids are already doing.

A typical kids class at Journey runs through a short warm-up, then technique, then drilling, then live rolling. By the end of an hour, a 9-year-old has done dozens of push-up patterns getting up off the floor. They have squatted, bridged, sprinted, and wrestled. Two hours a week of BJJ moves a kid more than a full week of recess for most kids today. Our kids program has been running 8 years with zero serious injuries.

Here is the part parents are missing. Kids actually love being measured. Watch a 7-year-old the first time they do a real push-up. They light up. They want to know how many. They want to know if they got better. The shame only shows up when the measurement is public, ranked, and tied to an award. Kids do not hate benchmarks. They hate being graded against the class.

In BJJ, your kid wears a belt with stripes on it. They earn a stripe when their coach sees they can do something they could not do last month. The benchmark is real, structured, and measurable.

There is no class average. There is no percentile. There is no public test day.

Your kid is measured against last week’s version of themself, and only that. The kid who started in September gets her first stripe on her own timeline. The kid next to her gets his on his. They both know they earned it.

Nobody got humiliated. Nobody got an award for being naturally athletic.

What parents can do, regardless of what MMSD does

A few things that work, in plain words.

Get your kid moving against resistance twice a week. Anything where they push, pull, hold their bodyweight, or wrestle a real human counts. Two solid sessions are worth more than five token ones.

Pick something they will actually go to. The biggest predictor of whether kids stay in a sport is whether they like the people there. Not the equipment. Not the price. The coach, the teammates, the room.

Stop measuring your kid against the class average. Measure them against their own September. That is the rule we use on the mat, and it works on push-ups too.

Cut the screen time hours. You already know this one. The kids who train and move are usually the ones whose parents made a rule and stuck to it.

If they are not in anything yet, look at the 2026 guide to kids’ martial arts in Madison we put together. There are a lot of options here, and not all of them are a fit for every kid.

If you want to see what we do

Our kids BJJ program runs five classes a week, gi and no-gi, taught by certified instructors who actually like kids. The 2-week intro is $49 and includes a free uniform. You walk in, you see if your kid likes it, you go from there.

See the kids 2-week intro

The Presidential Fitness Test is going to make a lot of parents uncomfortable this year. It should. The data behind it has been uncomfortable for a long time. We have been here before. We have, by every measure, lost ground since the last time we tried.

The good news is that what your kid needs is not complicated. They need to move, with other kids, against resistance, with a coach who pays attention. Whatever you pick, pick it this month.

The test is back. The score that matters is the one your kid sees in the mirror in September.