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Movement & Strength

Stronger at ninety

What a squeeze of the hand may say about your health, and how to build strength without a gym · 14 min

In a Boston nursing home, a young doctor told residents in their nineties that exercise might help them live longer. They answered with scorn, and one man told her what he really wanted. What happened next, how a squeeze of the hand predicted death more strongly than blood pressure across seventeen countries, and a way to build strength with a chair, a wall and two bags of shopping.

Takeaways

  • In about 140,000 adults aged 35 to 70 in seventeen countries, richer and poorer, each 5 kg of weaker grip went with about a 16% higher risk of death over about four years, more strongly than systolic blood pressure. It is a link, not proof.
  • In Boston in 1990, nine frail nursing-home residents aged 86 to 96 who finished eight weeks of high-intensity weight training nearly tripled their leg strength on average; a larger trial later confirmed big gains in very old people.
  • Muscle responds to how hard the work is for you, not where you do it. This week: three moves (chair stands, push-ups, a carry), two days, the last few repetitions hard.

Chapters

  1. Live longer?0:16
  2. The bodybuilder answer2:06
  3. Muscle doesn't retire3:53
  4. Two bodies, one rule7:09
  5. Hear it done8:41
  6. Build yours10:19
  7. The answer12:46

References

  1. Fiatarone, M. A., Marks, E. C., Ryan, N. D., Meredith, C. N., Lipsitz, L. A., & Evans, W. J. — High-intensity strength training in nonagenarians: effects on skeletal muscle(1990)
  2. Fiatarone, M. A., O'Neill, E. F., Ryan, N. D., et al. — Exercise training and nutritional supplementation for physical frailty in very elderly people(1994)
  3. Fiatarone Singh, M. — Do you even lift? (Raising the Bar Sydney talk transcript)(2018)
  4. Gallob, B. (The Jewish News) — Report on the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center weight-training project(1991)
  5. Leong, D. P., Teo, K. K., Rangarajan, S., et al. — Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study(2015)
  6. The Lancet (EurekAlert) — Testing hand-grip strength could be a simple, low-cost way to predict heart attack and stroke risk(2015)
  7. Celis-Morales, C. A., Welsh, P., Lyall, D. M., et al. — Associations of grip strength with cardiovascular, respiratory, and cancer outcomes and all cause mortality: prospective cohort study of half a million UK Biobank participants(2018)
  8. Kikuchi, N., & Nakazato, K. — Low-load bench press and push-up induce similar muscle hypertrophy and strength gain(2017)
  9. Momma, H., Kawakami, R., Honda, T., & Sawada, S. S. — Muscle-strengthening activities are associated with lower risk and mortality in major non-communicable diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies(2022)
  10. World Health Organization — WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour(2020)