What grip strength can tell you about how well you’re aging (WaPo)

#1

How are other people’s results in terms of grip strength testing?

I suspect, but can’t prove, that rapamycin may be really helping me in this area. My grip strength in the past year has been consistently testing around 60kg, which seems pretty good from this paper, and which seems to match with my biological clock measures (Levine phenotypic) suggesting 15+ year lower measure than chronological age.

Is anyone else here seeing really good results on hand grip strength?

I ended up buying a device on Amazon (see bottom of post) to track grip strength over time.

I’m starting to think that we as a group need to try to pull together a full list of functional aging biomarkers that we can track over time to see how longevity interventions are working. Ideally these functional biomarkers are things that are cheap and easy to do… I think this grip strength test is one of them:

GripStrengthjospt-685-fig003
FIGURE 3. Box plot of the hand-grip strength measurements (kilograms) for (A) the dominant hand and (B) the nondominant hand. For each box, the center line represents the median (50th percentile), the height of the box represents interquartile range (25th percentile and 75th percentile), and the top error bars represent minimum and maximum (after removing outliers).

Source:
https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2018.7851

What prompted this was the recent article in the Washington Post:

What grip strength can tell you about how well you’re aging.

Grip strength is closely linked to mortality in people of all incomes, and may be a better indicator of life expectancy than blood pressure.

Want to know how well you’re aging? Check your grip strength.

A recent study of 1,275 men and women found that those with relatively feeble handgrip strength, a reliable marker of overall muscle quality and strength, showed signs of accelerated aging of their DNA. Their genes appeared to be growing old faster than those of people with greater strength.

Why grip strength matters.

A wealth of research already tells us that strength is good for us. People who lift weights are substantially less likely to develop heart disease, high blood pressure and many other chronic illnesses than those who skip resistance exercise.

Strength also can be an augury of how long we’ll live. In a 2015 study of almost 140,000 adults in high-, middle- and low-income nations, reduced handgrip strength was closely linked to mortality in people of all incomes, predicting risks for early death better than blood pressure, which is often considered one of the best indicators of life span.

“Grip strength is a simple but powerful predictor of future disability, morbidity, and mortality,” the authors of an accompanying editorial concluded, its effects holding true “not only in older people, but also in middle-aged and young people.”

How, though, might a sturdy grip today influence our well-being tomorrow?

“Grip strength is often called a biomarker of aging,” said Mark Peterson, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the new study. “But the biological context for why it’s so predictive of positive and negative outcomes during aging hasn’t really been clear.”

Maybe, Dr. Peterson and his colleagues speculated, epigenetics might be key.

What is your epigenetic age?

Epigenetics also may signal how rapidly we are aging, recent science shows.

Washington Post Article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/01/18/grip-strength-muscles-aging/

Full Paper (Open Access)

Grip strength is inversely associated with DNA methylation age acceleration

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jcsm.13110

12 Likes
Take the 30-second Power Test (NYT)
#2

Try the chair test - how many times one can sit and stand for one minute.

Was able to do 48. It burned my quadriceps at around 35. From thereon, it was just a fight against the burn, not a test of ability. Raises the heartrate too.

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#3

The plank test has also been recommended.

In 2020, 62-year-old former US Marine George Hood set the world planking record with a time of eight hours, 15 minutes and 15 seconds.

Six minutes is considered an excellent score/time.

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#4

This is the research on the Chair Stand test - right?

Performance on sit-to-stand tests in relation to measures of functional fitness and sarcopenia diagnosis in community-dwelling older adults

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7791746/

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#5

Chair should be the height of the knees. Arms folded on chest is best, on thighs is ok.

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#6

A good description here, with images. Test for 30 seconds or 60 seconds I guess.

STEADI-Assessment-30Sec-508.pdf (206.5 KB)

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#7

In the article, Dr. Mosley refers to a study done in 1999. Still trying to hunt it down.

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#8

I started with the dead-hang from a bar and progressed up to several pull-ups. Pretty good for a big person. Bar hanging massively increased my grip strength.

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#9

Amazing bladder control as well

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#10

I have a grip strength in the top 1% of my age class and I attribute it to a lot of bar hanging to stretch my spine. It really does wonders for the lower back.

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Need Advice: Writing an Article on Physical Function Related Mortality Predictors
#11

That’s a sudden and big drop off after 44 in men

#12

I’m pretty sure you don’t need to bother with any of these tests if eg you can deadlift >1.5 body weight or if you are better than novice in any of the large compounds

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#13

I agree it is worth getting a good list of functional tests. I am not a fan of the chair sit stand test because for someone who is quite fit there is a lot of thrashing around. I think a range of challenges such as chin-ups etc is a better thing.

Grip strength is quite a good test. I wonder if it varies during the day.

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#14

I only do dead hangs but my time has increased 25% since taking Rapa.
What one can’t determine is if the improvement comes from Rapa or from the muscle exercise of doing the dead hang. (It wasn’t an exercise I did before taking Rapa).
I suspect it’s just the exercise as it always appears to fall back if I go more than a week without doing it.

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#15

It seems that A LOT of things seem to drop off at 40 (this is why there are so few elite athletes after that age)

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#16

I do not recommend any kind of deadlifting for older people. It simply compresses the spine. I believe this is why many older people have back problems, not simply because they may have been lifting wrong. I see many at the gym doing deadlifting wrong and I wonder how they are going to feel after a few years. So many of my friends have had back problems at an early age that it caused me to be extra cautious with my back. I do not do any exercises that put an excessive load on my spine and, at 82, have no back problems.

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#17

Yes. So few elite athletes above 40. A smaller number of the few maintain their plateaus till their 70s.

The late Ed Whitlock run the marathon in 2:54:48 at 73, and did a 39:25.16 10k in the 75-79 age group. A sub 3 hour marathon is below 7 minutes per mile, sustained for 26 miles.

Trying to finish the Rapamycin and risk of cardiovascular disease thread. I have not reached one-fifth (436 of 1363). But it is the most informative thread I’ve read in this forum.

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#18

Genesis Lung
Genesis Lung
I have been repeatedly saying that light cardio exercise with some low weight load is ideal for old people. People keep ignoring that weightlifting to get buff decreases muscle satellite stem cell health and the added vasculature strains your heart. You want just enough to ward off sarcopenia and get the benefits of musculoskeletal mechanical transduction and antioxidant release and lymph clearance, not more than that. This is what led to me cutting mass. Not to mention longevity interventions like metformin reduce your muscle gains by like 75% anyway.
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 · Reply
 · 20h · Edited

Tomer Ze’ev
Genesis Lung
One wonders whether it’s a lack of satellite muscle cells or the harmful effects of uncontrolled inflammation and/or cellular senescence in other cell populations. Even when you’re 60 you have an ample amount of satellite cells, but they need to know when to start dividing, if the inflammation has reached unhealthy chronic levels it could be giving them the wrong signal. But yeah there’s quite a bit of evidence that being lean contributes to a longer life, especially lower levels of IGF-1, that’s part of the benefit in caloric restriction.

I have been repeatedly saying that light cardio exercise with some low weight load is ideal for old people. People keep ignoring that weightlifting to get buff decreases muscle satellite stem cell health and the added vasculature strains your heart. You want just enough to ward off sarcopenia and get the benefits of musculoskeletal mechanical transduction and antioxidant release and lymph clearance, not more than that. This is what led to me cutting mass. Not to mention longevity interventions like metformin reduce your muscle gains by like 75% anyway.
2

 · Reply
 · 20h · Edited

Tomer Ze’ev
Genesis Lung
One wonders whether it’s a lack of satellite muscle cells or the harmful effects of uncontrolled inflammation and/or cellular senescence in other cell populations. Even when you’re 60 you have an ample amount of satellite cells, but they need to know when to start dividing, if the inflammation has reached unhealthy chronic levels it could be giving them the wrong signal. But yeah there’s quite a bit of evidence that being lean contributes to a longer life, especially lower levels of IGF-1, that’s part of the benefit in caloric restriction.

#19

I’ve always assumed the whole grip strength thing is simply a marker for overall body strength. For example, if I can squat 400lbs and bench 300 and can run a six minute mile (BTW, I can’t do any of these things), but my grip strength isn’t great does that mean I’m out of shape? Doesn’t make sense/

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#20

Of course not, if you had no hands they couldn’t be used as an indicator of your health. Grip strength is merely a surrogate measure of frailty. Grip strength is an indicator of all-cause mortality because of the myriad of things it represents; namely sickness and frailty.
In addition, poor grip strength might prevent recovery from falling, such as grabbing a handrail. Lifting heavy weights requires good grip strength, but you will gain grip strength from lifting even modest weights.

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