It was never about your hands

The Frame, Part 3 of 4

Read time: 5 minutes

Under the Hood is a weekly look at what's really driving your health, fixed 1% at a time.

Today: your grip strength, why it's the gauge nobody reads, and how to use it to get stronger on your very next set.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the playground helping my daughter Adelyna up onto the monkey bars. She's two and a half. I let go for a second to see what would happen, and she just hung there. Ten seconds, maybe longer, holding her whole bodyweight with two hands.

Nobody taught her that. No cues, no program, no coach. It was already in there.

That's what stuck with me on the drive home. We don't build grip from scratch. We're born with it, and then we spend forty years quietly setting it down.

You are only as strong as your grip.

THE DEEP DIVE

I say this a lot in my coaching. It usually gets a nod and not much else, because it sounds like a saying. But grip is one of the checkpoints I cue, and when a client remembers it, he feels the difference in the lift that day.

First, the gauge nobody reads.

Your annual physical checks your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your glucose. Nobody has ever asked you to squeeze anything.

That's a miss. In one of the largest studies ever run on this, researchers measured the grip strength of nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries. Every 5 kilogram drop in grip was linked to a 16% higher risk of dying from any cause. It predicted death better than systolic blood pressure did.

Be careful with what that means. It does not mean squeezing a gripper buys you more years. Nobody has proven that, and the researchers said so themselves.

It means your grip is a readout of the whole system. Strong hands are what's left over after years of a body being used. It's a receipt, and these receipts are worth reading.

So I'm not going to hand you a number to beat. Test it, write it down, and watch which direction it goes over the next few years. That's the only version of this that matters for you.

And here's what you're actually training for. Not a number on a chart. It’s so that at 80 years old you can still open your own jar of jelly.

Then, squeeze the bar.

Here's the part you can use in the next twenty minutes.

On your next strength set, whatever it is, squeeze the handle like you're trying to leave fingerprints in it. Then count your reps.

You will get more reps than you did with a loose grip. Not next month. That set.

Strength coaches call this the law of irradiation. I think of it as inviting more friends to the party. More friends means more muscles involved. Squeeze hard in one place and the muscles around it show up too.

Your hands are one of the fastest connections you have to the world (your feet are the second), which is why your brain listens to them first.

That's also how you build strong grip. A loose grip on the bar trains everything but your hands. Squeeze it like you mean it and every set you were already doing turns into grip work.

Which tells you the real thing: your grip was never a hand thing. Watch someone close a heavy gripper sometime. Their toes grab the floor, their glutes fire, their whole midsection locks down, and all of that gets funneled into a hand. The hands are just the last six inches of a chain that starts at the ground.

Your hands are where the chain gets tested, not where it lives.

Then, the carry.

So why do a lot of people not train this?

Because no workout split in history has ever had a grip day. Chest day, back day, leg day, arm day. Grip never made the list, so it only gets trained by accident.

That's what the carry is for. It was one of the six patterns I gave you last week, and it's the one most men have never programmed on purpose.

Here's the standard we use: the farmer carry. Half your bodyweight in each hand, dumbbell or kettlebell, held for 60 seconds. A 200 pound man carries 100 per hand.

That's one of two grip tests worth knowing. The other one is down in Quick Hits.

If that's a long way off, start with a weight you can hold for 30 seconds and add time before you add load. Once you can hold 60 seconds, start adding weight until you get to half your bodyweight per hand.

Back in Issue #2 I gave you the Norwegian 4x4 and told you your VO2 max was worth training. That's still true.

But when researchers accounted for aerobic fitness, the strength signal didn't disappear. Two separate systems. Two separate gauges. Peter Attia makes this point well: you can't cram for either one. There's no night-before version of a good VO2 max or a strong grip. Both take years, which is exactly what makes them worth measuring.

Which means a good 4x4 doesn't cover you here. A man can have an engine that runs clean and a frame that's quietly giving out at the edges, and he'd never know it, because he's only reading one gauge. This is why both are critical for optimal health and longevity.

Remember, you are only as strong as your grip. Go find out where yours is.

QUICK HITS

FUEL — Protein does the building, but your grip is one of the first places you'll feel it when you're not eating enough of it. If your hands are giving out earlier than they used to and nothing else changed, look at your plate before you look at your program.

TRAINING — Pavel Tsatsouline calls it greasing the groove. Practice a hard thing often, well short of failure, and treat strength as a skill instead of a workout. A few hangs from a bar most days will do more for your grip than one brutal session a week.

FAMILY — Every carry you train is a carry you'll actually do. The cooler to the water. The car seat through the parking lot. The kid who fell asleep in the third row. You don't get to warm up for those.

MIND — If you haven't read Outlive by Peter Attia, read it. It changed the way I think about my own health and a lot of what I write here starts there. He uses a dead hang as one of his benchmarks for staying functional into your eighties. Straight bar, overhand grip, feet off the floor, hang until you can't. Write the number down and check it again in 90 days.

ON THE WALL

One of my older clients started with me a little over five years ago, right after he came through lung cancer. I asked him what his goals were. He wanted to get back to running, he wanted to finally do a strength program the right way, and he told me he'd love to do a pull-up. He'd never really been able to do one. Maybe one, back in high school.

He was in his early seventies when he started.

After years of being consistent and training his grip through different exercises in his program, he got to 15 pull-ups on his own. He's in his late seventies now and still going, outlasting most of his peers.

What most people hear in that story is a back story. It isn't. He wasn't failing pull-ups because his back was weak. He was failing them because his hands let go before anything else got a chance to work.

If you know a guy whose hands quit before the rest of him does, forward this to him.

Your body is worth stewarding.

Go become 1% better. 🔧

— Coach Joshua

Educational content, not medical advice. Partner with your physician, ideally one who believes in proactive care.

New here? Every issue lives in the archive. Last week I made the case that if you train movements, the muscles come free.