Bringing attention to kids’ health beneficial

Editor’s Note: This editorial originally ran in fellow CNHI paper The Tribune Star, Terre Haute, Indiana.

How many of us can run a mile?

What about do one pull-up? Envision yourself grabbing a hold of that slick, cold bar and hoisting your body upward, holding your breath, struggling to raise your chin higher and higher.

Not many of us could do it. Not even once.

Yet that’s one of the challenges in what used to be administered as the Presidential Fitness Test.

On July 31, President Donald Trump signed an executive order reviving the test, although to what extent is unknown. Will the president require the standard one-mile run, pull-ups or push-ups, sit-ups, a shuttle run, and sit-and-reaches? and will the test be mandatory or voluntary for school districts?

Some may remember a rigid, unforgiving PE teacher with a clipboard, pen and timer administering the test. Others may recall the test being no big deal.

Molly Hare, a faculty member at Indiana State University whose background is in pedagogical kinesiology, told Tribune-Star reporter Sue Loughlin she remembers excelling at the test as she was athletic as a kid, while also remembering “how devastating it was to others,” possibly discouraging them from pursuing healthy lifestyles and physical fitness.

The goal should be to get youth interested in activities to stay healthy and fit. The administering of the test also should be done by those who’ve been trained to be empathetic to individuals who may not excel at it.

“In physical education, we want to be more inclusive and supportive of every person and their ability to move and achieve their best level of fitness,” Andrea McMurtry, undergraduate coordinator for physical education and health teacher education at Ball State University, told Loughlin.

The Presidential Fitness Test was phased out in 2013, when then-President Barack Obama replaced it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which focused less on athletic skill and more on individual health.

It’s unclear what Trump’s true intentions are at this point, but this statement in the executive order is promising: “We must address the threat to the vitality and longevity of our country that is posed by America’s declining health and physical fitness. For far too long, the physical and mental health of the American people has been neglected. Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children.”

We agree, but when the health of our nation is at “crisis levels,” the fix becomes more complex than administering a basic test.

Trump has established the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, which will recommend strategies for reestablishing the Presidential Fitness Test.

While we await those strategies, we’re left to debate the merits of such a test.

Anytime you bring physical and mental health into the conversation, it’s a good thing. It gets us thinking about what we can do to become a healthier individual, how we can motivate our children to take an interest in fitness and even how we can influence our communities to participate in initiatives that prioritize health.

And many of the experts Loughlin spoke to about the test agreed on one thing: Promoting a healthy lifestyle is the most important part.

“I applaud any time we are getting youth fitness into the news and drawing attention to the need,” Hare told Loughlin.

The discussion about the Presidential Fitness Test focuses attention on the bigger issue that “our kids are not getting enough activity,” McMurtry told Loughlin. It not only affects their physical health, but there are direct links with inactivity in terms of heightened depression and heightened anxiety.

Also, kids who are more active are more likely to do well in school and are better able to focus, McMurtry said.

We hope Trump’s council will do its due diligence. It should include in its discussion the ways in which the original test could be harmful. It should discuss giving children more time to be active and the training of PE teachers. Most importantly, the council should make the test’s main goal to motivate children to make their health a priority. If it accomplishes those things, we see it as a positive step forward.