How strong is your grip?

Announcement: I shall be LIVE on YouTube on Monday, November 10th, 2025 at 1 pm Eastern/12 pm Central/11 am Mountain/10 am Pacific to discuss the new insights coming at us that potentially solve many of the serious pitfalls and dangers—yes: dangers—of conventional weight loss methods. I will introduce many of the new concepts that I discuss in my new Super Body book to be released in December, 2025. To attend this live event, sign up here. Everyone signing up will be sent an excerpt of the new book. The new concepts focus on SHAPE AND BODY COMPOSITION, not the now outdated concept of just weight loss.

Shake hands with someone and you will quickly get a sense for the strength of their grip: strong and confident, soft and wimpy. But can something as simple and basic as handgrip strength predict future health? Because I have lately been discussing the idea that muscle mass and strength are important predictors of health as we age, variables that you have individual control over, let’s consider the issue of handgrip strength as a measure of health.

Here are the results of the Prospective Urban-Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study, or PURE Study, a huge effort involving 142,000 people from 17 countries (people with disabilities excluded) that measured handgrip strength using a simple device called a dynamometer (as shown in the above photo) and then tracked outcomes over 4 years:

From Leong et al 2015

You can readily see that people with the lowest grip strength experienced greater risk for heart attacks (“MI”), stroke, cancer, hospitalization for respiratory illness, and, to a lesser degree, risk for falls and fractures (for which leg strength is likely a superior measure). The impressive breadth of participant enrollment allowed the study group to break down grip strength by ethnicity, revealing marked differences (accepting that such differences may not be intrinsic to ethnicity but to confounders such as income, diet/protein intake, latitude, social factors, etc.):

Notably, grip strength in this study was not the maximum of each participant’s dominant hand, but a combination averaged from both dominant and non-dominant hands.

Likewise, grip strength may be a predictor of longevity. In this unusual study of men of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii (and thereby presumptively at least partially Americanized in lifestyle), grip strength at baseline predicted potential for longevity over 20+ years:

From Rantanen et al 2012

In this unique analysis, men with the greatest grip strength lived approximately two years longer than men with the weakest. (Only men studied, unfortunately)

The results of these analyses are, of course, consistent with the arguments I have been making that preservation or increase in muscle mass or, in these studies, strength correlates with greater freedom from numerous common health conditions as well as longevity. If you are engaged in my programs, you have already adopted a number of important strategies that preserve muscle, strategies that include achieving an optimal vitamin D blood level, elimination of foods that cause accumulation of abdominal and ectopic fat, strategies that cultivate muscle growth. In future blog posts and on my YouTube channel, I will be discussing these issues including unconventional and often little-known ways to address this aspect of health and longevity. I shall also share how to put information like visceral fat measurements and grip strength to use to determine where you fall compared to other people and how to make substantial improvements.

Much more on this and related issues to come. Join me in my LIVE YouTube broadcast scheduled for Monday, November 10th where I shall discuss my new book, Super Body, scheduled for release in mid-December, 2025. I will be discussing some of the newest ideas on this topic, including new and unique ways to reclaim lost muscle and strength. For anyone interested, Super Body is available now for pre-order prior to its anticipated release date of Dec 15, 2025:

The original IHB post is currently found on the: ⎆Infinite Health Blog, but accessing it there can require an unnecessary separate blog membership. The copy of it above is complete, and has been re-curated and enhanced for the Inner Circle membership.