Physical Fitness

Shape the hell up, America.

Two months ago, President Trump, noting that America’s “rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels,” signed an executive order declaring that from now on he will eat no more than two pounds of fries per meal.

No, seriously, his executive order re-established the Presidential Fitness Test, a group of graded physical exercises designed to make young people hate school even more than they already do.

This test dates back to our first president, George Washington, who implemented a rigorous youth-fitness program under which elementary-school students were sent out alone into the wilderness to try to survive for three weeks armed with nothing but a sharp stick. Unfortunately a large number of students failed this test, and most of those who survived decided to quit school altogether and form Kentucky.

Over the ensuing years the Presidential Fitness Test was modified to make it less fatal. Eventually it incorporated such exercises as sit-ups, pull-ups, the one-mile run, the 20-minute retch after the one-mile run, and the rope climb, in which you grabbed hold of a fat hairy rope and, by exerting every ounce of your strength, ascended a distance from the gym floor roughly equal to the height of a box turtle. At least that’s how far up I got.

The Presidential Fitness Test was part of the American public-school curriculum until 2012, when the Obama administration, as part of a general trend toward the weeniefication of American youth, eliminated the mandatory graded exercises and replaced them with some kind of woo-woo “holistic” physical-fitness program wherein the students didn’t have to do anything that was actually physical, and of course they all got participation trophies, unless they produced notes from their therapists stating that trophies might cause them to be triggered.

But now President Trump is bringing back the fitness test. This is good. Nations need to be physically fit so they can defend themselves from their enemies. This has been true throughout recorded history, dating all the way back to the year 2006 A.D., when the movie “300” was released. You may remember this movie: It tells the story — based on an actual comic book — of how 300 Spartan warriors, armed only with swords and spears, did battle with an invasion force of several hundred thousand computer-generated Persians.

What made the Spartans such formidable fighters? How were just 300 men able to hold their own against impossible odds? The answer is one word: abs.

I mean, look at these guys. It has been years since they were in the same zip code as a carbohydrate. If you’re a CGI Persian soldier, you’re going to be intimidated. You’re going to see the Spartans and say to yourself (in Persian): “Yikes! Those warriors have done WAY more crunches than I have in preparation for this battle!”

And they were right to be intimidated. Thanks to their extreme fitness level, the Spartans were able to hold off the attacking hordes for days, going down in heroic defeat only after the Persians came up with the tactic of shooting them with arrows tipped with Krispy Kreme doughnut filling.

The point is, fitness is critical to national defense, and in these perilous times America needs to be more like Sparta. That’s why Secretary of War and Hair Gel Pete “Pete” Hegseth, in a speech this week to a gathering of the U.S. military’s senior officers, harshly criticized the fitness level of our armed forces and announced a new policy under which — this is a direct quote — “from now on, everyone in the military, regardless of rank, will be required to wear Spartan-style leather warrior briefs, which are available for purchase on the Internet.”

No, I’m kidding again, obviously. Such a policy would, by definition, have to include the commander-in-chief, and there might not be enough cows on the planet to produce leather briefs of that magnitude.

What Secretary Pete actually ordered was that the armed forces had to become physically fit. So with that initiative, and the return of the Presidential Fitness Test, both our military and our students are going to be getting into better shape. Maybe this would be a good time for the rest of us, by which I mean you, to do the same.

I’m not suggesting that you have to hire a personal trainer, or join a gym filled with fancy equipment and annoyingly fit people and their b.o. vapors. You can get an excellent physical workout using items that might be lying around your home right now. Your spouse, for example. I’m referring here to the sport of wife-carrying, which I am not making up. It originated in Finland, which every year hosts the World Wife Carrying Championships in the town of Sonkajärvi.

TIMO HARTIKAINEN/AFP via Getty Images

Is wife-carrying good exercise? I’ll answer that question by asking another one: Have you ever known an out-of-shape Finnish person? Of course not. You don’t know any Finnish persons. You’re not 100 percent sure where Finland even is. But to judge from this photo, wife-carrying appears to provide a strenuous workout, not to mention a great way for two people to get to know each other in an exciting new and highly personal way. And the good news is that, despite the fact that the sport is called “wife-carrying,” the rules do not require that you be married, or that the man be on the bottom, or for that matter that any party involved has to belong to any specific gender. Anybody can participate!

Or maybe not. I showed the photo above to Michelle and asked her if she’d be interested in this sport. She indicated, via facial expression, that she would rather undergo amateur brain surgery with unsanitized garden tools. This is probably just as well, because at my age I cannot safely lift a medium pizza with more than one topping, let alone another human being.

Which brings me to today’s special bonus feature:

A Fitness Challenge for Baby Boomers

For the vast majority of Boomers, by which I mean me, our most difficult fitness challenge is picking things up. For example, every morning I am faced with the challenge of picking up our home-delivery newspapers. We subscribe to two of them, the Miami Herald and the New York Times, shown here in their natural environment:

I can hear you youngster Gen-Whatever whippersnappers asking: “Why in God’s name do you still get physical newspapers? Do you also churn your own butter?”

No, dammit! We’re modern! We get our butter from the milkman.

But getting back to the fitness challenge: There was a time, back during the Clinton administration, when I could simply bend over and pick the newspapers up. That technique no longer works.

The problem, as you can see, is that over the years, probably because of global climate change, the distance between my hands and the ground has gotten too great. I have tried bending my knees...

...but even then the newspapers remain just out of reach. I have also tried employing the technique recommended by the AARP and leading geriatric-health professionals, which is to pick up the newspapers using a standard fireplace poker and a long-handled barbecue spatula:

Unfortunately — and don’t think I won’t write a sternly worded letter to the editor about this — the newspapers are too slippery to be picked up via this technique. So finally I had to resort to a risky maneuver:

The good news was, I was able to grip and raise the newspaper. The bad news was, this meant I was relying, for balance, on only 50 percent of my available legs, which turns out to be an insufficient level of support.

So basically what I have determined is that, from a fitness standpoint, it is best to just leave the newspapers on the ground, in their natural state.

This concludes my review of our nation’s physical fitness. Now it’s time for you paying subscribers to exercise your typing fingers.