What’s the Frequency, PE?: Fitness Testing as an Out-of-Tune Practice

by Klayton Donoghue

Fitness Testing in U.S. Physical Education

The practice of fitness testing in U.S. physical education began to take its modern form in the 1950s and 1960s after concerns regarding the strength of the nation’s population, and particularly its youth, started to rise (Esmonde & Jette, 2021). In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, which included the development of the Presidential Fitness Testing program—a collection of performance-based measures that compared the physical fitness of students across the nation. This was a response to the results of a fifteen-year-long study by Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonja Weber on youth physical fitness which indicated that American children had fallen far behind their European counterparts (Esmonde & Jette, 2021), leading to Cold War anxieties over military readiness (Kennedy, 1960). In 1960, then President-elect John F. Kennedy took this concern one step further by calling out the physically and morally "Soft American" with a letter published in Sports Illustrated that insisted upon the implementation of national fitness testing standards in U.S. public schools to prevent such “softness on the part of individual citizens” from destroying the vitality of our nation (Kennedy, 1960).

Fitness testing in schools has more-or-less remained the same since its inception—push-ups, some form of running, a variation of sit-ups, and something to do with hanging from a bar. This particular testing configuration is not accidental, as many of these measures can be traced back to the implementation of fitness testing in the U.S. military. Former Air Force officer, Kenneth Cooper, developed various measurements of physical ability to assess military readiness while pioneering the science of aerobic training in the 1960s (Cooper Institute, n.d.). Dr. Cooper would later establish the Cooper Institute and repackage his testing battery to be used in schools as a measurement of health-related components of fitness and students’ “physical literacy” (Cooper Institute, n.d.). In the early 2010s, the Presidential Fitness Test was phased out as the primary tool for testing American youth in the gym and replaced with the FitnessGram testing battery developed by the Cooper Institute. The FitnessGram battery distinguishes itself from other forms of fitness testing by making it easier to share results with a broad-ranging network that includes parents and district and state-level school administration through its report card-style approach that places students in one of three fitness zones: Healthy Fitness, Needs Improvement, and Health Risk (FitnessGram, n.d.). However, the future of the widely-used testing battery is now uncertain as President Trump has called for the return of the Presidential Fitness Testing program as a method to trim the nation of its softness and make America healthy again—just as the U.S.’s political leaders of the mid-twentieth century advocated for.

Fitness testing in PE is often thought of as a neutral practice that everyone experiences equally during their school-age years, though this is simply not the case. Fitness testing is never a “neutral” practice, as it teaches diverse youth to understand health in terms of strict “zones” and to view their bodies as “at risk” (Jette et al., 2020). The process of fitness testing not only measures bodies, but also regulates and standardizes the embodied experience. Instead of coming to know the way one’s body moves in relation to subjective feelings and realities, diverse young students are taught to understand movement in terms of numeric values, categories, and through the same exercises used to assess the “readiness” of military members.

“What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”

In 1986, American newscaster Dan Rather was attacked by William Tager, who repeatedly shouted “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” At the time, the intent of the assault was unclear—even to Rather himself. Tager later explained that he believed television networks were broadcasting mind-controlling signals, which led him to try and find out the frequency the network was using, so he could stop them (Zebrowski, 1997). The confusion surrounding the attack inspired Michael Stipe of “alternative” rock band R.E.M. to write “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” (1994)—a song that explores intergenerational attunement, which can be understood as the challenge to be in-sync with a different generation from one’s own.

In “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, an individual from an earlier generation unsuccessfully attempts to understand the younger generation: “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?... I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed… I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines… I never understood the frequency” (R.E.M., 1994). Here, the older figure’s failure is not one of effort, but of attunement  despite studying the cultural artifacts of youth, they remain unable to properly tune into their frequency. The song exposes the difficulty of moving beyond inherited ways of knowing and being that haunt the present because they no longer fully correspond to contemporary realities.

Ghosts of Physical Education Past

Much like the older figure in “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” who struggles to attune to youth culture, contemporary physical education continues to rely on practices that attempt to produce knowledge related to young bodies through inherited approaches that have become increasingly out-of-sync with present conditions. As a field with an identity crisis, PE has continuously reconfigured itself throughout history to generate relevance by mirroring dominant ideologies of the moment (Kirk, 2010; Landi, 2025; Lupton, 1999). Over the course of PE’s long history in our society, there have been several practices to become extinct as the times have changed like military marching, the rope climb, and group calisthenics, while others like dodgeball are currently being added to the “endangered species” list; we’ve recently come to understand that a student can learn how to throw without using another human as the target. You can still see the remnants of a few of these practices as they haunt the gymnasium like the ghosts of PE’s past. We may no longer march through the school in the same way one would in bootcamp, but don’t be shocked when you see an entire class walking along the lines of the basketball court “hips n’ lips” style after blasting through their noise level expectations. Though many practices now only exist as the specter of a past generation’s physical education, one core practice has remained despite its incongruity to the current time—fitness testing.

Tuned to Another Time: The Frequency of Fitness Testing

If fitness testing had a frequency, it would remain tuned to the historical moment from which it emerged—a Cold War logic concerned with national strength, military readiness, and the standardization of bodies in the name of health and citizenship. While the bodies moving through school gymnasiums today are not fundamentally different from those of previous generations, the social and cultural contexts through which movement is lived, felt, and understood have shifted. Fitness testing has always operated as a form of power, shaping unequal, decontextualized experiences in the gymnasium and producing particular ways of knowing the body. Yet, the practice persists, tied to contemporary movement cultures much less than it is to physical education’s ongoing need to demonstrate relevance in a precarious space governed by dominant ideologies connecting individual health to morality and citizenship (Landi, 2023, 2025). Fitness testing offers PE a familiar path to claim a purpose within the current U.S. education system, even as it remains inherited from a past moment. The question that lingers, then, is not necessarily how to update fitness testing for the present, but whether physical education can imagine its own value beyond practices that remain firmly attuned to another time.

References

Cooper Institute. (n.d.). About the Cooper Institute. https://www.cooperinstitute.org

Esmonde, K., & Jette, S. (2021). ‘We are not a nation of softies, but we could become one’: Exploring the materiality of fitness testing in the President's Council on youth fitness. Somatechnics, 11(3), 395–412. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2021.0367

FitnessGram. (n.d.). FitnessGram Statewide. https://www.fitnessgram.net/fitnessgram-state

Jette, S., Esmonde, K., Andrews, D. L., & Pluim, C. (2020). Big bodies, big data: Unpacking the FitnessGram black box. In J. I. Newman, H. Thorpe, & D. L. Andrews (Eds.), Sport, physical culture, and the moving body: Materialisms, technologies, ecologies (pp. 131–150). Rutgers University Press.

Kennedy, J. F. (1960, December 26). The Soft American. Sports Illustrated, 13(26), 14–17. https://theleanberets.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/1960-JFK-The-Soft-American-SI-VAULT.pdf

Kirk, D. (2010). Physical education futures. Routledge.

Landi, D. (2023). Precarity, fitness testing and critical pedagogy: A response-able approach. Motrivivência, 35(66), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8042.2023.e95538

Landi, D. (2025). All physical and no education? – Gender, sexuality and the ‘affective atmosphere’ in physical education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2025.2517649

Lupton, D. (1999). ‘Developing the “whole me”: Citizenship, neo-liberalism and the contemporary health and physical education curriculum. Critical Public Health, 9(4), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581599908402941

R.E.M. (1994). What’s the frequency, Kenneth? [Song]. On Monster. Warner Bros. Records.

Zebrowski, J. (1997, January 29). Rather discovers what the frequency is. Time. https://time.com/archive/6929642/rather-discovers-what-the-frequency-is/