Over ten years on from “The horse is dead…”: surely it must be time to “dismount”?!

This paper represents a response over ten years on, to an editorial piece in this journal by Thomas Rowland in which he debated fitness testing and asked whether the “horse” of fitness testing in schools was dead. Here, we revisit the debate and consider the progress which has been made with regards to fitness testing in schools in recent years. On the basis of the findings from the literature and some of our research, we suggest that accepting the “horse” is dead would not be a bad thing. Our advice is certainly to pull tightly on the reigns, slow the horse down, and not allow fitness testing to dominate schools’ efforts to promote physical activity.