You know, ever since I’ve moved to Southern Utah, where the sun is always shining, I’ve seen my fair share of baseball and softball players, rock climbers and tennis players. In those sports, grip strength is king- whether you are slamming a speedy serve, leveraging your body on a narrow ledge, or creaming a curveball out of the park, grip strength is going to make the difference.
Grip strength is useful beyond sports as well, especially for those who work with their hands or enjoy hobbies like woodworking, playing a musical instrument, or gardening. In fact, good grip strength can limit the risk of heart attacks, heart disease, and even strokes. By reading this article, you’ll be able to grasp all the ways grip strength holds you up.
Benefits of a Beefy Forearm
Let’s look at a study published in Shoulder and Elbow, a medical journal that specializes in, well, you can guess. This particular study, published in 2016, focused on the correlation between good grip strength and shoulder rotator cuff function, and found that grip strength can be used as a measurement of one’s shoulder health and mobility. If you’ve injured your shoulder before, you might’ve noticed that your grip strength is hindered as well.
Now, let’s assume that everyone wants to not die of heart disease, a heart attack, or a stroke. Grip strength can help, according to a thouroughly investigated connection between a person’s grip strength and their likelihood of avoiding death from one of the aforementioned causes. The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology study, more commonly referred to as the PURE study, is one of the most definitive studies when it comes to grip strength and longevity.
The PURE study ran from 2003 to 2009 and included a total of nearly 140,000 patients from 17 different studies. The study found that “Grip strength was inversely associated with all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, non-cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction, and stroke.” Furthermore, PURE found that the grip strength was so effective that “Grip strength was a stronger predictor of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality than systolic blood pressure.”
Throwing Weights Around
For those who are dedicated to getting gains, as in, lifting weights, grip strength is going to improve your gym sessions more than taking more pre-workout or doing extra bicep curls. For example, think of every time you have done a deadlift, a chest press, or a pullup, and stopped not because of your tired muscles, but because of aching wrists.
Ethan Reeve, assistant athletic director of sports performance at Wake Forest University, said in an interview with the Washington Post that training grip strength can help avoid common health complications related to your hands. He said that, “Having general health in your hands is important. Extension is just as important as flexion in the fingers, so you need to build the muscle on the top side of your hand and those on the other side. Overworking the muscles used to close your hands, for instance, could lead to tendinitis.”
So, How do I Get a Grip?
I get it, I get it, we’ve been reading all about all sorts of studies and facts related to grip strength. We get that it’s important. But now, finally, we will understand how to increase our grip strength.
Scott Caulfield, head strength and conditioning coach at the National Strength and Conditioning Association, has a few recommendations. Firstly, for those who have not yet familiarised themselves with lifting, holding a dumbbell for as long as possible is a great way to work the muscles relating to grip strength.
For those who are gym savvy, Caulfield suggests doing deadlifts, a great full-body workout that relies on grip strength as a key aspect. “You can also train your fingers by letting a dumbbell roll down your hand and catching it at the tip of your fingers,” says Caulfield.
Finishing Strong
If you took anything away from this article, take the following: grip strength should not be overlooked when thinking of general health. The importance that it holds through its correlation with both shoulder strength and heart disease alone makes it worthy of note in any workout plan.
Make it part of your plan, and make your grip strength, well, grippier.
Angela Tanaka, Mom and Physical Therapist
