Get a grip, millennial men
You’re not as strong as your dad was
Young men: Chances are your dad was stronger than you are.
Retirement-age dads: Your millennial son is probably a weakling, comparatively speaking.
A new study in press at the Journal of Hand Therapy (yes, it’s a thing) says millennial men may have significantly weaker hands and arms than men the same age did 30 years ago.
Researchers measured the grip strength (how strongly you can squeeze something) and pinch strength (how strongly you can pinch something between two fingers) of 237 healthy full-time students aged 20 to 34 at universities in North Carolina.
Among the males, the reduction in strength compared to 30 years ago was striking.
The average 20-to-34-yearold today, for instance, was able to apply 44 kilograms of force when gripping something with his right hand. In 1985, the average man could squeeze with 53 kilograms of force.
The caveat is that the participants in the North Carolina study were recruited from college and university settings, so they’re not representative of the population as a whole. If you were to look exclusively at young adults who never went to college, for instance, you might get different results.
But the 1985 study wasn’t nationally representative, either. It was built using volunteers from an area around Milwaukee; many in the 20to-34 age range were also recruited from a university setting.
The North Carolina findings generally agree with what other research has shown. For instance, a 2013 study found that children today are less physically fit than they were 30 years ago. And the grip strength numbers reported in the North Carolina study are similar to numbers reported in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults the same age, although the two studies are not directly comparable because of differences in methodology.
In the North Carolina study, the differences over time were least pronounced among older millennials (aged 30 to 34), who squeezed with five kilograms less pressure than men in that age group squeezed in 1985. The biggest deficit was seen among men aged 25 to 29, who gripped with 11 kilograms less force than their forebears.
Modern-day men’s deficiencies in pinching pressure were less pronounced, but still observable.
Grip strength isn’t quite the same thing as benching 100 kilograms or doing a set of squats. But researchers have found it to be a great predictor of many other strength and health-related outcomes. So it’s a useful proxy for overall muscular strength.
Millennial women fared much less poorly in the study. Their average right-hand grip force is roughly the same today as it was 30 years ago, at about 34 kilograms. Millennial women between 30 and 34 actually squeezed much harder than their forebears did — 44 kilograms of force compared with 36 kilograms in 1985. But this was offset by decreases in strength among younger millennial women.
To look at it another way: in 1985, the typical 30-to-34-yearold man could squeeze your hand with 14 kilograms more force than the typical woman of that age could. But today, older millennial men and women are roughly equal when it comes to grip strength.
So what’s going on here: a crisis of masculinity? Not exactly. The biggest driver is likely changes in adult work habits. In the 1980s, men were more likely to be employed in jobs involving manual labour. Less daily physical activity means less overall strength. The study doesn’t show the same decline among women partially because women were less likely to be doing jobs involving manual labour to begin with, and also because women’s labour force participation has increased since the 1980s. Changes in women’s daily physical activity over the past 30 years appear to be much less drastic than changes for men. Already, U.S. life expectancy numbers are starting to plateau and decline. If these strength numbers are any indication, we might expect life spans to shrink even further in the coming years.