Dr. Andy Galpin

Last thing I want to add here is actually something we'll talk about further.

a lot more in the future, and that is grip strength.

It is incredibly important and a great insight into your overall health for both athletes and non-athletes.

Easy to test, there's a number of ways that you can grab hand grip dynamometers.

They are cheap and available almost anywhere.

For men, just again, a rough number here.

I like to see individuals over 45 kilograms and then for women over 28 kilograms or so.

Another thing to keep in mind here is asymmetry really matters.

Now this is the first test I've given you where you can isolate your left side from your right side.

Really important to test your grip strength in both.

Recent papers have come out suggesting that an asymmetry of more than 10%, specifically, increases your risks of sarcopenia and heightened denervation of muscle groups by 2.67 fold.

And so we'll talk about that more in detail later.

But really, really important, you want to understand whether or not you have major asymmetries in strength between both your sides.

Again, some asymmetry is probably okay, maybe even advantageous for some sporting applications, but asymmetries outside of that are potentially concerning.

If you're unfamiliar with that term, sarcopenia describes the excessive loss of muscle mass with age.

We know there's going to be some sort of natural decline in the amount of muscle mass you have.

In fact, on rough average,

Men will lose about 40% of their muscle mass from the ages of 25 to 80.

So we know it's going to happen.

We've talked about how strength training and adequate nutrition can reduce that loss of muscle, but some of it's going to happen.