Grip Strength by Age and Sex | Hacker News Reader

Grip Strength by Age and Sex

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Of course this is no surprise to anyone whose family hunted or farmed or went to war within living memory. It wasn’t because of arbitrary gender roles that my wife’s grandpa was the one in charge of dressing the deer carcass and hauling it to the truck. Likewise it was my uncle that killed a bunch of Pakistanis to win his country’s independence, not his sisters.

I must admit I’m a bit puzzled by the (I must assume fringe minority) of folks who insist that the equality of men and women is literal, not moral. We’re lucky today that most jobs don’t implicate men’s natural advantage in strength. It’s not relevant to doctors and lawyers and engineers. So what’s the point of denying the obvious? I sometimes wonder whether it’s motivated by a need to make the past seem more irrational and unfair than it really was. (Traditional gender roles probably seemed much more fair when men were regularly getting injured bringing home game animals or dying to protect the homestead.)

It sounds like you are just trying to make an unnecessary point about gender roles which isn't actually universal.

Among many Native America/First Nations tribes, dressing a carcass was a task performed by women...

I said “dressing and dragging”—my wife’s grandpa would field dress the deer and bring it back home. Her grandma knew how to dress the deer, which doesn’t require much upper body strength. But she wasn’t the one who was dragging it back to the truck and loading it on. To my knowledge Native American women weren’t doing that either.

>folks who insist that the equality of men and women is literal

As far as I can tell, this opinion, held without qualification, is beyond fringe - it is vanishingly rare, and frequently pointed to as a strawman in arguments about [in]equality (see the dead sarcastic comment in this very thread: "This is considered highly controversial in 2022"). I hate to say "non-existent", because somebody will find some example, but even then, usually when I see a supposed example of it, it is actually an example of something dramatically lesser, like "women can be as strong as men", or "women are just as [metaphorically] strong as men", not the ridiculous "women and men have no inherent differences, literally", which can only exist as a form of provocation, not an earnest opinion. It seems like a distraction to insinuate otherwise, designed to create an easily mocked image to be projected onto people who don't actually match the description.

https://twitter.com/shereebekker/status/1504899936843935746

Just saw this tweet this morning. A professor arguing women's sports exist to protect men from having to compete with women.

You have either misunderstood or misrepresented this. My grok of what has been said here is quite different.

The tweet author has pointed out some quite legitimate examples of when women have been excluded for reasons that can't be justified by "different strength capabilities":

- Skeet shooting - Womens professional football being banned - Figure skating

I don't agree with her broader points, but I don't think this is an example of what this particular thread is about.

the literal physical equality things was a sad side effect of the gender/sexuality wars of the mid-to-late 2010s. IIUC it came about because of twisted logic tryng to say that "women and men are capable of doing all the same jobs" and following that to a logical conclusion, rather than questioning the premise.

for a while it was hard to even push back against this (for example, inside a large FAANG filled with employees who are terrified of the progressive wing) and there is even a fair amount of scientific literature (mostly opinion articles in nature) that seem to continue to propagate these ideas.

On the topic of grip strength, "Grip Strength: An Indispensable Biomarker For Older Adults":

> Several authors have recommended grip strength as a “useful indicator for overall health,”[16] a vital sign[4,5] and as a biomarker of health status.[3,138,139] The purpose of this literature review was to provide an up-to-date, thorough and balanced synopsis of evidence for using grip strength as a biomarker of current and future health status. Based on the review it appears that there is adequate evidence to support the use of grip strength as an explanatory or predictive biomarker of specific outcomes such as generalized strength and function, bone mineral density, fractures, and falls, nutritional status, disease status and comorbidity load, cognition, depression, and sleep, hospital-related variables, and mortality. Based on this evidence and the promotion by others,[140] the routine implementation of the measurement of grip strength can be recommended for older adults in the community and health-care settings.

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC6778477/

(There are notes on some limitations of the metric.)

when I went on estrogen I was surprised how much strength I lost, especially grip strength. I couldn't open jars that I'd been previously able to brute-force through. I hadn't been working out either before or during transition. I've heard muscles are "use it or lose it" on hormones - you can retain the increased strength from testosterone - somewhat - through training, but if you don't it's gone for good.

The age-old joke is that trans girls want pickles (spironolactone gives you salt cravings) but can't open the jars.

Also, even with regular weight training I've still lost about 20% of my pre-HRT strength.

Have you considered balancing out your estrogen with some testosterone? You could go on a low dose and get your strength back.

I should consider it. I have EDS, which disproportionally affects women for hormonal reasons. T might help me build muscle to compensate for my elastic connective tissue. but I remember feeling like I'd been poisoned when I had to go off hormones for a while and felt T come back. couldn't hurt to try though.

A blood test might be a good start. My suspicion is that if you're at or below the typical range for cisgender woman, you might have more room for adjustment before feeling poisoned.

I hope to never shake hands with that one 35 yr-old dude on the chart.

(on a first date?) "men are afraid to be rejected, women are afraid of being killed" or "it's like dating a bear" given the disproportion in strength

The age distribution is as interesting as the sex distribution. I wouldn't have guessed that the peak is around 30 years. At 60 years I have an even shot at out-squeezing an 18 year old. I would have bet on the 18 year old.

Between males and females most female muscles are about 90% as strong as males, except for wrist/hand strength which is about 60% as strong. It's hard to come up with an evolutionary advantage for this anomalous result.

I assume that the higher wrist/hand strength in males was necessary for handling the weapons during hunting.

Humans had been dependent on hunting during more than 1 million years, enough time for this characteristic to be improved by selection.

What evolutionary advantage would required that males did the hunting and fighting?

If you’re going to walk the “just so” path of evolutionary biology, you may as well walk the path to its end. Alternatively - and much more unsettling - hand strength could have had a direct selective advantage by making it easier to restrain females without their consent.

in more happiness way, more power mean that guy can take more food to home -- better husband or father.

Sure - but again, why would that advantage apply disproportionately to males?

Sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive.

> What evolutionary advantage would required that males did the hunting and fighting?

There's an obvious evolutionary disadvantage to hunt and fight while pregnant and/or nursing the young, so obvious this smells like a weak strawman.

I'm not arguing gender roles in this case - I'm proposing a justification for the sexual dimorphism in grip strength.

Nursing and pregnancy are not a gender role, they are biological capabilities unique to the female sex.

What tasks remain for the males to do benefits from grip strength (and being stronger in general), meaning the ones who got stronger survived and reproduced more.

I'm not saying that males having increased grip strength over previous males does not provide a selective advantage - I'm saying that males having increased grip strength _over females_ provides a selective advantage only if the difference between the sexes is the cause of the advantage.

To put it another way: if the advantage is because of tool/weapon use, why wouldn't females also be stronger than previous generations?

Assuming we're using the evolutionary biology approach here (which I'm not convinced is appropriate), we should be trying to explain not why humans have increased grip strength over time but why female grip strength has not similarly increased. I see two options:

1) Females with grip strength equal to males successfully reproduce at a lower rate than those with less.

2) Males with grip strength greater than the females of their own species successfully reproduce at a higher rate.

My "just so" comment is pointing out that in this case, the poster seemed to be projecting their own biases on human evolution, and making assumptions. Among those assumptions are "men usually do the hunting". I'm pointing out that if that were the case then there would be no reason that females would be weaker. In the case of reproduction via rape - which has without question been common throughout the history of mankind - males being stronger than females would have a very direct correlation with their success in passing down their genetic makeup. Many children have been born with strong fathers and weak mothers.

Having more strength is not always an evolutionary benefit, for men or women. If it were we would all have the hormone levels of a professional body builder. Having more upper body strength and being generally bigger costs calories and there is an evolutionary incentive to be physically smaller (to a point). Also building strength is an adaption to stressors, by exercising the muscles. If it is the males who do the majority of the hunter/gathering then they will be getting more exercise and consequently growing stronger. It's not possible to consider male and female evolutionary pressures separately. If males have adaptive pressures to grow stronger and evolve stronger, then females would have some of the opposite pressures.

Nine months of pregnancy followed by feeding the child (for months). Followed by having another child. In a context without medical care or baby bottles or diapers etc. It is really not surprising at all that things are the way they are.

I'm gonna need a cite for that 90% figure. Here's a study that compared bicep muscles and the largest quadricep muscle. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8477683/

Women were only 52% as strong as the men in the bicep and were 66% as strong in the quad. Women are _closer_ to men in the lower body, but men are still way stronger in both upper and lower on average.

A quick websearch uncovered the following, which might be of interest to those who want to know more about such data.

* Wang, Ying-Chih, Richard W. Bohannon, Xiaoyan Li, Bhagwant Sindhu, and Jay Kapellusch. “Hand-Grip Strength: Normative Reference Values and Equations for Individuals 18 to 85 Years of Age Residing in the United States.” Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy 48, no. 9 (September 2018): 685–93. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2018.7851.

Curious if the mid 30s distribution is from carrying infants around

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