Grip Strength Is More Than Access to Nut Butter: Positive Aging

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What are you waiting for? Good night. Did you know your grip strength and mortality risk are closely related? Scientific studies included in this episode share the relationship between your grip strength and your longevity, how to test it, and how to improve your grip strength. Can you open that jar of nut butter without assistance? If you're handing those jars off to somebody else, maybe time to examine an often overlooked component of mortality rate and longevity, or positive aging. I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50, where I address your top struggles and concerns. Most of all, we hope to inspire you so you expect and then demand better services, better products. I share what to eat, how to move, and how to change your mindset so you can have the energy and the vitality that you want, need, and deserve in this Second and Better Half. So really, how are you doing with opening those jars? Uh-huh. Okay. So here's what's inside this grip strength and longevity episode. What is grip strength? We'll mention it. Why is that a measure of positive aging? How do you measure it? How to improve it. Once you know the measure, and strengthening your forearms and how that also comes into play and what could interfere with your grip strength that you might not have any control about. So here we go. So first of all, what is grip strength? It is exactly what it says. Basically, we measure how strong your grip is. The indication that you may have a little bit of a grip strength problem may in fact be that you're handing off those peanut butter jars to somebody else, or maybe it's the pickles or the something else. But you know those jars in the pantry, you know what I'm talking about, and that's potentially the first sign you're gonna see. However, there are those of you— we're gonna end with this— that have certain autoimmune or other other types of diseases that may be getting in the way of your functioning. And though you can't do something about that, you can potentially do something about many other things associated with aging. So if grip strength and improving grip strength isn't in the cards for you, keeping strength elsewhere is still going to become a bigger factor for you. So how do we measure it? We measure it by use of a dynamometer. It's kind of a fun word to say, but a dynamometer. And it's literally, um, you know, when I think about it, I was the youngest of 4 children. My older brother used to— this used to be a thing, and I don't know if it still is or if it's come and gone ever since, but my older brother used to have, um, like a squeezable hand tool. Like, and I— he played hockey. I don't know if that had anything to do with it, like if you had to have good grip strength to play hockey and that's how he ever got started with that. But he would have been like in high school, um, like a junior and a senior as I was a young, young kid, probably under 5, trying to do the math here. But, um, so he used to have one and he would squeeze it while he'd watch TV, and then he'd put it in the other hand and he'd squeeze it, you know, and just on hinge. And I remember later it was still hanging around the house, like years later and a move later. And my stepfather, when he was older, I think probably retired, had somehow pulled that back out of their drawer and was working on it. So I'm sure he had read in his Bottom Line magazine— anybody else read that or have parents who've read that?

But it is—

that is literally the measure. So Interestingly enough, we don't work on it, right? I mean, very few of us do. It's where that memory— I didn't intentionally think I was gonna put that in the podcast, but it just kind of came to me like I didn't even remember doing that. But we really don't do this. Although I can remember now also being a little girl, probably elementary school, remembering that when I would sometimes go to like friends of my parents to stay with them for a day or two if somebody— my parents were going out of town And I remember certain friends of ours would carry around racquetballs and they would squeeze them, and they were the more fit friends of my folks, and it was something they did on a regular basis. So very interesting that those things come back to you, you know, that you hadn't thought about for a very long time. But I do think that it, it may not be crossing your mind if you're in your 40s, your 50s, maybe more so, more likely to happen if you're in your 60s or your 70s, but let's start it sooner, right, rather than later. But there are other ways that you're working on your grip strength without quote-unquote necessarily working on your grip strength, and I'll explain what I mean by that. Here's why it's a measure of positive aging. There's an association directly with mortality and grip strength and cognitive function and grip strength. And so from the literature, in a 2015 study, researchers examined the connection between your grip strength and mortality in 140,000 adults. We love those big studies. They found that poor hand grip strength was linked to higher risk of heart disease, heart attack, stroke, and death. And part of the reason why I want to bring this back to you— this is not saying sit in your armchair, right, and squeeze, and if you get better grip strength, you're going to live longer and won't have a heart attack. But it is probably saying that those of you who are more active anyway, you're already out there, you're playing golf, you're lifting weights, you're maybe gardening, doing something active on a regular basis, you're overall stronger and your grip strength is naturally also better. But you're doing the things that actually also do decrease heart disease, heart attack, stroke, and death. And probably in doing those activities, you're decreasing your body fat increasing your lean muscle or improving your body composition. In other words, your grip strength is also an indicator of cognitive and your mental health. A 2022 study found that increased grip strength was associated with better cognitive function, less depression, anxiety, and higher life satisfaction. So where does that come from? I mean, obviously, again, it's not you sitting in your La-Z-Boy squeezing that you know, little squeeze thing on a hinge. I don't even know what the name of that is, but it's probably the correlation of somebody who has good grip strength is participating in regular physical activity, not just walking. That's probably not enough to work on your grip strength, but doing strength training, doing just an active lifestyle like the gardening, the raking, the— maybe it's the shoveling, it's the raking. And those types of things, the movement gets the blood flow circulation going. So there's better cognitive function, better mood correlation, less depression, less anxiety, and higher life satisfaction. So it's not just as direct as, okay, squeeze something, squeeze a tennis ball, and you're going to decrease your risk of cardiac disease. Probably not. But we can come at it from both approaches. So exactly, literally exactly why grip strength correlates is not truly known. So in the literature of all of these studies saying there's a correlation between this and that, they still don't know exactly why. But I'm gonna intuit, and so do the researchers, that it is people who are already active and who are using their hands in, in strength training exercises and and activities and sports, both of lifestyle nature, not just exercise, that increase the hand strength. So we know how to measure it, we know what it is. How can you improve it? What if you find out it's not good, or you said, yes, ding, ding, ding, I have been handing those jars to somebody else? Uh, here's the thing, here's how you improve it. We're going to start from this is the greatest way to improve it all the way down to. If you can't do that, do this, right? And some of those will be— these are things you'd only want to do occasionally during a week anyway, but others of those you could do every day and sometimes multiple times a day. So number 1, pull-ups or arm hangs. So you're just holding on to the bar, pulling yourself up. Obviously you're going to have better grip because— and it doesn't matter, don't get all caught up in should my hands face forward or face palms face you. I think If you can do either one, I'm good with that. Okay, I'm very impressed in fact with that. But pull-ups would be one. You don't necessarily even have to pull up, but just hanging by holding on to the bar or to a grip is also good. The next thing is farmer's carry. This is actually, for those of you who have done this before, incorporated into your core exercise. That's what it is, it's core exercise workout. But a farmer's carry would be holding dumbbells, or you could hold a kettlebell, doesn't really matter at your sides and walking with weight. So you're carrying something heavy essentially, right? You can carry them— when I have people do farmer's carries, I almost prefer that they hold the weight in one arm, not in the other arm, so they're now imbalanced and have to work through the core to hold themselves in good alignment, and then switch sides. But you can do it either when you're working toward the goal of grip strength, you might put a weight in both hands. Next up is just dumbbell exercises. Any dumbbell exercise is going to hold— have you hold and grip the dumbbells. If you're pushing it up, it's going to sit a little bit in your hand. It's going to rest there and your fingers are just gripping over the top. But if you are flipping that over and you're pulling the dumbbell up from the floor, doing a bent-over row for instance, now it could slip out, right? So you have a little bit more grip strength when you're working it in that direction, certainly. Um, and that's very different than, say, machine weights. You sit on a machine weight, you put your hands around maybe the handles that you're pushing or pulling. You have to have a certain amount of grip strength for pulling, a little less so though for pushing. You just need to align your hands on that handle, then you could push forward without having to have much grip strength because it's not something that you're working on guiding, or maintaining balance or a path. The next is a plate squeeze, and I don't mean dinner plates. Probably don't do this with your dinner plates would be the, uh, advice I'd give, but weight plates. So this is where you've got the weight plates like from the gym, and you're just going to pick them up with your thumb on one side, your forefinger, or the forefinger and the middle finger on the other side, and you're going to pick them up and squeeze them and hold on to it. Try to hold on to it for as long as you can. And you could walk with those in a farmer's carry. You could do both sides at the same time. But again, you're working on holding that for as long as you can. Your next thing is towel wringing. So hopefully you're noticing it's getting easier and easier and easier. So towel wringing, where literally you would dampen a towel or get it wet, run it literally underneath. And right now that sounds really good. Then I would go do this outside and the towel would be dry in about 2 minutes. It's 115 here, but you would take it and get it wet, and then you're going to wring it out and keep twisting and twisting and twisting and twisting and using your grip to twist and try to get all the water out that you possibly can., and that again is causing you to rotate and rotate. Now that makes me think of when we were kids and we had PE and the ropes went all the way to the ceiling and you had to climb up them. Great for grip strength, right? So you don't necessarily have to start climb to the ceiling, but even if you were lying on the floor and you have access to a TRX, so you may have one at home or at a gym. And there may be a rope hanging or a suspension rope hanging from something where it's strong enough and it's anchored enough that you could do this, and you grab hold and you pull yourself up to a sitting position, and maybe then from there up to a standing position. But again, grip strength. And then the very last is the tennis ball squeeze. You could use a racquetball as well, and depending on the size of your hands, you may want to, but literally just the fact and the act of squeezing, squeezing each digit as much as possible. And remember that it's as much about squeeze and relax is important, so you release that contraction as well. So those are great recommendations for how to strengthen your grip. Strengthening your forearms can also be helpful. So if you were, say, laying your forearm, from your elbow to your wrist, over a tabletop or a bench if you're at a gym or in your own home gym for that matter. But then you are doing what we call reverse curls, and that's important because most of the time when we're carrying something, we have our palms facing us and we have our wrists already curled toward us. We don't necessarily need more of that range of motion, but we need more of the other, and that strengthens some of the muscles leading into your hand that work on grip strength, but you'd lay your palm down facing the floor and you'd hold on to a weight as your wrist is kind of belly up to the side of the table, and then you lift that weight up and down. That's called a reverse curl. So we're really extending through the wrist and getting even up into hyperextension, and that can strengthen. So you need forearm strength in order to get the, the grip strength in your fingers, your digits stronger as well. So now let's talk about what interferes with your grip strength. So neurological diseases, um, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, and I could say maybe osteoarthritis, but osteoarthritis generally anyway hits the joints where we've had trauma. You know, and that means trauma from weight bearing. So our ankles take a big brunt for any older adult. We've been ambulatory and mobile for a very long time. And then there's knees, there's hips. And often if you played sports or you did anything high impact, there may be damage from that. If you were ever in an automobile or even a bicycle accident, motorcycle accident, and you had trauma literally from being hit or struck, that would also do it with osteoarthritis. The hands are less likely to experience osteoarthritis, but it could be true. But rheumatoid arthritis can often sneak in, and that is— you're going to notice that probably in those hands get gnarled if you're an older adult who's suffering from that. But MS, or multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, any type of nerve damage that you may have had from an injury or just malalignment. And then carpal tunnel syndrome also can get in the way of grip strength, so that may be alleviated after a period of time. Some people have to have surgery in order to alleviate it, others don't get relief, but those things can get in the way of doing it. So what I want to point out is, in case you landed here and some of the things that I've mentioned as far as how do we improve your grip strength don't apply to you. You can't do those. Maybe your arthritis will not allow you to hold on to a plate with two fingers, you know, on one side and a thumb on the other and, and create a grip. Some— we've noticed, um, members who come to Flipping 50 have a hard time holding on to dumbbells, and sometimes It's a matter of we need an extra grip, so getting it wider and getting it softer sometimes can make that easier. And there are a lot of tools, and Amazon is honestly full of them, um, so to make it easier. But if you can't, what I want you to look at is grip strength is but one measure of mortality and/or longevity, depending on how you want to look at it. And, and then there are other things. So being able to get yourself up and off the floor is another So a lot of people will show the crisscross applesauce kind of sitting down, standing up, you know, whether it's that or it's just simply being able to get over to all fours, get one leg up in front of you and then stand up so that you could do that if you fell. That's an important part of your longevity. And then taking care of yourself, decreasing inflammatory kinds of foods in your diet, first unprocessing it, then maybe taking a closer look at foods that are known to be more inflammatory, especially for those people who do have autoimmune diseases like dairy, gluten, wheat, um, would be some of the first ones that I would look at. So knowing we have something that we cannot do, there are always things that we can control. Say you have Parkinson's or rheumatoid arthritis, that may be a limiting factor, but overall strength, mobility, mobility, other forms of exercise, and your diet are things you can control, it's a good reason to pay more careful attention to those things you can do something about. And mindset and attitude are sometimes proven to be more valuable than physical traits. So I'll leave you with that. And I'm curious to know, how was this helpful for you? So if you use grip strength yourself, you notice that it's slipping. Anybody spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard and just notice, Oh, my fingers get stiff and tired more than they used to. Yeah. Okay, so this episode you'll find at flipping50.com/gripstrength if you want both the references actually for today's podcast, and if you want the list of how to improve it, what those things were again, those will be right here. What are you waiting for? Let's start flipping 50. Me today.