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Comment by mmcdermott | Hacker News Reader

This article has a bad "pop science" feel to it. The correlation between grip and survival is probably solid enough, but it's hard to avoid the nagging feeling that people who have a strong grip are probably stronger and healthier overall as well.

The article goes on to recommend grip strengthener and I strongly suspect that better skeletal-muscular health in general should be the goal.

"Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general." --Mark Rippetoe.

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Yes. The correct take from this article is to change your lifestyle until you have strong hands if you want to live longer, but don't focus on getting strong hands specifically.

Yup. The right lifestyle leads to all sorts of beneficial side effects. I moved off grid about two years ago, and since, have become leaner and fitter than I have been in my entire life, with zero deliberate exercise. I hadn’t considered my hand strength until just now, but it just occurred to me that I’ve had no carpal tunnel symptoms in at least a year, although I still do plenty of typing and fine manual work. I also do a lot of heavy carrying and lifting and digging and all the rest. Prior to this I was a desk jockey, living off processed crap - now, barely a day passes when I don’t find myself doing some kind of manual labour out of necessity. Honestly, it feels great to live like a human is built to live. We just aren’t made for the sedentary lifestyles we typically live in developed countries, and it’s killing us - and advice like “use a hand exerciser” is the absolute epitome of treating the symptom, not the disease.

I generally love Axios, but this does feel more life hacking newsletter than hard news.

But the article does talk about risk of falling too which. seems like a fair logical causation jump that stronger hands = less risk of falling injury. They don't cite that though....

I think they should have used the line from the harvard link they put "these findings highlight the importance of doing regular exercise to maintain strong muscles as you age. "

Yes, real science takes a random group and has some strengthen hands and others do something else and see who has better outcome.

Which is fairly impractical over those timespans and so we mostly have to make do with observational studies and RCTs looking at proxies for the actual outcome of interest and mechanistic reasoning.

I definitely agree with this. When I was a beginner weightlifter, I'd actually grip the bar too tightly. This led to bicep activation when doing bench press, so I had to learn to lighten my grip and focus on activation of my deltoids, pectoral muscle, lats, etc. Even some tricep activation helped too

Yes I believe you are correct here. So often in medicine we want to just treat the symptoms. It's amazing how hard it is to find doctors who don't end up thinking like this. Personally I haven't been able to figure it out. They're definitely not stupid, but why do so many research papers look at the body in such a way that leads to such prescriptions? Is it because researchers lack the clinical experience to overcome this mistake?

Definitely the advice of increasing one's grip strength is poor on multiple levels. Even if increasing your grip strength leads to a higher-quality life, simply training only the forearm without addressing the entire arm and shoulder and neck all together is not going to be good for ones overall muscular (and nerves, etc) balance.

No way man, the entire medical industry is well aware about the differences between correlation and causation.

Trials to validate medicine heavily involve tactics to check for causation.

What you're reading here is just some journal that identified a correlation and the author of the popular science article can't tell the difference between that and causation.

I think it is probably fair to say that the industry is aware, but most of the practitioners that make up the industry can still be susceptible to the mistake. This is largely true of science, as well.

Note that I don't mean that many practitioners are ignorant of the idea. I mean that they could know it, and still fall to it. "Value based judgements" are still a large thing, after all.

Practitioners just regurgitate the results of said science. They use standard treatments and well-documented techniques without the need to understand the science around the development of those techniques.

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