5 Ways to Test Your Grip Strength (and why it matters to your health)

Betty Rocker (00:15):

What’s up, rockstar Coach Betty Rocker here. Thanks so much for tuning in to spend some time with me today. Hey, so I wanted to talk today about grip strength, which is actually a really important indicator of our overall strength. And I wanna talk about why it matters, how to test yours and what you can do to improve it. So grip strength is a particular type of hand strength that refers to your ability to hold onto things with your fingers. There are a bunch of different ways you can test yours, and I’m gonna tell you all about them, plus how you can strengthen your grip too. But first and foremost, I mean, why is grip strength so important to pay attention to? Because you know, it doesn’t really sound like the most obvious strength indicator, right?

(01:01)
You might think of how much you can squat or your ability to jump or do pushups. And of course all of those are super important indicators of our strength too. And they’re really important as we age, particularly leg strength and our ability to balance as they both have so much to do with our ability to function and move as we go through time. But grip strength is also really important and it’s specifically correlated to our overall strength. It’s a really important indicator of where we’re at, and it can let us know if we need to improve. And I’m not just talking about the practical considerations for grip strength, like being able to open the pickle jar , although that’s going to be important too. I’m also talking about the research that links a decline in our grip strength to a lot of really serious health conditions and increases in mortality risk.

(01:55)
A study from Pure, which stands for Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology found that each 11 pound decrease in grip strength was linked to a 16% higher risk of dying from any cause. A 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, a 9% higher risk of a stroke, and a 7% higher risk of a heart attack. And those statistics are kind of alarming, right? Because for just 11 pounds of grip strength, just a decrease of 11 pounds that we lose our risks go up for such a wide variety of things. Another research study published in the Orthopedic Surgery Journal correlated low hand grip strength in women, especially postmenopausal women, with an increased risk of osteoporosis and fracture. This association is of course, significant for us because falls and fractures are one of the leading causes of accident related death in older women. That low grip strength is also associated with poor survival in patients with cancer, specifically those with things like cancer cachexia, which is a wasting condition.

(03:02)
And it’s also been linked to increased mortality in other specific cancers like breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and lung cancer. This lower grip strength has also been found to be a predictor of the likelihood of post-surgical complications, post-surgical recovery time and mortality. And this all adds up, right? If we’re losing overall strength, we’re losing muscle, we’re losing our bone density, our essential body tissues that drive all of our movement and protect us. And losing our muscle and losing strength means we’re losing our autonomy and our ability to not only live life to the fullest. It means that when we have a setback or an injury or say we have to undergo surgery or we suffer from some other life-threatening condition or disease, our recovery time and our ability to handle the recovery is gonna take a lot longer. I mean, this kind of stuff could happen at any age, right?

(03:58)
You could trip and fall. It’s a super common form of injury that can have such a wide ranging complication factor depending on our state of health at the time. I personally had a bad fall myself just this past year, tripping over something hidden in the grass and I dislocated my elbow and I couldn’t use my right arm for some time while I was healing. I had a lot of strength in my body overall, which really helped me heal faster and reduce the amount of complications that potentially could have occurred were I not in that high state of fitness and health at the time. But I think about what it means for people who don’t have the strength and reserves in their muscle tissue to fall back on when they do get injured, right? Or they’re recovering from a procedure, you know, maybe before that happened, they were totally functioning just fine, they were managing, but all it took was an injury or an unexpected fall.

(04:48)
And suddenly they’re totally incapacitated in dealing with all the layers of complication that start to compound once they can’t take care of themselves or move as much. Maybe you’ve helped take care of someone in this situation, or you’ve even been in this situation yourself, and you know how frustrating it can be to just feel so incapacitated. So why we’re talking about grip strength today is because it’s a real indicator of where we’re at with our strength. It will tell you how long your recovery would potentially be if you were to get an injury, for example. It’s also an indicator of more than just our physical wellbeing, and this stuff was actually scary to learn. Weaker hand grip strength in midlife is linked to cognitive decline only a decade later. So for every 11 pound decrease in grip strength, we have, there’s an associated 10% greater risk of cognitive impairment and associated higher risk of dementia.

(05:45)
And that’s pretty scary, right? But it’s also good news for you if you are prioritizing your health and fitness because doing the things we can do to strengthen our muscle tissue and preserve it is really the name of the game. Now, our workouts are what we all think of when it comes to our muscle, but without the nutrient building blocks we need in our meals consistently, we won’t support the turnover of the amino acids in our body that it uses constantly to rebuild and repair our muscle tissue. And remember, aminos are needed by the body for all kinds of things, including our brain function, our hormone and enzyme function, our immune system, and of course our muscle repair. So if you don’t eat enough protein, your body’s gonna break down your muscle to access the aminos that are stored there, which it needs for all these different jobs.

(06:36)
And this can contribute to greater muscle loss than you intend. And as we age, we need more of those aminos than we used to because our body doesn’t absorb them as readily. And this can be further compounded in our menopause years when our lower hormone levels make us a little more susceptible to muscle and bone loss. And if we don’t know, we need to do things like up our protein intake a bit, or focus on more resistance training or doing more explosive short burst cardio instead of endless cardio, or we’re just constantly over training without the balance, we need to support our changing hormones. This can all kind of snowball and contribute to greater muscle loss and weakened bone tissue. And this will translate into that weaker grip strength, which like we’ve been talking about, is a good indicator of some of those health risks we’ve been talking about.

(07:29)
I’ve really detailed my training and eating guidelines for women in perimenopause and post menopause in some of our other recent episodes that I’ll link to for you in the show notes. But really just to say this stuff that you are doing for yourself, no matter what, your age really matters, so, so much.
So here’s how to test your grip strength because I know you’re, you’re gonna wanna see where you’re at right after we’ve talked about all this important stuff. So number one, there’s a device that specifically measures it called a dynamometer that you squeeze, which then gives you a digital readout of your grip strength. And typically you’ll get a reference chart for different age groups with this device. So you can see where you fall if you use this method. You can also test your grip strength at home using a bathroom scale, though depending on the type of scale you have, this may or may not work well for you.

(08:16)
For that test, it might be most helpful to watch a video demonstration. And if you’re watching this podcast on my YouTube channel, I’m gonna show you how to do it. But if you’re listening, basically you just hold the scale in front of you at your chest with your elbows bent and your fingers wrapped around each side of the scale. You squeeze the scale with your hands as hard as you can for three seconds and get your number. Typically, you’d repeat this three times and take the average. You could do the same thing for one hand at a time. Also, holding the scale the same way and squeezing one hand at a time to get your number for the different sides. Another way to see where your grip strength is at, is to hang from a bar with your arm straight. This is called a dead hang and you time, how long you can hold yourself in that position.

(08:59)
A good average for us women would be between 30 and 60 seconds. And when you test yourself, you could record your baseline number and then work on increasing that over time with regular practice. For instance, if you’re on the low end, say 10 to 15 seconds, you could work on building up to 20 seconds. If you’re able to hold yourself for 20 to 30 seconds, work towards a goal of 45 seconds. If you’re able to hold yourself for 45 seconds, work on getting up to a minute or more. Another test that’s really simple is a dumbbell head grab, which is also called a dumbbell pinch, which is exactly like what it sounds like. You just squat down and grab the dumbbells by the heads and stand up with them at your sides. And you could test yourself to see how much weight you could do with this and how long you could hold the dumbbells without letting go.

(09:41)
And I definitely recommend starting light with this one. It’s a lot harder than it seems. You might wanna try like five to 10 pound dumbbells for this one, just to test yourself for the first time and, and just record your time and the amount that you used and just test yourself periodically and work on increasing it. Another way you can test your grip strength is to hold dumbbells at your sides and do an exercise called a farmer’s carry, where you simply walk holding onto the dumbbells and see how long you can maintain your grip for a full minute. So to test yourself, grab a couple of dumbbells and set a timer and just walk for a minute. If that felt easy and you were able to maintain your grip, try something heavier. A couple benchmarks for grip strength with this could be using half of your body weight and see if you can farmers carry that for 30 seconds.

(10:29)
So for a 120 pound woman, you would say 60 pounds. And so you’d hold two 30 pound dumbbells, one in each hand, and that would be how you would do that test and see if you could carry it for 30 seconds. Now, if you could easily do that, you would try maybe doing that amount for a full minute. And then if you wanted to ramp that challenge up, you could see if you could carry 75% of your body weight for 30 seconds. So again, for 120 pound woman, we’d be at 90 pounds. We’d distribute that into 2 45 pound dumbbells, and then we’d walk with that amount for as long as we could. And then once we worked our way up to 30 seconds, we could work our way up to carrying that amount for a full minute. Now, keep in mind, like we’ve talked about before, that your grip strength is related to your overall strength.

(11:17)
It doesn’t live in isolation. It strengthens over time as you build strength in your entire body. So more important than just working on being able to meet one of these tests is to use your result from whatever test you do as really just motivation to keep building more balanced overall strength in your body with your exercise plan, and support that with your healthy eating and keep training in balance. And over time, you’ll continue to see your abilities increase, and you will certainly maintain them as well. And while so many aspects of our life are beyond our control, I mean we can’t stop time . We can’t stop aging. We do have a lot of control over how we go through time by taking steps to train smarter, train consistently, care about the food we eat, learn about how our bodies work in different phases of our lives, and take consistent action to take care of ourselves.

(12:10)
I thought that these, grip strength tests were super interesting, and I really like how grip strength is such a, a simple benchmark of our overall strength, and we can get kind of a, a read on where we’re at and use it as motivation to continue to progress, to continue to utilize these healthy practices. So I’m excited to hear from you and hear what you learn when you do test yourself with one of these methods. And I really appreciate you taking some time to tune in today, rockstar, and I really look forward to hearing from you. So be sure to drop me a line over on the show notes page or anywhere on my social media, and I will be back again soon to talk about some more fun topics related to your strength. So until next time, I’m Betty Rocker, and you are so awesome flawsome and amazing. Bye for now.