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Presidential Fitness Test

The 2026 Presidential Fitness Test — A Practical Guide for PE Teachers

Fitness Tests Team·

On 5 May 2026 the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition published a new Presidential Physical Fitness Test, reviving an award that was retired in 2012. If you teach PE in the United States — and especially if you teach in a DODEA school, where the test is mandatory across all 161 sites — you need a workable plan for testing day. This is ours.

What's actually in the 2026 test

Three categories. Two events per category. Students choose one event per category:

  • Core & Abdominal Strength: curl-ups in 1 minute or a plank hold (seconds).
  • Cardiorespiratory Fitness: the One Mile Run or the 20m Beep Test (laps).
  • Upper Body Strength: right-angle push-ups or pull-ups (reps).

Hit the published age- and sex-specific benchmark in each of the three categories and the student earns the Presidential Physical Fitness Award. The benchmarks are published at whitehouse.gov/fitness; we mirror them on the standards page with revision tracking.

The 45-minute class plan

You almost certainly do not have 90 minutes of PE in a day. Here's a workflow that fits in one period for a class of 25–30 students.

  1. Minutes 0–5 — Brief. Walk through the choose-one rule. Show the calculator on the projector with their age bracket so they know exactly what they're chasing.
  2. Minutes 5–10 — Warm up. Five minutes of dynamic mobility. Non-negotiable — the mile and beep test punish a cold start.
  3. Minutes 10–35 — Stations. Six stations, one per event. Groups of 4–5 rotate every 4 minutes. The Fitness Tests app handles the timer, cadence audio, and scoring at each station.
  4. Minutes 35–40 — Cardio. If you've left the mile or beep test for last, run them as a class together. The app captures finish times.
  5. Minutes 40–45 — Wrap. Cool-down stretching while the app generates the class roll-up and (opt-in) award certificates.

The data side

Hannah Thompson at the UC Nutrition Policy Institute pointed out that the original PFT was "devalued" in places where schools tested but never reported the data. The fix is the same as it has always been: capture once, store somewhere durable, surface trends over time. The Fitness Tests app stores results per student, exports class-wide CSV/PDF reports, and lets you track year-over-year change without an extra spreadsheet.

Run it without shaming anyone

SHAPE America's 2017 position statement on appropriate fitness-testing use is the rubric to measure your administration against. We've turned its principles into a checklist: privacy by default, no public ranking, criterion-referenced framing, opt-in awards, and never grading on test performance. The PFT was retired in 2012 partly because of how it was sometimes used — the 2026 revival is a chance to do this well.

Set it up

The Fitness Tests app ships a 2026 Presidential Fitness template on web, iOS, and Android. Roster your class, hit Start, and the choose-one rule plus award logic is applied for you. Try it free at fitnesstests.app/signup.