Jay Shetty

If you lack physical strength, a number of things start to happen.

Number one,

This is one of the reasons why we look at, for the record, like leg strength and grip strength as two of the most ubiquitous predictors.

And you'll see this all across the literature as statistically significant predictors of mortality.

And in fact, some of the papers that directly compare strength, again, mostly leg strength, leg extension, and grip strength, to VO2 max, oftentimes, but not always, but oftentimes will show strength is a stronger predictor of mortality or all-cause mortality than VO2 max.

So we've talked ad nauseum the last bunch of years about important VO2 maxes, and it's absolutely true.

But strength is right there as an equivalent predictor of how long you're going to live.

So the question is why?

Well, you have correlation and causation here.

Lots of evidence on both sides.

If you are weak, say in your hands, it is a proxy for overall strength.

So that in and of itself is true.

It's also direct intervention.

If you can't carry a bag confidently and you can't put a backpack in an overhead compartment, you're not going to take the bus.

You're much less likely to go on an airplane.

This now leads to secondary problems with social isolation.

You're not confident.

One of the single biggest predictors of one of the single biggest issues we have with unsuccessful aging is that people, when people start to feel like they become a burden on society, they start to withdraw rapidly.

No one wants to be the person in line holding everybody up.

No one wants, like, you just, you know all those examples there, right?