The commission, though, urges states to establish specific metrics of fitness, for example, a \u201cpredicted VO\u2082 Max\u201d as a baseline for evaluating Medicaid managed care organizations on how much they were improving health. Other factors would include sleep, nutrition, and potentially \u201cselect high-quality supplements.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
And decades after President John F. Kennedy introduced it, the Presidential Fitness Test will\u00a0return to gauge the speed and strength of America\u2019s schoolchildren, the report says.<\/p>\n
When the test was introduced in the 1960s, people worried that kids were spending too much time indoors, sitting around and watching television. To jump-start their fitness, physical activity at school was encouraged with routines from running to rope climbing, culminating in an annual test.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\tKennedy makes his formal pitch to fight chronic disease in new MAHA report<\/a><\/p>\n STAT has requested comment from the Department of Health and Human Services, which directed inquiries to the White House, asking about the basis for these ideas and what might come next.\u00a0<\/p>\n What is VO\u2082 max, anyway?\u00a0<\/p>\n Experts told STAT they were puzzled by the mention of VO\u2082 max as a metric. VO\u2082 max stands for the maximum volume of oxygen the body can take in and use in a single minute during intense physical activity. It\u2019s determined by a standard exercise stress test that measures breathing with a mask to calculate oxygen consumption to define fitness.<\/p>\n As a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness, higher is better. It\u2019s less clear whether it makes sense to apply an adult athlete\u2019s numbers, aka VO\u2082 max, to children at play.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a really great test. It\u2019s not really something you can do in someone under 9, 10 years old in a really good way,\u201d Jared Hershenson, a pediatric cardiologist who directs cardiac exercise and rehabilitation at Children\u2019s National Hospital, told STAT. \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about trying to measure someone\u2019s fitness who\u2019s younger than that, there really is not any objective test that can do that, or quantitative test that can be done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n VO\u2082 max is difficult to measure, even for adults, I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies the role of physical activity in preventing chronic diseases, also told STAT. You need lab equipment and you need participants to exercise to the point of exhaustion. Picture people on an exercise bike or a treadmill, going full out while wearing a mask to track their oxygen levels. Many people won\u2019t or can\u2019t do that, she said.<\/p>\n There are predictive equations that do not rely on lab tests, but instead use age, sex, body mass index, or other numbers. With varying degrees of accuracy, they are more feasible in large numbers of people to advance health.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lee underscored that physical fitness and physical activity are related, but not identical constructs. Activity is something we do; fitness is a physiological construct.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s this catch: Fitness can be improved by regular activity, but it\u2019s also partially genetically determined, she said. \u201cI could exercise to death, but I will never be as fit as Lance Armstrong, since I don\u2019t have his genes.\u201d<\/p>\n Outside the lab, VO\u2082 max is familiar to weekend warriors who upload their runs, swims, rides, and hikes to sports\/social media sites like Strava to track training and add up kudos from their friends. That less-than-lab-quality number is derived from heart rate and other data collected by the watches on their wrists, made by Garmin or Apple or Coros, among others in the burgeoning market for wearables.<\/p>\n In June, Kennedy predicted wearables for all<\/a> in the next four years, but later pulled back, saying in a statement to Axios<\/a> that \u201cthey are not for everyone because of concerns like cost and personal privacy.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\tAs MAHA turns 1, a fired-up movement is still figuring out how to fulfill its promises<\/a><\/p>\n Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist at Scripps Research Institute, scoffed at measuring VO\u2082 max in kids when for adults, studies have shown there are more practical ways to measure fitness that don\u2019t involve lab testing or expensive wearables.<\/p>\n \u201cTo do that in children? Are you kidding me?\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cThat is just absurd. But that\u2019s just the anti-science movement that keeps spewing out things that are not substantiated or possible or likely.\u201d<\/p>\n Topol himself gets his VO\u2082 max data on his iPhone, but acknowledges its limits compared to a physiology lab. For children, it would make more sense to give them a wristband with a pedometer to measure activity. \u201cLet\u2019s go with something simple and cheap like that, that everybody could have,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n We\u2019re not there yet for children\u2019s wearables, Hershenson said, while acknowledging its potential if government and private sector entities work together. There are no reliable fitness data from wearables in pediatric patients, for the children Hershenson\u2019s center sees who have significant challenges or for healthier kids. Companies on their own might have variations in how they measure fitness.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn any of the technology, as far as I know, nothing\u2019s been correlated with exercise tests. You\u2019d have to have some sort of standard testing to compare it to,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s going to have to be some sort of surrogate,\u201d maybe heart rate recovery, which tracks how fast the heart rate returns to its normal resting state after exercise.<\/p>\n Presidential Fitness Test, redux<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the metric President Trump wants to bring back to life: The Presidential Fitness Test. Started in the 1960s by President Kennedy and modified decades later by President Obama, it sent schoolchildren racing the mile and doing situps, pushups, pullups, and rope climbs.\u00a0\u00a0The new report says HHS and the Department of Education will partner with the President\u2019s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition to help states and schools reintroduce it.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up for Daily Recap<\/p>\n All the health and medical news you need today, in one email<\/p>\n Hershenson isn\u2019t sure measuring how many pullups a child can do is going to help gauge fitness, strength, or flexibility as they pertain to future health.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s useful to have some sort of baseline. But you need to know what to do with that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not just gonna throw a ball around. Let\u2019s find ways that we can improve this person\u2019s strength and this person\u2019s fitness by doing stuff that\u2019s fun.\u201d<\/p>\n That also means thinking about barriers to exercise.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTo me the best approach is always treating each person individually to figure out how I can help them be the best version of themselves,\u201d Hershenson said. \u201cThat\u2019s extraordinarily difficult when you\u2019re making massive public policy for however many millions of people, but I think it\u2019s going to be different for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs it a questionnaire? Is it measuring heart rate recovery? Is it measuring how many steps you take?\u201d he asked. \u201cIt\u2019s probably not going to be perfect.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n STAT\u2019s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies<\/a>. Our financial supporters<\/a> are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nobody\u2019s against fitness for children.\u00a0But health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s proposal to make physical activity a \u201cvital…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":213996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[17667,1198,210,42229,881,49697,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-213995","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-childrens-health","9":"tag-fitness","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-hhs","12":"tag-public-health","13":"tag-rfk-jr","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115176812451750482","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/STAT_MAHA_checkup_f2_3000-768x432.jpg\")
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