| Every "thing" you do to improve health has a marginal benefit attached to it. There is so much crap out there which claims to have a huge impact, but at the end of the day, we have to compare the [cost and time] against marginal benefit. The following provide the greatest marginal benefit: 1. Body-weight: this is going to have downstream impacts on cardiovascular function and sleep, so I'll go ahead and claim this is probably the most impactful variable. Simply being a healthy body-weight has an ENORMOUS positive impact on overall health. Likelihood of cancer and other non-communicable disease are tightly linked with bodyweight. 2. Diet: tied to bodyweight, sleep, and cardiovascular function as well. Diet is not complicated, at least in terms of gaining a large marginal benefit. Sure, you can optimize, but rigid fad diets are often a sham and will rob you of liberty, time, and money. Just eat a recommended diet of mostly whole foods. Keto, carnivore, low carb, low fat... it's all just product differentiation. Maybe one is better than another, but what is the marginal benefit of giving up the liberty of what you put in your stomach? 3. Sleep: Practice good sleep hygiene. Get as much as you need. Don't lay in bed unless you're actually sleeping. Get out of bed immediately upon waking up. 4. Exercise: for longevity, focus on moderate cardiovascular function. Overdoing it can be as bad as none. Strength training is important as well. Grip strength is a leading indicator of whether or not an elderly person will recover from a fall. |
I suspect that this is one of those things where the correlation falls apart as soon as you start training explicitly for it.
Many clinicians use grip strength can be used as a proxy for overall strength[1], but the actual correlation is often moderate, at best[2]. Grip strength is just much easier to measure than, say, someone's max deadlift, so some inaccuracy is allowed.
But _only_ training grip shouldn't have much effect on hip fractures. You can use one of those squeeze handles all day, every day, and not improve your overall survivability. Likewise, squats would have little effect on your grip strength, but should correlate highly to surviving a fall.
All of which is to say, ignore all the stories about how grip strength, or the sitting-rising test[3], or any other "trick" that is supposed to correlate on long life, and focus instead on being overall strong and limber. For most people, yoga is probably sufficient. Adding in some basic weight lifting would be excellent, too, for most people.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6778477/
[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29935982/
[3]: https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/take-th...