The “60 kg standard” comes from clinical research. Specifically the kind of research where they follow 140,000 adults for years and figure out what predicts whether you live or die. Grip strength on a hand dynamometer turned out to be a stronger predictor of cardiovascular death than blood pressure was. The PURE study put it […]
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The weak handshake is the cliché. The reality is broader and more concerning. If your grip is weak, opening jars takes more effort than it should. Groceries become a multi-trip operation. Hanging from a pull-up bar feels precarious within 20 seconds. Heavy deadlifts drop out of your hands before your back is ready to quit. […]
The pain shows up on the outside of your elbow first. Sharp twinge when you grip a coffee cup. Dull ache when you shake hands. Nagging pinch reaching for the door handle. Then it shows up in the gym — presses feel weird, rows hurt where the bar meets your hand, even pull-ups start aggravating […]
You hit lockout on a heavy single. Back solid. Hips stacked. Bar at the hips. Form clean. Everything in position. Then your fingers open. The bar drops. Six inches from a clean rep, you lose the lift to your hands. The whole rest of your body still had gas in the tank. Welcome to grip-limited […]
Three minutes into a roll. Your forearms feel like sand has been poured into them. You can’t grip the gi anymore. Your fingers won’t close on the lapel. Your collar grip slips off the neck like it’s coated in oil. The guy on top of you knows it. He times the pump, sweeps you, and […]
You finish a heavy back day. Forearms feel inflated. Veins popping. Muscles full of cement. You can barely close your hand around a glass of water for the next two hours. You google “forearm pump after lifting” and the answers are scattered bullshit across a hundred forum threads. Some say it’s normal. Some say it’s […]
In 1998 a grip guy from Bean Station, Tennessee named Joe Kinney picked up a Captains of Crush No. 4. That’s the gripper rated at around 365 pounds, the top of the whole line back then. Nobody had ever officially closed it. Kinney shut it. And it didn’t look like a war. Strongman historian John […]
During World War I, a Russian soldier named Alexander Zass got captured by the Austrians. Then he escaped. Then he got captured again. Four times total, and he got out every single time. At least one of those escapes involved snapping his chains and bending the bars of his cell. Later accounts say he kept […]
In 1895, in Boston, a French-Canadian named Louis Cyr got under a platform with 18 men standing on it. Then he lifted the whole thing on his back. The total was reported at 4,337 pounds, and that lift still gets talked about over a hundred years later. A doctor measured him that same year at […]
Early in the 1900s, an English strongman named Thomas Inch had a dumbbell cast that weighed 172 pounds. Heavy, sure. But plenty of men in that era could pick up 172 pounds. The trick was the handle. Almost two and a half inches thick, and it didn’t spin. Inch offered cash to anybody who could […]