From the beginning, our presidents have represented the best and worst of us.
The job itself — the idea of one man being in charge of the unruly post-revolution mess—was created with George Washington in mind.
He was considered the greatest man of his age, and the position defined by the newly ratified Constitution required nothing less.
Washington’s greatness, wrote historian Gordon Wood in Revolutionary Characters, didn’t come from the fact he led his army to victory against a military superpower.
It was what he did after that: “The greatest act of his life, the one that made him internationally famous, was his resignation as commander in chief of the American forces.”
Of course, he wouldn’t have been in position to resign if he hadn’t won.
He more likely would’ve been hung as a traitor. He wouldn’t have won if he hadn’t been a credible leader. He wouldn’t have been a credible leader if he hadn’t been both a feared and fearless warrior, one who kept his cool in battle even when things were going badly (as they often did under his command).
And he wouldn’t have been that warrior without his size, strength, stamina, and athleticism.
That’s why a list of our fittest presidents has to start with our OP—our first athlete-in-chief.
George Washington
History can’t give us Washington’s resting heart rate, body-fat percentage, or one-rep-max bench press. All we have are paintings and stories.
The paintings show a pear-shaped old man with narrow shoulders and matronly hips. But the stories tell us something completely different. This is a fellow military officer describing the 26-year-old Washington:
“[S]traight as an Indian, measuring six feet two inches in his stockings, and weighing 175 pounds. His frame is padded with well-developed muscles, indicating great strength. His bones and joints are large, as are his hands and feet. He is wide shouldered but has not a deep or round chest; is neat waisted, but is broad across the hips and has rather long legs and arms.”
And here’s historian David McCullough describing him in the book 1776:
A strapping man of commanding presence, he stood six feet two inches tall and weighed perhaps 190 pounds. You could distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among 10,000 people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet…by his side.
As for endurance, consider what he did in 1755, when he was an officer in the British army en route to attack the French at Fort Duquesne, near present-day Pittsburgh.
This was near the start of the French and Indian War, a war that Washington himself had ignited with an unfortunate attack on a party of French soldiers who were probably on a diplomatic mission.
He got the shits. Full-on dysentery, compounded by hemorrhoids.
For two weeks he was flat on his back. To make it worse, doctors back then tried to draw out “ill humors” by bleeding their patients. So he was depleted every which way.
But on the day of battle, July 8, he still climbed up on his horse (after adding a couple of cushions). The battle was a debacle from the get-go.
The British were so disoriented they fired on their own troops, and the officers’ tall hats (the kind the Pope wears) made them easy targets.
Without leadership, troops broke and ran. Washington, though, kept his head.
“Because of his height,” wrote Ron Chernow in Washington: A Life, “he presented a gigantic target on horseback.” But Washington “displayed unblinking courage and a miraculous immunity in battle.”
Two horses were shot out from under him. Bullets ripped through his uniform in four different places.
And after 12 hours on horseback and under fire, he was sent to bring up reinforcements…who were 40 miles away, requiring him to ride all night. With hemorrhoids. While recovering from two weeks of both dysentery and the worst of 18th-century medicine.
Show me any American president who could’ve matched that.
Related: How People Stayed Fit in 1776
Theodore Roosevelt
Okay, maybe there’s one. The difference between Washington and Roosevelt is that TR would’ve done a ride like that for fun.
True story, from doctorzebra.com (an amazing compendium of health information about all 44 U.S. presidents):
“For no particular reason, Roosevelt and a few companions rode 98 miles on horseback in one day, from the White House into northern Virginia and back, through terrible winter weather. A newspaper wrote: ‘The President … was able to sit down comfortably for a late dinner.’”
In The Hypomanic Edge, psychologist John Gartner, Ph.D., proposed that Roosevelt had a condition called hypomania—bipolar with all the manic and little to none of the depressive.
One of his successors, Woodrow Wilson, described him as a “great big boy.” “You must always remember that the president is about six,” A British diplomat once said.
That energy and enthusiasm helps explain how a sickly, asthmatic kid could make himself over into a rower and boxer at Harvard, a rancher, a big-game hunter, and an accomplished naturalist.
As a frontier sheriff in North Dakota he hunted down outlaws and horse thieves. As New York’s police commissioner he walked the streets in the wee hours to make sure his officers actually did their jobs.
And then there was the Spanish-American War.
He didn’t trigger it the way Washington had started the French and Indian War 144 years earlier. But when the Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in early 1898, he made sure, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that the U.S. was ready to go on the offensive against the Spanish.
When war was declared, he resigned and formed a volunteer cavalry regiment that went down in history as the Rough Riders.
On June 30, in Caribbean heat, he led them in a charge up Kettle Hill, part of the fortifications guarding the port city of Santiago. He wasn’t supposed to lead the charge, but he got impatient because the soldiers in front of his Rough Riders weren’t advancing fast enough.
The top of Kettle Hill was exposed to fire from nearby San Juan Hill. Roosevelt ordered an attack, and of course led the charge himself.
Problem was, only five men heard the order, and three of them were immediately wounded. (Roosevelt himself had been hit in the wrist by shrapnel earlier in the day, but didn’t seem to notice.)
He turned around, went back to his troops, chewed them out, and repeated his order to charge.
The hill had been taken by the time his troops reached the top, but it didn’t matter; the first charge was enough to secure his legacy.
Related: The Better Man Project—2,000+ Brilliant Tips for Living a Richer, More Fulfilling Life
Three years later, he was president, and as president established a frantic pace that will never be matched.
He set up a boxing ring in the White House, sparring with men half his age, and only quit when he was blinded in one eye by a punch.
He tried tennis for a while, but that was boring, and instead he began daily hikes through the roughest country he and his compatriots could find. Their obstacles included swimming across half-frozen rivers.
Somehow he even found time to earn a brown belt in judo.
Gerald Ford
Never mind how “SNL” portrayed him as a clumsy oaf. Ford was easily the most accomplished athlete ever to reach the oval office, even if he got there with more asterisks than Barry Bonds.
(He remains the only president never to be elected; he was appointed VP when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, and then became president when Richard Nixon resigned in even more disgrace.)
But never mind that either. At Michigan, the former Eagle Scout was the starting center on two undefeated national-championship teams, and was offered contracts to play pro football by the Packers and Lions.
He turned them down to go to Yale Law School.
The rest of his career seems almost Forrest Gump-like:
• As a naval officer in World War II, he was nearly tossed overboard during a typhoon
• As Speaker of the House, he was appointed to the Warren Commission
• As vice president, his most notable accomplishment was to make it through Watergate with his reputation intact
• As president, he was the target of an assassination attempt by a member of the Manson family
That’s aside from the indignity of losing to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election, although just barely. Had he pulled it out, he wouldn’t have hit a hole in one in a pro-am golf tournament a year later.
And given the no-win developments of the late ’70s, who knows if he would’ve set the record for being the longest-lived president. He died at 93 in 2006.
Related: The First Step to Living Longer
Ronald Reagan
Reagan’s best-known athletic achievement was playing quarterback George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All-American.
But long before then, he played football and was captain of the swim team at Eureka College. And before that, as a teenager, he rescued 77 people as a lifeguard.
Other presidents were good athletes in their youth. Dwight Eisenhower played football at the U.S. Military Academy, where he once tackled Jim Thorpe.
George H.W. Bush was captain of the baseball team at Yale, where he played in two College World Series games. John F. Kennedy swam at Harvard.
What set Reagan apart was his workout routine while in office. Carter, his predecessor, was a runner, but Reagan was the first to actually train.
In 1983, while gearing up for his re-election campaign the next year, he wrote a first-person article about his fitness routine for Parade magazine.
As far as I know, it’s the first time a sitting president described progressive-resistance training. (“The trick to keeping the exercises brief but effective is to increase the weights rather than the repetitions.”)
Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush (tie)
It’s pointless to try to separate this group. They all worked out or played sports almost every day while in office.
The elder Bush was an avid golfer, tennis player, and fisherman before, during, and after his four years in office.
The younger Bush finished a marathon in under 4 hours, and was said to have 14.5 percent body fat as recently as 2001.
Related: 10 cardio exercises that burn more calories than running
His knees eventually gave out, forcing him to switch to mountain biking, where his spills sometimes left the 43rd president looking like Roosevelt must have post-sparring.
And our current president, although best known for his left-handed jump shot, also trains several days a week, and frequently plays golf at a notoriously slow pace. (He’s said to average 6 hours per round, or roughly half the pace of the elder Bush, who was as impatient on the links as Obama is methodical.)
Honorable mentions
• John Quincy Adams swam naked in the Potomac (unlike John F. Kennedy, who was rumored to swim naked in the White House, although not necessarily for exercise).
• Woodrow Wilson played more than 1,000 rounds of golf during his two terms in office.
• And Herbert Hoover invented a game (called, appropriately, Hooverball) that involved tossing a 6-pound medicine ball over an 8-foot-high net.
And, just for balance, a shout-out to our least-healthy president:
At the start I suggested that our presidents represent the best and worst of us. One of our best presidents, polio survivor and wheelchair-bound Franklin Roosevelt, was also our most fragile.
But so was one of our worst presidents, Warren Harding. He was a heavy smoker, drinker, and gambler, on top of being overweight and chronically short of breath.
The worst part wasn’t that he died of a sudden heart attack in 1923. It was the fact he was ever president at all.
An office once occupied by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln (a big, strong man who once picked up a heckler and threw him out of a political rally), and the two Roosevelts is way too important to leave to an unhealthy man of such limited ability.
Lou Schuler, C.S.C.S., is an award-winning journalist and the coauthor (with Alwyn Cosgrove) of Strong: Nine Workout Programs for Women to Burn Fat, Boost Metabolism, and Build Strength for Life.