APEX PWR | Lessons in Longevity
Our piece on bone density this week ends on a point worth repeating. A broken hip at seventy-four has two inputs: how strong the bone is, and how hard the ground hits it. Bone density scanning speaks to the first one. Nothing on a bone report speaks to the second.
This article is about the second one, and it starts with the single most interesting number in longevity research, which is also the cheapest to collect.
The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology study, known as PURE, measured grip strength with a handheld dynamometer in 139,691 adults across 17 countries, spanning high, middle and low income settings, and followed them for about four years.
And the finding that got the attention: in this cohort, grip strength was a stronger predictor of cardiovascular and all-cause mortality than systolic blood pressure was.
Take a second with that. Blood pressure is checked at essentially every medical appointment any adult has ever attended. Grip strength is measured almost nowhere outside of research and a handful of facilities, and in a cohort of nearly 140,000 people it carried more predictive weight for mortality.
One of the most informative measurements in adult health takes about fifteen seconds and almost nobody has ever had it done.
Every time this research circulates, a wave of grip trainers follows it. That misunderstands what the finding is.
Grip strength does none of the work itself. It stands in for something larger, which is the total amount of muscle you carry and your nervous system's ability to recruit it under demand. Both of those decline with age, with illness, with inactivity and with undernutrition, and both of them are genuinely hard to measure. A dynamometer gives you a reasonable estimate of the whole system for the price of a handshake.
Squeeze a spring in front of the television every night and your grip number will improve. The quantity it was standing in for will not have moved at all. Whole body resistance training is what moves the underlying thing, and grip comes along for the ride.
Grip strength is an excellent screen and a poor plan. It tells you whether to look closer. It does not tell you where the problem is.
A force plate measures the force your body applies to the ground, sampled thousands of times every second. Stand on one, do a few simple movements, and the software separates out physical qualities that a single strength test blends into one figure.
Strength is how much force you can produce. Power is how much force you can produce quickly. They are different qualities with different training requirements, and in aging they come apart. Power declines earlier and faster than maximal strength does. Someone can still move a respectable weight slowly and have lost a great deal of their ability to produce force fast.
How quickly force climbs from zero. This is the quality that decides what happens in the quarter second after your foot catches an uneven paving slab. Maximal strength has almost no time to express itself in that window. Rate of force development is the whole story there.
Most people load one side more than the other, often without noticing, frequently as a holdover from an old injury that resolved years ago. A total number hides this completely because the strong side compensates. Two plates see each leg separately.
Quiet standing looks like doing nothing. On a force plate it is a continuous stream of small corrections, and the character of those corrections changes measurably as balance declines. This is a quality you can train, and one almost nobody measures until after a fall.
Put those four together and you have a description of the second input to fracture risk. Not how strong the bone is. Whether you go down, and how hard, and whether you get a hand out in time.
Here is the thing about every number in this article. On its own, a single reading tells you where you sit against a reference population, which is mildly interesting. Two readings separated by a few years tell you your trajectory, which is the part that actually matters.
A woman who measures at the fiftieth percentile for power at fifty-two and the fiftieth percentile again at fifty-eight is in a completely different situation from one who was at the eightieth and has arrived at the fiftieth, even though their current numbers are identical. The second person is losing something quickly. Nothing about a single measurement would tell you that.
This is the same argument we make about bone, and about body composition scanning. Baselines are worth more the earlier you take them, and they are worth very little if you never take a second one.
Grip strength tells you to look. Force plates tell you where. A plan built on either one alone is working from half the picture.
We built the Longevity Performance Analysis around exactly this gap. It is a one-to-one session with a Doctor of Physical Therapy or a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, run on our force plates, covering strength, power, balance and asymmetry.
You leave with two things. A set of numbers you can compare against in five years, and a plan built on what those specific numbers say rather than on what a generic program assumes about someone your age.
The testing is the same equipment we use with the athletes who train here, which is how the technology reached us. The questions it answers for a fifty-year-old are different questions, and in our view more consequential ones.
One-to-one on the force plates with a Doctor of Physical Therapy or a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. Strength, power, balance and asymmetry, measured and explained in person. Tigard, Oregon, off Highway 217, minutes from Beaverton.
Request an Assessment See Adult Training OptionsTell us what you are trying to find out and we will tell you which assessment answers it, including when the honest answer is that you do not need one yet.
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