Maintenance Phase - October 20, 2020


The President's Physical Fitness Test

Topics
fitness testing impacts
What's Our Deal？ Fen Phen & Redux

Episode Stats


Length

58 minutes

Words per minute

186.77

Word count

10,833

Sentence count

506

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

65

sentences flagged

Hate speech

34

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, where we will tell you all about the
00:00:15.420 hidden histories of health, wellness, and, you know, your worst memories from childhood
00:00:20.240 PE.
00:00:22.280 That's remarkably accurate today.
00:00:24.220 I mean, unfortunately, I don't know anyone who felt affirmed by this particular thing.
00:00:29.060 I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm a writer and author and fat lady about town. And I can't shut up about
00:00:34.560 my new dog. Oh, yeah. We have we have a special guest today sitting on your bed behind you.
00:00:38.980 Yeah, that's right. Fin Diesel. I'm here with the with my co host, Michael Hobbs.
00:00:44.040 Petless Michael Hobbs, a reporter for HuffPost. And today we're talking about the president's
00:00:49.180 physical fitness test, which is a site of intense trauma for it appears like 97% of American children.
00:00:57.220 i've seen very few people that are like that was great glad i did it i will say i had like a couple
00:01:04.940 of good that like i really liked being like a surprisingly flexible fat kid oh there were a
00:01:10.360 couple of things that i was really good at oh yeah but pull-ups are a nightmare that never ends
00:01:14.280 unbelievable nightmare i have a vague recollection also of being like you have to be on the bar for
00:01:19.840 like 15 seconds or 30 seconds or something even if you don't do one that's the uh flexed arm hang
00:01:25.540 That was the one that I always did because I couldn't do one pull up where they would lift you above the bar.
00:01:29.920 So your chin was above the bar.
00:01:31.420 And then you just had to hold yourself there for as long as possible.
00:01:34.640 Yep, that's right.
00:01:35.360 And like you would start shaking.
00:01:37.140 It was like it was just awful.
00:01:38.820 I don't remember if the wall sit was part of that or if that was just a different thing that those PE teachers did.
00:01:43.300 Well, as we will learn, the program wasn't very well organized.
00:01:46.780 And it was kind of up to individual schools and individual teachers what they wanted to include on it.
00:01:52.320 So, fun fact, the rope climb was never on any official fitness test ever.
00:01:59.960 Yes, there was no instruction to make kids climb a rope.
00:02:03.300 They just did that because they had one.
00:02:05.480 So at your school, maybe they did the wall sit because your gym teacher wanted that.
00:02:09.420 Oh my god.
00:02:10.580 That was how scientific it was. 1.00
00:02:12.160 Also, what kind of jerk? 0.99
00:02:14.060 It's like, these kids got to be able to climb to the top of that rope. 1.00
00:02:16.700 These kids need someone to look at them from below.
00:02:19.620 That's the thing that helps with all of their self-esteem.
00:02:21.840 Do you want to summarize like what is the president's physical fitness test?
00:02:27.360 So the president's physical fitness test, my recollection just as as a consumer of it was that every classroom in the US did this.
00:02:36.400 And it was like a little battery of physical tests that always seemed sort of old fashioned to me.
00:02:42.280 you know you had to do a pull-up and you had to do sit-ups and you had to sit with your legs
00:02:48.240 flat on the floor and sort of reach along a yardstick to see how many inches you could reach
00:02:53.660 we didn't have a ton of pull-up bars we had like one or two so everybody's watching those one or
00:02:59.860 two kids fail to do a pull-up yeah and i also remember seeing kids who were like totally star
00:03:06.380 athletes not be able to do some of the stuff yes and remember how there was always like one random
00:03:12.860 goth kid who was like in theater who could just do like 55 pull-ups and everybody was like trevor
00:03:18.540 really what totally it did not correspond to kids actual physical fitness in these like extremely
00:03:25.060 obvious ways yes there was a kid in our school who was super good at pull-ups and she was a
00:03:31.920 Marilyn Manson super fan. Yes. And had little cat ears that she clipped into her hair every day.
00:03:39.520 And she wrecked the president's physical fitness test. 1.00
00:03:45.220 I also think a really big thing that like people remember about the president's physical fitness
00:03:50.720 test is that it was quantitative. At the end, you got an actual score. And of course, kids started
00:03:56.220 competing for it, right? Of like, you can only do three pull ups, but like, I can do 12. And why
00:04:00.600 can't you do as many i mean it was just so perfectly designed for kids to rank each other
00:04:05.880 and to make fun of each other because there was a literal number right there on the paper you would
00:04:10.400 sort of publicly see people feel betrayed by their own bodies right with a bunch of kids who for the
00:04:16.380 most part didn't feel comfortable being vulnerable in front yeah it was also the most vulnerable kids
00:04:22.380 feeling the worst right in that it was it was the fat kids it was like the kids who had asthma
00:04:27.220 who their teachers made them run the mile anyway, it was specifically like structured
00:04:32.120 to be the most humiliating for the least well-performing kids.
00:04:37.180 Right.
00:04:37.460 So all of that said, the purpose of this episode is to try to tell the story of the
00:04:43.840 President's Physical Fitness Test, how we got it, how the justifications for it changed
00:04:48.240 over time, and what happened to it.
00:04:50.520 But what's really surprising about this to me is that I have researched probably 50
00:04:56.580 episodes of You're Wrong About by this point. I have never researched a podcast that was so
00:05:03.340 difficult to find basic information. Really? So the president's physical fitness test at one point
00:05:08.580 was used by 75% of schools. This was a massive nationwide program. And yet it's amazing. You
00:05:17.960 look through the old historical accounts and there'll be like, duh, duh, duh, the 1950s,
00:05:23.860 And then George W. Bush expanded the – and you're like, wait, isn't there some information in between JFK and George W. Bush?
00:05:32.300 I'm sorry.
00:05:33.100 Didn't you skip half of a century?
00:05:35.260 So at one point, I emailed one of the few researchers I found.
00:05:41.080 It was a historian, literally a historian of fitness tests.
00:05:45.660 I emailed him like, am I losing my mind?
00:05:48.760 I cannot find any reports about this test or how it came about or what the debates were at the
00:05:56.280 time. And he wrote back and he basically said like, yeah, we don't do that in like exercise
00:06:01.020 studies. Because even in academia, everyone just accepted all of the precepts of fitness testing
00:06:07.800 as gospel. Nobody really asked basic questions of like, is this helping? Should we be doing this?
00:06:14.060 Are there other ways to achieve these goals? God, this is so bizarre. And it feels like
00:06:18.700 in some ways, it feels like a little encapsulation of a challenge that we have with health and
00:06:23.720 wellness in general, right? Oh, yeah. That there is this sort of very uncritical acceptance. You
00:06:29.360 have to be able to do these things. You have to look this way. You have to have these numbers in
00:06:33.220 your chart and your blood work and all that kind of stuff, right? Like, this just is what it is.
00:06:37.700 And you don't question it, right? So I don't actually know where this, where this all got
00:06:41.460 started. It feels very sort of like mid century 50s, 60s kind of time. Oh, my God, yes. So I'm
00:06:47.240 curious, where did this all start? And do you have any sense of what was the buildup to getting to
00:06:51.940 this point of a national fitness test for kids? This is actually one of the few areas that we do
00:06:58.500 know about. So the origins of this start with two doctors named Hans Krauss and Sonia Weber,
00:07:05.700 who are what was known at the time as posture physicians. This field eventually becomes
00:07:11.620 basically physical therapy. If you have lower back pain, there's exercises that you can do
00:07:16.220 stretches that you can do or you know if your hips hurt or whatever you're strengthening some
00:07:19.840 muscles so that others can rest a little more basically right we had this sort of emerging
00:07:24.700 physiology of like why do so many americans have back pain this is something that had
00:07:30.360 appeared after world war ii basically it's like a lot of americans were moving into sedentary jobs
00:07:35.740 and so the muscles that you're using to sort of move around and twist all these posture muscles
00:07:40.740 were starting to atrophy and so a huge number of americans in their 30s and 40s were showing up
00:07:45.820 with back pain and shoulder pain and wrist pain. This was a new thing in the 1950s in America. And
00:07:51.420 so these two doctors just started noticing that once they started doing these sort of, you know,
00:07:57.200 sit up exercises and stretching the hamstrings and that kind of thing, oftentimes their pain
00:08:01.080 would go away. And they became convinced that the real problem was that kids were not getting
00:08:07.400 these skills in childhood. And so these two doctors come up with something called the
00:08:11.680 Krauss-Weber test, which is a six-part test that is just measuring sort of your basic fitness,
00:08:18.800 your basic like posture muscles. And so I'm about to tell you these six exercises. Are you ready?
00:08:24.700 Yes, let's do it.
00:08:25.660 It's a very different test than the President's Physical Fitness Test because it's not measuring
00:08:30.640 a sort of peak of performance or average performance. It's just a binary test that
00:08:36.400 measures minimum fitness so each one of these exercises you only have to do once okay okay so
00:08:43.140 the first one is you're lying down on your back with your legs straight your arms straight at
00:08:49.360 your sides and you just sit up uh-huh that's it okay you're not doing 50 sit-ups you're literally
00:08:54.840 just like you're lying down and then you you move into a seated position yeah and there's also the
00:08:58.800 same one but with your knees bent and your feet on the floor and you just sit up into a seated
00:09:03.700 position so that one's like a single sit-up yes yeah then you roll over you're lying on your
00:09:09.220 stomach and then can you raise your head chest and shoulders off of the ground kind of like a
00:09:14.580 reverse crunch and then still lying on your stomach can you raise your feet off of the ground
00:09:20.640 yes or no and then there's one flexibility test which is the one we've all done a million times
00:09:26.820 you're just standing there and then you reach down and you touch your toes for three seconds
00:09:31.580 All right.
00:09:32.060 And so it's a very quick test.
00:09:33.960 It's a very easy test.
00:09:35.140 And it gives you these really useful results because it's just like, yes, yes, no, no,
00:09:39.500 no, yes.
00:09:40.320 And you're like, okay, this is the level of fitness that you have.
00:09:42.700 This is what we need to work on.
00:09:43.680 It's also really interesting because a lot of this has elements of sort of like yoga
00:09:47.380 and Pilates both.
00:09:48.520 Yeah.
00:09:48.840 That is just sort of like, can your body move in these ways, right?
00:09:52.020 Yes.
00:09:52.280 Which is a very different approach than do a pull-up in front of the whole classroom.
00:09:56.540 And it's also – because it's a minimum test, there's really not a lot of ways to stratify kids from this because there's no difference between somebody who can do one sit-up and somebody who can do 100 sit-ups.
00:10:08.620 It's just can you do one, yes or no.
00:10:10.860 It's not designed to shame children as later tests will be.
00:10:15.240 It's more – it's a diagnostic tool basically.
00:10:18.080 Great.
00:10:18.540 Go for it.
00:10:19.160 Sound good.
00:10:19.660 But so in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Krauss Weber and a woman named Bonnie Prudden, who becomes a really famous exercise guru, like early exercise guru, the three of them start administering this test to thousands of school kids.
00:10:39.260 And eventually in the early 50s, they go to Europe and they test 3,000 kids in Switzerland, Italy, and Austria on these tests.
00:10:50.420 And so the scientific result that really begins the panic that leads us to the president's physical fitness test is after these tests, they find out that 58 percent of U.S. kids fail at least one of these tests and only 8 percent of the European kids fail these tests.
00:11:12.060 So Americans are failing at these like basic minimum standards of fitness far more than the European kids.
00:11:19.340 Well, and if we're talking 40s and 50s, right, we're sort of like, in the ramp up of the space race, it's post World War Two, there's this intense sense of like, establishing the US as a superpower and is like dominating on a bunch of fronts. So I could imagine that results like this would be like really alarming.
00:11:38.660 It's like an existential crisis when these results come out because one of the things that they find within these tests is that there's no difference between rich kids and poor kids or urban kids and rural kids.
00:11:52.280 Something is wrong with America and Europe is beating us at this.
00:11:56.940 Do they ever figure out what's at the root of that or are there sort of decent hypotheses about why that might be?
00:12:02.300 Yes. So the main hypothesis for this is American decadence. So this is an article from Hans Krauss
00:12:12.200 interpreting the results. He says, Europeans rely less on automobiles, school buses, and elevators.
00:12:19.400 European children walk miles to school, ride bicycles, hike, chop, and haul wood for home
00:12:24.560 heating. In contrast, American children are largely driven in cars by their parents, confined to their 0.68
00:12:29.740 own neighborhoods and obligated to perform only easy chores, such as making their own beds and
00:12:34.840 setting the table. Nothing more strenuous than walking the dog or mowing the lawn.
00:12:39.220 That feels like such a little prototype of what's to come with sort of the obesity epidemic.
00:12:44.240 Oh my god, I know.
00:12:44.860 There is a really fascinating book. I think it's called Diet and the Disease of Civilization.
00:12:51.400 The idea that this author is sort of positing is that the way that we think about diet and
00:12:57.640 exercise and weight loss and all that sort of stuff is as we were in the garden of eden and
00:13:03.240 we have fallen and the reason we have fallen is because of civilization right is because of
00:13:08.080 cars and buses and industrialization and all of that kind of stuff and that the solution to that
00:13:13.520 is to get quote unquote get back to something that is like pre-industrial is almost the idea
00:13:19.040 with a lot of fitness stuff where i'm like cool we could get back to pre-industrial times but also
00:13:24.400 So you want to think about what life expectancy was in those times, Bob?
00:13:27.260 Right, exactly.
00:13:29.140 Yeah, they were just like eating raw meat off the ground.
00:13:31.820 Like this is not necessarily a recipe for life.
00:13:34.760 Yeah, that seems right.
00:13:35.740 But so eventually we find out the actual reason that European kids did so much better on the test has much more to do with practice than American decadence.
00:13:49.500 If the problem was American decadence, you know, we're not walking to school anymore, we're all living in the suburbs, whatever, that's actually a pretty small slice of Americans at this point.
00:14:01.680 In 1950, we still had about half of American kids were walking or biking to school.
00:14:06.080 It's actually very important that in these fitness tests, we don't have a stratification between rich kids and poor kids, urban kids and rural kids.
00:14:14.780 Because if this was about American decadence, well, they have rich kids in Europe and they have poor kids in America.
00:14:21.140 This also feels like just such a classic example of adult anxieties getting projected onto kids, right?
00:14:26.680 That's like, okay, everything's gotten industrialized. 0.81
00:14:29.980 Women are in the workplace to some degree or have been, right? 0.99
00:14:33.980 We've got all these factories that were producing munitions and are now producing like dishwashers and shit like that. 1.00
00:14:40.740 What's the human cost of not having to do this work? 0.88
00:14:43.840 What's the human cost of living in cities and suburbs, right?
00:14:47.140 Like I could imagine given the rate of change during that sort of post-war time that there would be a lot of anxiety to go around and this seems like a weird place to put it.
00:14:57.820 Oh, yeah.
00:14:58.060 But then what's really interesting about the Krauss-Weber test is as Krauss and Weber themselves say, this is a test that can improve with practice.
00:15:09.300 So American kids who take this test and fail it and then practice at it for six weeks will then get the same results as Europeans.
00:15:19.540 There's also the question of whether this is actually measuring fitness or is it just measuring – I mean are you somebody who does sit-ups on a regular basis? 0.62
00:15:28.420 For European kids, the PE that they get in school is much more like calisthenics where it's one gym teacher standing at the front of the class and they'll sort of – they'll do 50 jumping jacks together and then they'll stand with their arms out and the kids have to kick up their left leg and kick up their right leg and then they'll all do 50 sit-ups together.
00:15:46.840 it's very regimented and sort of militaristic whereas what happened with this form of physical
00:15:53.720 education because this was actually very popular in america from around the 1890s until the 1950s
00:15:58.880 americans did this too but then what they found out was that this kind of exercise was really
00:16:04.880 popular with the nazis like this was this was a huge thing for hitler was this idea of sort of
00:16:13.040 physical superiority, right? That it's not just enough to be white and blonde. You also have to
00:16:17.860 be white and blonde and fit. And so the Nazis in Austria and Germany were doing a lot of these
00:16:24.780 group exercise programs. So Americans got kind of uncomfortable with this stuff. And American
00:16:30.960 schools in the 1940s started shifting over to sports. So instead of doing these calisthenics,
00:16:36.400 we're going to play baseball. We're going to play football. The culture of sports shifted very
00:16:41.120 quickly, because we were all watching like the triumph of the will. And it just got kind of
00:16:46.220 creepy and weird. Well, so the interesting thing here is that this also maps on to there's a flip
00:16:50.520 side of this, right? There's not just establishing superiority. Through this, I would imagine there's
00:16:55.560 also establishing inferiority, right? Oh, absolutely. You're also sort of identifying
00:16:59.960 who do we not want to have around anymore? Well, also, I mean, as a guy who lived in
00:17:04.360 Germany for five years, and has read a lot about the Nazis over the years. It's also I think really
00:17:08.780 important to acknowledge that in authoritarian regimes, there will always be another spectrum of
00:17:15.200 superiority. After you get rid of the Jews, then you're just going to start stratifying people by 0.95
00:17:20.120 physical fitness. And then after you do that, you're just going to find some other reason 1.00
00:17:24.540 to stratify people and get rid of the quote unquote inferior people. This is a way of looking
00:17:29.700 at the world. And so it's understandable that for American kids who have grown up playing baseball
00:17:35.680 and doing these other things, they can't do sit-ups because they haven't been doing sit-ups
00:17:39.440 at school. And once you get them doing sit-ups at school every day, they can do sit-ups. So
00:17:44.800 there's nothing magical going on here. And the fact that, you know, kids that are playing soccer
00:17:48.720 every day, you know, a couple of days a week with kids in their neighborhood,
00:17:52.060 maybe they can't do a sit-up, but that doesn't mean that they're out of shape.
00:17:55.620 It just means that they can't do this one specific thing.
00:17:58.380 Well, and based on a thing that was like, do you have back pain, adult? How do we treat your back
00:18:03.280 pain adult right to be like we got to get in there early so these kids don't have back pain
00:18:08.480 20 years later i guess like it just feels like there's some missing connections here so all of
00:18:14.020 this the reason why it's called the president's physical fitness test is because eisenhower sees
00:18:17.780 these results and he's a military guy and he immediately links the fitness of american kids
00:18:25.980 to america is going to have problems fighting wars if this gets any worse that's where the
00:18:31.820 rope climbing comes in. Oh, yeah. And also, I don't know if this is apocryphal, but Bonnie 0.55
00:18:37.100 Prudden, this later exercise guru, she gets invited to the White House and she gives Dwight
00:18:43.420 Eisenhower the Kraus-Weber test and he passes. And then she tells him, you know, 60% of American
00:18:51.340 kids don't pass these tests. And he's like, yeah. Yeah. And so in July of 1956, Eisenhower creates
00:18:58.740 the President's Council on Youth Fitness. And one of the reasons that he wants to do this is
00:19:05.220 because he wants it to be separate from all of these other government agencies. He doesn't want
00:19:10.520 it to get bogged down in all of this bureaucracy. And so this is from a Sports Illustrated article
00:19:15.720 in 1955. So this is the quote from, his name's Frank Karsten. He's a Missouri Democrat. He says,
00:19:22.880 according to Dr. Krause, the physical fitness of American children is eight times lower than that
00:19:27.780 of the physical fitness of European children.
00:19:30.080 Simply on the mathematical surface, 0.96
00:19:31.820 this is a ridiculous statement 0.97
00:19:33.160 and I am very much surprised that you would dignify it. 0.98
00:19:35.820 Which like, yes, like people should have been
00:19:38.200 more skeptical of this than they were.
00:19:40.340 He also says, I ask the president to explore the matter
00:19:43.540 through the proper governmental agencies
00:19:45.640 rather than simply taking stock in Dr. Krauss's figures.
00:19:49.500 So he's essentially saying,
00:19:50.720 why are we doing this as a completely separate thing?
00:19:54.420 If this is so important,
00:19:55.560 it's very strange that you're setting up this separate president's council with an executive
00:20:00.940 order right why wouldn't you use like health departments why wouldn't you use right like
00:20:05.720 education departments why wouldn't you use like there are vehicles that are better positioned
00:20:10.260 and have more infrastructure to do this kind of thing and there's also policies that you could
00:20:14.720 pass one of the things that i think is actually really important and this really sets the template
00:20:18.780 for the issue of youth fitness for the next 50 years is that it is always conceived throughout
00:20:24.840 every future president that touches this issue, it is always conceived as A, so important that we
00:20:33.280 have to do something about it. We have to rally parents. We have to rally schools. B, it's not
00:20:39.780 important enough to change any actual laws or make any sacrifices. This is what Eisenhower says.
00:20:45.500 I believe you and I share the feeling that more and better coordinated attention should be given
00:20:49.640 to this most precious asset of our youth. By this, I do not mean that we should have an overriding
00:20:55.160 federal program. The fitness of our young people is essentially a home and local community problem.
00:21:00.360 Your deliberations also reveal a need for arousing in the American people a new awareness of the
00:21:05.960 importance of physical and recreational activity. This is the Republican approach to so many things
00:21:11.660 where it's like, it's really, really, really important, but not important to actually do
00:21:15.500 anything about it. We're going to leave it to local communities. We're going to leave it to
00:21:19.520 parents. And, you know, my rule of thumb on this is whenever somebody says, we need a culture of
00:21:26.140 X in America, we need a culture of exercise in America. That means they don't want to do
00:21:30.380 anything about it. That means they want things to change spontaneously.
00:21:33.540 Wait, can I tell you something? I just turned in a new piece and the title is,
00:21:37.420 it's time to bring a culture of consent to diet talk.
00:21:40.540 No!
00:21:42.620 I'm the problem, Michael.
00:21:44.060 You're the enemy.
00:21:47.240 No, but totally.
00:21:48.700 Like, I hear you, right?
00:21:50.080 That if you're talking about a culture of something, then there's not necessarily like a single person who's responsible.
00:21:55.260 Yes.
00:21:55.720 One of the things that's amazing, I actually found a really fascinating article about the systematization of children's play.
00:22:03.060 What they find is that in the early years of this council, so right after Eisenhower sets it up, it's actually really cute and really lovely.
00:22:12.500 So in the first wave of this organization, what they start putting out is all these recommendations
00:22:17.940 that are really about we need to give children open-ended forms of play.
00:22:24.700 And it's really important for kids to have hobbies, but it's not important what those
00:22:28.600 hobbies are.
00:22:29.900 So one of their first recommendations that they put out in one of these reports, it
00:22:34.040 comes out in 1956, it says schools should have more time, equipment, and personnel for
00:22:38.900 physical education and should focus increased attention on children who are not athletically
00:22:43.540 gifted rather than on stars so it's already saying like let's let's look at the kids that
00:22:49.080 need a little bit more help and let's focus on them because like the buff football jock who's
00:22:54.220 doing 24 pull-ups he really doesn't need us it also mentions specifically and this is dope for
00:22:59.680 1956 it says make sure that girls have equal opportunities for physical fitness whoa hey dude
00:23:06.580 That's great.
00:23:07.700 They also, this is from the terrific article on this that I found.
00:23:11.000 It says, in the conference's final report to the president, the conferees offered a
00:23:15.580 definition of fitness that encompasses the total person, spiritual, mental, emotional,
00:23:21.080 social, cultural, as well as physical.
00:23:23.240 That is like some whole child learning that is even today can be kind of a radical approach.
00:23:29.760 Totally.
00:23:30.060 That's kind of badass ahead of its time thinking.
00:23:32.740 Yeah. And in their reports, they even mentioned stuff like camping and fishing and bowling,
00:23:38.980 these things that are not necessarily the most athletic, right? You're not dripping sweat when
00:23:44.520 you're fishing, but it's also, it's just a nice recreational activity. And some kids are going to
00:23:49.700 be more suited to that than they are to jogging 10 miles. And that's fine. Totally. And this is
00:23:55.480 the last time that this is going to happen in this episode, but they actually propose changes to the
00:24:00.820 physical environment, that one of the things they say is that cities should start closing down
00:24:06.400 streets to cars so that they create time and space for children without excessive adult
00:24:12.920 oversight. They're essentially saying, let kids play in the street, let them meet their neighbors,
00:24:18.060 let them play Frisbee, let them ride their bikes. It doesn't really matter what it is.
00:24:21.940 I will say this is something that we are sort of working toward in Portland, Oregon now,
00:24:27.340 not for kids playing purposes but for like maybe some streets should just be for bikes
00:24:33.180 and pedestrians oh yeah and the freak out around that from folks who drive cars is like astronomical
00:24:39.860 oh people lose their minds so it's really fascinating to hear this you know coming
00:24:44.520 around you know 60 years ago plus 70 years ago now i mean it is this glimpse of the the health
00:24:50.600 and wellness rhetoric that we could have had if we hadn't diverted into this fork of weight
00:24:55.800 You know, some kids are going to like fishing and they're not going to be able to do a pull-up and fine.
00:25:01.160 Like I don't need every kid to be getting their resting heart rate above 90 beats per minute three times a day.
00:25:07.100 Like this quantification is something that has become so poisonous around all of our rhetoric around food and health and fitness.
00:25:15.440 And this was a time when basically this council explicitly resisted calls to do that, right?
00:25:22.880 They resisted the idea of testing kids.
00:25:25.240 They resisted the idea of setting a baseline for fitness.
00:25:28.300 They basically said, let's not tell them what kind of play we want them to do or what play is or what it means to be fit.
00:25:35.180 There's no point in doing that.
00:25:36.440 Let's just give them the space.
00:25:37.940 Yeah, play with your army guys.
00:25:39.580 Go hang out in the forest.
00:25:41.880 You know what I mean?
00:25:42.400 Like build weird structures.
00:25:44.360 Do whatever you want, right?
00:25:45.720 Like weird kid play.
00:25:47.500 Yeah.
00:25:47.700 So I'm super curious about how we got from this point of this council resisting this kind of measurement.
00:25:53.980 And then in pretty short order, it sounds like we pivot into now there's a national test.
00:26:00.440 So what happens is and the way that we get to the president's physical fitness test that we know today is the sort of academic expert community starts to coalesce around a new way of thinking about fitness that becomes really popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
00:26:17.280 there's a guy called Charles McCloy who becomes really famous by writing a bunch of magazine
00:26:21.220 articles. One of his most famous articles is called How About Some Muscle? He essentially
00:26:27.180 makes the same argument that Krauss was making in 1953. Kids are too soft. And the problem is
00:26:34.460 we don't have any measurable goals for these kids. And what the hell are these presidents,
00:26:38.680 council, whatever, whatever people doing that, you know, they've been doing this for a couple
00:26:42.640 years and we don't even have baselines of what kids should be able to do and so in 1958 the
00:26:50.900 president's council gives in to this changing paradigm of fitness and this increasing quantification
00:26:56.660 of fitness and produces the first official u.s government fitness test here i'm going to read you
00:27:03.580 the activities that are on it okay yes please so it has eight fitness tests so first straight leg
00:27:10.660 sit-ups okay standing broad jump they're measuring how far you can jump pull-ups for boys or modified
00:27:18.200 pull-ups for girls that's the flexed arm hang the 50 yard dash the shuttle run that's the thing where
00:27:24.980 you pick up an eraser and then you run back and then you pick up another racer you basically run
00:27:28.240 back and forth for a couple minutes yeah there's the 600 yard run there's a softball throw where
00:27:36.040 they measure how far you can throw a softball. And then there are three aquatic tests.
00:27:42.220 What are the aquatic tests?
00:27:43.960 I could not, I could not find this out.
00:27:46.160 Oh, man.
00:27:47.020 The test says that they're optional. I've seen no literature on schools actually implementing
00:27:52.280 these because like you'd have to go to a different building.
00:27:54.140 But your school would have to have a pool.
00:27:56.260 Exactly.
00:27:56.940 Like what?
00:27:57.760 Step one.
00:27:58.460 Also, imagine how much worse the president's physical fitness test 1.00
00:28:01.820 would have been if you had to do part of it in a fucking bathing suit. 1.00
00:28:04.980 Seriously. 0.99
00:28:05.780 I am very glad that these have been lost to time.
00:28:08.800 Totally.
00:28:09.460 Although I will say I was like a swim team fat kid.
00:28:12.540 That was my activity of choice.
00:28:15.380 I loved it and was like super good at it.
00:28:18.060 But also if we had done that, I would have had to test my percentile rank at hiding a boner.
00:28:21.980 Like every other boy is going to just be like wandering around a speedo and like doing sit-ups.
00:28:27.640 I'm like, I don't think we're measuring what we want to be measuring here, guys.
00:28:31.400 So what's interesting about these tests is that nobody knows how they were put together. We don't
00:28:38.800 have clear literature on sort of who proposed them specifically. But the theory that academics
00:28:43.920 have come up with over the years is that all of them are linked to military prowess. So things
00:28:51.900 like the long jump, the shuttle run, all of that is, you know, running through the jungles when
00:28:57.780 you're invading another country like these are skills that you need for doing military maneuvers
00:29:02.420 also i saw in one article they said that the softball throw how far can you throw a softball
00:29:08.060 that's linked to potentially throwing grenades jesus you don't want to get too conspiratorial
00:29:12.980 about these things but it's clear that there was a military reason a national security reason
00:29:19.100 for doing these things right so that's the sort of half tinfoil hat explanation of how these
00:29:24.940 exercises got in there do you know i don't i don't know why this is what just popped into my
00:29:28.800 head but this is such a bizarre thing that's like we don't think of our children as soldiers right
00:29:34.220 like we're against child soldiers but we are for child military readiness like if push came to
00:29:40.220 shove we do know how far that kid can throw a grenade or what we want to know what is his
00:29:45.140 willingness to kill but so it's the late 50s this test has been developed but it's not really being
00:29:52.600 used in that many schools. Like there's still not a national PE program. So this obscure government
00:29:59.400 body has created this test, but it's not in all of the schools yet. But then what happens is JFK
00:30:07.300 comes into office and apparently this is one of the first times this had ever been done,
00:30:12.360 that right after he was elected, but before he took office, he wrote a editorial in Sports
00:30:21.460 illustrated called The Soft American. What? Which basically lays out exactly the same argument
00:30:28.720 as Krauss and Weber had made in 1953. The American kids are soft. Their fitness is bad. 0.89
00:30:35.180 The fitness of kids is actually worse in 1961 than it is in 1953. So he starts out his essay
00:30:41.960 by saying, the first indication of a decline in the physical strength and ability of young Americans
00:30:46.840 became apparent among U.S. soldiers in the early stages of the Korean War.
00:30:51.820 Almost one out of every two young Americans was being rejected
00:30:55.540 by selective service as mentally, morally, or physically unfit.
00:31:00.260 Sorry, was it physically, mentally, or morally unfit?
00:31:04.440 I know.
00:31:05.240 You're just going to throw in the mentally and morally
00:31:07.900 and not really unpack that at all, my dude?
00:31:10.000 I know.
00:31:10.260 It's like, how much time do we have on this show?
00:31:12.100 Right.
00:31:12.660 Buddy, that's a big bucket to throw a lot of people into
00:31:15.680 and then be like, they all just need some exercise.
00:31:17.920 It's like really not the point.
00:31:19.560 There's also, but then he does the thing.
00:31:21.380 He ends his Sports Illustrated article
00:31:23.980 doing the exact same thing that Eisenhower did
00:31:27.800 and that every future president will do.
00:31:29.540 He says, you know, this is so important.
00:31:31.580 Our bodies are getting soft. 0.94
00:31:32.940 We need to beat the Soviets. 0.54
00:31:34.020 We need to be a vital nation, vigorous, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:36.920 And then he's like, okay, here are my recommendations.
00:31:40.240 Here's what we need to do to solve this problem.
00:31:42.380 I'm going to read these to you.
00:31:43.160 First, establish a White House committee on health and fitness.
00:31:47.900 Make the physical fitness of our youth the direct responsibility of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
00:31:54.200 The governor of each state must be invited to attend the annual National Youth Fitness Congress. 0.98
00:32:00.420 So it's like establish a fucking committee, invite governors to a meeting. 0.99
00:32:04.920 Right. 0.99
00:32:05.340 It's so important and this is the only way we're going to beat the Soviets.
00:32:07.960 but you just want to hold a bunch of meetings and bring the president's council into a different
00:32:12.400 government department? And so another really important thing that he does is he establishes
00:32:18.340 an award. So you probably remember this from when you were a kid, that the kids who scored above the
00:32:23.940 85th percentile on all six categories of the president's physical fitness test got an achievement
00:32:29.660 award. I don't know if it was like a ribbon or like a medal or whatever it was, but they would
00:32:33.200 get sort of officially recognized for being one of the fittest kids at school this was seen as a
00:32:39.760 way of promoting physical education and kind of fostering friendly competition among kids
00:32:44.000 how friendly was it i know you couldn't tell that i was putting friendly competition in quotes like
00:32:49.680 that's such an oxymoronic phrase to me friendly competition in school also like the people who
00:32:54.480 call school sports friendly competition are the people who win every quote-unquote friendly
00:33:00.220 competition right it's just like only the people who feel great about it who are like it's fine
00:33:04.920 yeah but so what's amazing about this entire field is that we keep having the same moral panic about
00:33:12.660 the fitness of children yeah right so we had in the 50s we had it again in the 60s and in the 1980s
00:33:18.320 we start getting another wave of news articles coming out saying kids are less fit than they
00:33:24.440 used to be kids are watching more tv it's now getting more wrapped up in the obesity epidemic
00:33:29.720 and in tv watching which is a decades-long moral panic about children but basically we just get a
00:33:35.480 third wave of articles coming out being like look how unfit our kids are i feel like i'm gonna end
00:33:41.360 up like in the style of jerry seinfeld having a clenched fist and rather than saying newman i'm
00:33:47.060 gonna end up saying reagan school fitness can't trickle down but money has to and so in the midst
00:33:54.180 of all of these swirling anxieties states start passing laws that every kid needs to get a fitness
00:34:00.960 test once per year so this is when we get the huge explosion of the president's physical fitness test
00:34:08.180 being launched into schools we also get in 1986 a new version of the test this is the version
00:34:16.080 that you and me remember is the 1986 version it consists of the one mile run slash walk curl ups
00:34:25.280 basically sit ups pull ups the shuttle run the v sit reach which is this thing where you're sitting
00:34:32.320 down with your legs spread and you see how far you can reach your hands forward and then the sit
00:34:37.500 and reach which is the same thing but your feet are together i remember the sit and reach well
00:34:41.900 oh it sucked we had like a weird little like box that you put your feet into remember the box and
00:34:47.020 there was a yardstick like glued to it or something it was like a weirdly janky super janky and a lot
00:34:53.500 of kids that actually were flexible and like did dance and stuff couldn't do that very well because
00:34:58.180 it was a very specific form of flexibility totally i completely forgot that the mile is part of it
00:35:03.560 yeah i think i have blocked out the mile because it was so horrible one year at my school i boycotted
00:35:09.100 it. And I walked as slowly as I could. And I sat down and I read a Stephen King book for like 10
00:35:15.400 minutes in the middle of it. And I remember they had to delay the start of the next class just for
00:35:21.600 me because I refused to do it. I took 27 minutes to do the mile. Oh my God. That's like the courage
00:35:27.260 I wish I had. So we had at my school, it was a long path to get from the gym to the track. You
00:35:34.380 had to like walk through this sort of like, this is very Pacific Northwest. You had to walk through
00:35:37.620 this big long like sort of forest section nice to get down to the track so everyone had to go down
00:35:43.460 to the track together and when we would run the mile you would just watch the fastest kids finish
00:35:49.580 first without even really breaking a sweat and it was reliably there were two kids who were last and
00:35:55.040 it was me and this other fat kid who was a friend of mine and there were two outcomes and both of
00:36:00.340 them were mortifying to me one was that many of the kids who finished first would get resentful
00:36:05.760 that they were like had this potential free time and they couldn't walk back up to the gym and
00:36:09.860 change and get that free time back. Because they had to sit there and watch the fat kids,
00:36:15.040 which just like is structured to encourage bullying. Totally. And the flip side of that 0.67
00:36:21.060 was there were some kids who finished faster who I think thought of themselves as nice kids and
00:36:26.540 were absolutely trying to do a nice thing. And they would like sort of jog alongside us and be
00:36:31.260 like good job you can do it oh no this is this is more spotlight that i do not want right now oh 0.76
00:36:37.620 it's so mortifying i fucking remember that it's just such a creepy way to like decide to be 0.63
00:36:42.240 inspired by like to center your own reaction yeah to what someone else is doing right rather than 0.86
00:36:47.100 what they probably want and need it was just so it was just so mortifying the entire exercise
00:36:51.840 so this is also the time in the late 80s and the early 90s when schools start doing what they call
00:36:57.800 body composition tests no so as part of the president's physical fitness test they started
00:37:04.960 measuring kids bmis no and they started doing skin fold tests sure so there's something called
00:37:13.060 the fitness gram where they take a measurement of your skin fold on the back of your right arm
00:37:18.500 and on your right calf and they measure how thick the skin is and that's a measurement of your body
00:37:24.760 fat percentage, basically. Totally bananas. Totally bananas. There's also some schools that
00:37:28.840 are weighing all the kids, but they only have one scale. So they have to do it in front of
00:37:34.120 everybody else and they read out the number, which is just, again, designed to shame the
00:37:40.580 fattest kids. Well, and it's also like, as I'm sure it's as close as you get to a guarantee of
00:37:45.760 somebody in that class getting an eating disorder. Totally. This is what happens when obesity
00:37:50.740 becomes the frame through which we look at all health issues.
00:37:54.480 It's not really about testing fitness anymore.
00:37:56.800 It's about testing fatness.
00:37:58.340 I'm super curious about the degree to which there is even just a shared definition at
00:38:02.480 this point of like what physical fitness consists of. 0.99
00:38:05.880 Oh my fucking God. 0.98
00:38:06.640 This feels like a way of defining it through negative space, right? 1.00
00:38:10.080 It's not being fat.
00:38:12.780 Which I'm like, okay, but then what is it though?
00:38:15.600 This actually gets into the next section that we're going to dwell on for a while,
00:38:19.200 which is the problems with the president's physical fitness test. So even on this,
00:38:25.120 there's not as much academic literature as I would like, but there's actually much more
00:38:28.980 on the challenges of the test and the deficiencies of the test than there is on its actual history.
00:38:34.200 So as the test becomes much more popular, much more widespread, kids are being now required by
00:38:39.420 law to get it every single year, studies start coming out about the fact that it's really not
00:38:44.120 achieving any of its goals. And one of the reasons is that kids are not practicing the president's
00:38:52.240 physical fitness test. I mean, this is something that really like made an audible click in my head
00:38:56.800 when I was reading it, that in middle school, we would just have gym class and, you know, we'd play
00:39:02.240 volleyball and whatever. And then one day a year, we would do this dumb physical fitness test. And
00:39:08.000 then we would just go back to what we were doing. Right. You weren't doing a sit and reach every
00:39:12.160 month yes yeah so it's basically okay a random wednesday we're just gonna come in you're gonna 0.64
00:39:17.420 do this thing you're gonna feel like shit yeah and then we're never gonna talk about it again 0.54
00:39:22.060 and then we're gonna go back to playing dodgeball and we won't test you on your dodgeball acuity or 0.74
00:39:27.080 whatever right yeah so it's totally separated from any actual program i mean i could actually
00:39:33.060 see some use in some of these things like hey we're gonna help kids get flexible so at the
00:39:38.540 beginning of the year we're gonna do the toe touch we can do a bunch of other stretching exercises
00:39:41.700 every single day for three months we're all going to do stretches together as a class and at the
00:39:47.620 end we're going to test ourselves again and look how much you improved i can see that being a pretty
00:39:52.980 positive experience for kids like look you can train your body and you can become better at
00:39:57.000 something and maybe you'll find a love for like downward dogging or something and maybe you'll 1.00
00:40:00.740 continue doing that at home great but it was never done like that it was just like you piece of shit 0.99
00:40:05.240 you can't even do one pull-up okay see you next year where you're also not going to be able to do 0.98
00:40:09.400 one pull up so like basically the lesson that we learned that sparked this whole thing right that
00:40:15.240 european kids were getting practice in these specific things we then did not apply oh yeah
00:40:22.400 for all of this time right yeah we shouldn't be allowed to be surprised by you didn't practice a
00:40:28.740 thing and then you didn't get better at it yeah that shouldn't be that's just like people that's
00:40:35.000 just how people work totally and another i mean another problem with this and i think this is
00:40:39.840 really key to almost all of these sort of national overall projects that we have about pe and schools
00:40:47.140 is that schools teachers were never really given very much instruction or extra resources for this
00:40:53.900 again it's not like this was like a six-week fun program that all the kids are going to do together
00:40:58.940 and we're all going to become stronger in these specific ways it was like hey pe teachers you're
00:41:04.360 required by law to give this test once a year, but we're not really going to give you guidelines on
00:41:08.220 how to do it, how to communicate the results to kids or what the results mean. Teachers since the
00:41:15.060 1950s have absolutely hated this test and teachers and principals have been opposed to it from day
00:41:20.580 one, but no one ever really listened to those concerns or took them seriously because like,
00:41:24.560 oh, it's just teachers. Who cares? It's only the people on whom we depend for the success of these
00:41:29.900 programs. So why would we listen to them? Obviously, right? Right. I mean, this is sort of
00:41:33.680 like a shitty like obstructionist term that gets thrown around a lot but like it is a pretty
00:41:38.720 classic unfunded mandate yeah oh yeah exactly it's just like just go do a bunch of other stuff 0.52
00:41:43.680 and we're not going to pay you for it we're not going to figure it out for you you'll figure it
00:41:47.300 out for yourselves and whatever but you should definitely be very concerned about it right like
00:41:51.800 what i mean this this is one of my biggest shocks when i was researching this and because i'm a
00:41:58.540 methodology queen i get really angry at stuff like this first of all the data that we get from
00:42:03.960 the fitness tests is pretty shitty because the data is being gathered in such a poor way like
00:42:09.640 they say in the bmi test that a lot of kids are getting weighed like with their jackets on with 0.55
00:42:15.280 their shoes on that's like fat lady 101 you go into weight watchers you take off as many clothes as
00:42:21.320 you can yeah come on it's like these kids don't even know how to diet but like this is to me is
00:42:29.900 completely ridiculous that no one ever did anything with the results the primary thing
00:42:37.260 that was done with the actual numbers that were produced by millions of kids taking this test
00:42:44.040 every year was they would just identify kids to get awards so all that stuff about like percentile
00:42:50.160 rankings. All of that is based on other academic studies that were done. The actual numbers that
00:42:55.580 were produced by all of the surveillance of all these kids, no public health departments were
00:43:00.260 plugged into that. That wasn't going to principals to like track kids over time. All of these numbers
00:43:05.840 that we produced, they didn't do anything. They were just there to make us feel shitty. 0.89
00:43:09.460 And then they just went into the recycling bin. Yeah. So they weren't even like aggregated. There 0.97
00:43:13.840 wasn't even like a report. Reagan. And another thing that comes up in the studies on this is
00:43:20.920 that none of the actual fitness tests measured fitness. So I found a really good meta analysis
00:43:27.980 of all of the individual tests that were the components of the president's physical fitness
00:43:33.300 tests. And there's literally no evidence that the ability to do pull-ups is related to overall
00:43:39.580 upper body strength right if it did no one would have any we would all have t-rex arms exactly 0.79
00:43:46.040 yes like of course it's not indicative of shit this actually comes up in this review that it's 0.61
00:43:51.020 extremely strange to pick a measure of fitness that most children cannot do you can have a lot 0.94
00:43:58.180 of different kids that cannot do a pull-up and some of those kids are extremely fit and some of
00:44:02.740 those kids are extremely unfit but because all of them are putting up the number zero you're not
00:44:07.820 catching any of those gradations right and so what this review finds is that pull-ups are a much
00:44:14.300 better measure of body fat percentage than anything else because your body weight is inversely
00:44:19.940 correlated to how many pull-ups you can do so you're basically just measuring how fat the kids
00:44:25.420 are it's not actually useful as anything else like this is always sort of a fascinating thing
00:44:30.600 when people talk about fitness where they're like i don't know that fat guy gets winded real fast
00:44:34.520 And I'm like, yeah, he's carrying 200 more pounds than you are.
00:44:38.020 Yes.
00:44:38.400 And he's working harder.
00:44:39.300 Yes.
00:44:39.760 And he's working harder every day to do everything.
00:44:43.020 Right.
00:44:43.120 I don't understand how this doesn't translate for folks, but okay.
00:44:45.620 So basically, if we were designing a fitness test from scratch now,
00:44:49.080 we would not be using any of these things because they don't actually test fitness.
00:44:52.940 The studies actually mention that there's no good test for fitness of kids generally.
00:44:59.040 Because when we talk about, you know, how fit should kids be,
00:45:01.980 It's really difficult because what we're basically trying to do is predict things far in the future, right?
00:45:06.840 Which kids are going to get heart disease, which kids are going to get lower back pain, etc.
00:45:10.400 And so it's really difficult to tell what should kids be able to do at 12 that's going to predict what happens to them when they're 50.
00:45:18.600 It is presenting itself as public health work.
00:45:22.940 And what it is doing for sure is just ramping up weight stigma.
00:45:27.800 Oh, yeah. I mean, this is one of the central criticisms of the fitness test that starts showing up in the literature around 2000, especially after the implementation of No Child Left Behind, when a lot of schools start cutting PE programs, and some schools even start cutting recess, because everything becomes built around standardized test scores.
00:45:50.140 And so a lot of schools cut their PE programs because they have to focus on STEM or whatever, but they still have this legal requirement to do the fitness test.
00:46:00.240 So a lot of schools that don't even have PE will sort of one day a year pull all the kids aside and make them do these humiliating fitness tests and weigh them and then just send them back into school.
00:46:12.920 So it's not even like this is being contextualized in a PE class.
00:46:16.880 It's literally just you're sitting all the time and then we test you and we're like, why are you so unhealthy?
00:46:22.680 And then you just go back to sitting the next day.
00:46:24.220 Right.
00:46:24.400 It also feels like we don't have a test once a year to see how well you can draw a still life and then defund art education, right?
00:46:32.560 It's like, hey, man, there's a pretty clear connection here from one to the other.
00:46:36.920 Yes.
00:46:37.160 And so I want to end the episode with this really fascinating article by Michael Garay, who's the academic who I emailed about the lack of history on the president's physical fitness test.
00:46:47.280 So he wrote a fascinating article called Why Is There So Little Critical Physical Education Scholarship in the United States?
00:46:54.040 And it's basically about this problem that the same articles with the same panic statistics keep getting published and yet nobody seems to come to the obvious conclusion that fitness testing is not working.
00:47:10.560 That there's an entire body of researchers that are looking at the data that is being produced by this and the experiences that kids are having and have been having as a result of these tests for almost 40 years now.
00:47:20.900 And they're just like, well, it has to still be good.
00:47:23.140 So what he says is, the remarkable point here is that despite these findings, widespread inaccuracies, negative student and teacher perceptions, and potentially harmful practices, the authors remain apparently unshakable in their support for fitness testing.
00:47:37.340 An interesting feature of papers such as this is the way the distaste or disinterest of people toward fitness testing is almost uniformly interpreted as a matter of communication rather than substance.
00:47:48.240 indeed despite the widely reported resistance of parents children and teachers in the fitness
00:47:54.220 testing literature fitness testing is presented as a settled and unassailable practice that is 0.99
00:47:59.820 inherently beneficial for individuals families and society this shit is fire emojis he's really 0.96
00:48:05.180 mad about this yeah and i found a bunch of articles in the literature that illustrate exactly the point 0.98
00:48:13.440 that he is making. It's amazing. There's all of these papers about sort of the ongoing debate
00:48:19.360 about fitness testing and should we keep fitness testing and it's a controversial subject and what
00:48:24.840 are the pros and cons. And what is amazing about them is that when they present the pros and cons
00:48:30.420 of fitness testing, all of the pros are potential things of fitness testing and all of the cons
00:48:37.760 are actual drawbacks. So the pros are sort of like imagined. Yeah, let me walk you through one of
00:48:42.980 these. So one of the main sort of literature reviews of, you know, the debate surrounding
00:48:48.700 fitness testing, the data surrounding fitness testing, it lists at the end of the article,
00:48:53.460 the pros and the cons. What are the good? What are the bad? What do various people say? They've
00:48:57.200 read all of the literature. The first benefit that he lists is tracking the fitness of youth.
00:49:02.300 Information concerning the distribution of scores can be used to track youth fitness over time.
00:49:06.820 Well, they're not doing that. Right. In order to do that, you would have to
00:49:10.720 aggregate your data somewhere in order to do that you would have to do that this paper also does
00:49:15.820 something that i think is very typical where people substitute the benefits of fitness testing
00:49:20.960 for the benefits of fitness so they say like well you know fitness is really good for kids
00:49:27.080 and it's like yeah fitness is really good for kids but that doesn't mean fitness testing is
00:49:31.380 good for kids right that's not an argument to tell kids to do pull-ups and then make them feel shitty
00:49:36.200 for not being able to do a pull-up once a year that's very distinct from like let's all play
00:49:40.020 volleyball on Wednesdays. If you want to foment a sort of commitment to fitness, A, you need a
00:49:47.340 class. And B, you need a class where instructors are aware of, you know, what makes kids take
00:49:54.600 things in and what makes kids change their behaviors and that kind of thing. You're not
00:49:58.680 going to do it by hiring a bunch of football coaches and then being like, anyway, now care 0.89
00:50:02.960 about fat kids. Exactly. That's just not going to happen. Another one of the main arguments for 0.81
00:50:07.580 fitness testing is that we need to raise awareness of the obesity epidemic.
00:50:11.680 What?
00:50:11.940 Like, this is something you see in so many articles.
00:50:14.000 It's like, oh, we need to make kids aware that the obesity epidemic is a problem and
00:50:18.300 that physical fitness is good.
00:50:20.080 And it's like, again, testing them and making them feel shitty is not a good approach to
00:50:25.540 this.
00:50:26.080 Right.
00:50:26.320 I mean, it's the same reason that, like, ideally, if you have a math test and you have kids
00:50:30.720 who have a hard time with math, you don't call them up to the front of the class and 0.52
00:50:34.540 be like, hey, look at these dummies. 0.96
00:50:36.720 Right.
00:50:36.760 Like, that's not a way that people learn, nor is it a way that people get invested.
00:50:43.120 Yes.
00:50:43.400 It's like, I think all kids should learn to read, but instead of actually giving them
00:50:47.040 time to read and dedicating teachers to teaching them how to read, I'm just going to test them 0.99
00:50:50.740 once a year and be like, why the fuck can't you read? 0.97
00:50:53.900 That's my way of raising awareness of the importance of reading. 0.98
00:50:57.260 And then this is from this literature review.
00:51:00.220 It says, when tests are properly administered, fitness testing provides useful information
00:51:04.920 for students to determine their needs, setting goals and plan programs for improvement. Well,
00:51:09.780 again, they're not doing that. So yes, if they were properly administered, sure, they have the
00:51:15.340 potential to do that. But that's been true since the 1950s. And that potential has never been
00:51:20.540 reached. Right. So I don't see why that's really relevant. Like, yeah, a lot of things have
00:51:24.060 potential to be good. Yes, totally. There's a ton of potential. The question is, does a test
00:51:29.420 fulfill that potential? Right. And it seems like we don't really know that. I mean, maybe there's
00:51:34.120 a school district in America that has done fitness testing as part of an integrated program in a way
00:51:39.740 that doesn't make kids feel shitty about themselves. But as far as a nationwide program
00:51:43.680 and legal requirements, it's clear that this is not working. So after listing all of these
00:51:49.860 potential benefits of fitness tests, things that could come to pass, but have not, they start
00:51:55.320 listing the drawbacks. First one is teacher motivation and support. Teachers are not being
00:52:00.320 motivated teachers are not supported teachers fucking hate this that's a real like that's not 0.98
00:52:05.960 a potential that's a real thing teachers have disliked this test for 70 years right right but 0.95
00:52:11.000 in order to take that into account we would have to listen to what teachers have to say about
00:52:15.480 education michael why would we do that exactly why would we start that we'd have to ask teachers what
00:52:20.580 they need this one is amazing the second bullet point on the cons of fitness testing is student
00:52:27.600 motivation and self-esteem of concern are the percentage of elementary school teachers
00:52:32.340 reporting that students cried during testing and the reports of high school students who had 0.96
00:52:38.140 negative test experiences god so uh kids are fucking crying and you're like oh the potential 0.93
00:52:44.560 of the test is still there right it's like uh you know what i love doing is things that make me cry 0.99
00:52:50.340 in front of my peers kids are fucking crying taking this test teachers fucking hate it and 0.96
00:52:56.140 we're like well you know it could work but you know we're taking no steps to make sure that it 0.99
00:53:00.820 works right and also how else are we going to know how far a child can throw a grenade yes
00:53:05.400 there is essential information embedded in your mind right so this is from yet another literature 0.57
00:53:11.860 review of this debate over fitness testing that says in the fucking abstract there is currently 0.85
00:53:17.140 no consensus on the importance need or impact of fitness tests on student experiences in physical 0.86
00:53:23.080 education. Several studies highlight the negative impact fitness testing has on students' experiences
00:53:28.000 in physical education, such as the formation of negative attitudes toward P.E., decreased
00:53:33.560 motivation toward P.E. following poor test scores, and feelings of humiliation when failing in front
00:53:39.200 of peers. These findings provide compelling evidence that fitness test experiences do little
00:53:43.840 to promote positive feelings about lifelong physical activity and fitness. So even on its
00:53:49.200 own terms, even if you're using fitness testing as a way of quote-unquote raising awareness about
00:53:54.340 the need for kids to move and the badness of the obesity epidemic, et cetera, even on those terms,
00:54:00.400 it's not fulfilling its mission because people are doing this and they're feeling discouraged
00:54:04.540 from doing physical activity because their experience was so bad.
00:54:07.660 I would say for me personally, not only did these fitness tests not incentivize physical
00:54:15.060 fitness, they attach trauma to it. Oh, yeah. So it like deeply increased my like, I was like a
00:54:21.580 pretty active kid until this kind of shit kicked in where it was became this sort of social ranking 0.91
00:54:28.020 stuff. Yes. So like, now when I am like active, which I like I'm relatively active, right? I have 0.99
00:54:35.740 to do it in ways that don't remind me of gym class. Right? Oh, yeah. There's a reason I've
00:54:41.320 never done another fucking pull up in my life. There's a reason I don't stand around my house 0.96
00:54:46.400 doing wall sits. There's a reason that all of these things are like, I don't engage with them
00:54:52.740 remotely anymore. And also, I mean, Michael Garay, this researcher, like one of the only
00:54:57.920 skeptical researchers on this entire field, he has an entire book about how we have tried for decades
00:55:04.520 to use schools as public health promotion devices. DARE is a good example. We've done
00:55:10.340 alcohol education in schools. We've done physical education. We keep trying to use schools as a way
00:55:17.700 to solve public health problems. And the fact is you can't solve public health problems without
00:55:23.360 public health approaches. That if we actually want kids to get moving, we need to just make it easier
00:55:29.860 for them to do that, right? Again, we need to close streets and give them a place to play. We need to
00:55:35.460 make it safe for them to walk and bike to school we need to build playgrounds and parks near them
00:55:41.000 so they can use them we need to give parents decent working schedules so they can go on walks
00:55:46.020 with their kids and throw frisbees around yeah it's these things that will actually encourage
00:55:50.960 the outcomes that we want rather than just fucking raising awareness of like exercise is good and 0.84
00:55:57.920 fatness is bad right we also don't need to tell people that smoking is bad at this point if you 0.87
00:56:04.180 are smoking at this point it is for other reasons than not knowing like you don't need to worry that
00:56:10.440 fat people don't know that it's like bad to be fat or that it's seen as bad to be fat like you
00:56:17.360 don't need to worry about that that box is checked team so the closest thing to a happy ending that
00:56:22.420 we're going to get is it appears a lot of states are actually starting to finally get rid of these
00:56:27.780 absurd laws requiring fitness tests so california is at the vanguard of this there's a big debate in
00:56:32.980 california right now about whether to get rid of this requirement and interestingly it is being 0.95
00:56:39.460 led by the parents of non-binary kids oh sure because these male female totally different you
00:56:47.380 know binary requirements the trans kids non-binary intersex kids and their parents are like well this 0.96
00:56:53.840 is really alienating to me and fuck you right so i hope that like this results in a broader movement 0.94
00:57:00.360 to just get rid of these tests altogether. 0.97
00:57:03.520 So yeah, that's the end of my long,
00:57:06.960 torturous, depressing journey
00:57:08.280 through the president's physical fitness test.
00:57:09.940 It's worse than you thought.
00:57:11.120 It's so much worse than I thought,
00:57:12.460 but I also have to say,
00:57:13.400 I feel oddly like at peace and validated 0.99
00:57:15.840 that it wasn't just a shit show for me 0.99
00:57:18.660 and for the fat kids that I knew 1.00
00:57:20.220 and the disabled kids that I knew, 0.99
00:57:22.080 but that it is just a garbage fire of public policy 1.00
00:57:26.020 from like every angle.
00:57:28.020 It's like pretty indefensible at this point.
00:57:31.120 There was no evidence to do it in the first place.
00:57:33.640 The evidence that it works is non-existent.
00:57:36.860 And the evidence that getting rid of it is good is there.
00:57:39.880 So just on every level, like, yes, let's do this. 1.00
00:57:43.220 Listen, aside from fat kids, disabled kids, right? 1.00
00:57:47.420 Like aside from everyone who's on the downside of this really terrible activity. 1.00
00:57:53.280 Yes.
00:57:53.540 What's the problem?
00:57:54.520 Jocks really seem to like their trophies. 0.68
00:57:56.520 That one girl who looks like Marilyn Manson, she loves it.
00:57:58.900 You know, we're doing this for her.