gripstrengthintropodcast

The host of the Movement Professional Podcast, Dr. Chris Lott, discusses the importance of grip strength in daily life and its correlation to longevity and mortality research. He explains that grip strength is a measure of overall body strength and activity level. In daily life, we constantly rely on grip strength for tasks such as carrying, lifting, and hanging. Dr. Lott emphasizes the importance of incorporating grip strength training into exercise routines and highlights three categories: carries, hanging overhead, and lifting from the ground. He concludes by mentioning that he and Corey will further explore training methods for grip strength in future episodes. Dr. Lott also mentions his book, which provides additional information and resources on longevity-based movement. Welcome back to the Movement Professional Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Lott. So today we're going to do things a little differently today. Corey will not be joining me. He is off at a wedding in North Carolina having a good time, and I did want to miss a week here. I do a solo podcast to be an intro for the next two or three weeks that Corey and I will discuss regarding grip strength. So just wanted to kind of lay a foundation of how I think about grip strength and why I think it's an important thing to talk about, but also how we're going to actually try to break it down to make it a little bit more palatable and a little bit more usable so that you can think about how to put it into your training. So first off, the idea of grip strength is really prevalent in the longevity and mortality research. So that's one of the things you see just show up time and time again when you're looking at research about what functional things, what movement-oriented things help people live longer. And I think one of the major reasons for this is just it's a nice overall measure of full body strength, and it also tends to be a measure of activity versus sedentarism in individuals. And one of the reasons for that is if you think about how we use our grip, it's such a multifactorial thing. There's just so many different ways that we have to use our grip to function. So one of the important things to think about is why would grip strength be something that indicates longer life or more activity? Well, we have to use it to function in daily life, which might be a little bit separate from how we think about exercise in a gym setting. So for instance, if we are going to the gym and we're using machines that are set up for us in a way that we don't actually have to use our body in complex manners because the machines are sort of trying to take that complexity out of it, oftentimes we also don't have to grip an object just as a prerequisite to try to move that object. So we can really think about grip strength as a foundation for any type of upper body strength that we would have to use in daily life outside of a generic setting. So we can easily think about a gym setting where we don't have to use our grip too much, where we just use machines for bench press, for rowing movements, where we can kind of have our hands however we want. So our grip isn't necessarily going to be a prerequisite to being able to lift and hold something because the machine allows us to move the levers of it without having to have that grip. But in daily life, if we're going to carry something, we've got to grip it. If we're going to pick something up off the ground, we've got to grip it. If we're going to hang on something overhead, we have to grip it. So it's really important that we have use of this grip throughout daily life. And I can tell you practically, when you start training things, quote unquote, functionally, which is a buzz term that annoys a lot of people nowadays, but what we can think about is it's just being able to take some of your training and think about doing tasks in daily life and saying, is what I'm doing in the gym actually helping me do things better or make things easier for me in daily life? And I would say one of the foundations of that is if you can grip things easier, you feel a lot stronger with more daily activities. You feel more useful to others. So that's something I've definitely noticed with just starting to train kettlebells years ago, using barbells more than machines years ago. It's just there was this after effect of not just doing the movement that I felt like I was training isolated anatomy, doing a deadlift to train my glutes, but I was also feeling like, wow, my grip feels a lot stronger. I can hold on to more things with more ease. So that becomes this foundation of when you are training your body, try to, as much as possible, have your grip be involved. And that doesn't mean all the time, but have that just be something you're thinking about. Is my grip being challenged with what I'm doing? Is there a way I could do the same activity and give my grip a little bit more challenge? So something that Corey and I will be talking about over the next couple sessions is ways that we would try to train the grip. And there are three basic categories that I tend to look at, and that's going to be carries. So carrying something at your side could be carrying something at your shoulder. And this has obvious carryovers to daily life where we have to carry things frequently. It could be just the garbage can going from, you know, your house to taking it out where the garbage workers will come and pick that up. That it could be carrying a car seat if you have children. There's all different ways that you're carrying things throughout the course of the day. And if you're training that in the gym and you're training that in the way that we think about some fundamentals of how we can carry things, it will carry over to those actions and we'll be more confident to carry heavier things. The second category would be hanging overhead, typically, but it could be all different versions of hanging on a bar, hanging on rings. Very gymnastic-oriented movements will have hanging in them with most things that they do. So there's all different ways that we could hang on bars or other implements while we're putting our shoulders into different positions. So we get this combination of anchoring through our hands while we're moving our shoulders into positions that they often need to be mobilized into. And then the third category is lifting from the ground. So this is probably one of the areas that grip strength is the most underestimated, except for people that lift heavy. So when you start to lift heavier and heavier from the ground, you realize how important, how vital grip strength is and what a difference it can make in being able to lift more weight. And that's why they have things like chalk for your hands and they have wrist straps that can take the grip out of it so you don't need as much grip strength in order to lift heavy weights. So the idea of lifting from the ground, to me, is this fundamental functional activity that often gets used when people are giving examples of functional movement. It's like, all right, how well can you move to pick something up off the ground? You're going to have to do that throughout the course of your life. One thing that doesn't get talked about, we always talk about how you move in the hips, how are you hinging, what's your spine angle, but how well can you grip different and various objects when you're lifting from the ground? That becomes super valuable. And it often, in daily life, takes on a lot of different grip shapes. So if we think about gripping a barbell, it could just be a crush grip where the bar rests in our palms. If we're thinking about carrying an awkward object like a child, if we have to pick up a child from the ground, they don't have handles, they don't have a cylindrical shape like a bar, so we do have to oftentimes change the shape of our hands, we have to use our bodies in different ways, and we have to think about all the principles of body mechanics when we're trying to use our grip to pick things up from the ground. Picking up furniture, carrying furniture, helping people move, all of that takes grip strength, but it takes grip strength in awkward angles. So there's different types of grips that we can train that are different than just having the convenience of having to grip something that's cylindrical, like we often see in the gym with dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells. So that's going to be something that Cori and I touch on the next few weeks. So I just wanted to do a little bit of an introductory episode. Please feel free to contact me with specific questions. Questions are one of the best ways to target the information and the content that we are providing. The other thing is, with the last several weeks, Cori and I have been really just touching on longevity-based movement, things that we use in our practice, both as physical therapists and personal trainers, to help people move, but also to try to keep them healthy for longer periods of time. I did write a whole book on this, which takes some of the topics that we're touching on in the podcast, and I put videos behind it. I put specific protocols and sequences behind it. So you can use that as a reference for what we're talking about in these episodes. Hope this was useful. Please, again, reach out with comments. I'll see you next time.