Carry the Suitcase

Hey {{first name | reader}},

It's Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #32.

I have spent the last stretch of this trip working my way from the south of Brazil to the north by plane, bus, and car, hauling my suitcase and, with some regularity, my niece's. Somewhere in a terminal with a broken escalator, carrying both bags up two flights, I thought about a college classmate of mine who discovered competitive grip strength in middle age and turned out to be very good at it. He had never been much of an athlete. Now he enters competitions, wins them, and carries a deck of cards around so he can tear it in half on request. Impressive the first time.

The party trick isn't the point. The suitcase is.

Grip strength is the force you can produce holding onto something. It shows up when you lift a suitcase by the handle, hang from a bar, open a jar, or hold onto a loaded barbell that would very much like to leave your hands. It is also the quietest limiting factor in almost every lift you care about. A strong grip is the difference between a deadlift PR and a fail. It's what buys you the extra pull-up.

I didn't pay much attention to mine until I noticed how much weaker my left grip is than my right. On heavy deadlifts, a double overhand grip goes first on the left. On dead hangs and pull-ups, the left hand quits while the right is still arguing. It's part of a general left-side weakness I now account for in every session by adding a set or a few pounds on that side.

There are three kinds of grip, and most of us only train one. Crush grip is how hard you can squeeze — my classmate and his decks of cards. Support grip is how long you can hold on, which is the suitcase, the grocery bags, the bar. Pinch grip is thumb against fingers, which matters less for lifting and more for the small motor tasks that get harder with age.¹ Lifting builds support grip and largely ignores the other two.

Here's where the research gets interesting, and also where it gets overstated. The PURE study followed more than 140,000 adults across 17 countries and found that grip strength predicted death and cardiovascular events better than systolic blood pressure. That finding has been replicated enough that clinicians now describe grip as a functional vital sign. It's cheap, it takes four seconds, and it correlates with almost everything — muscle mass, nerve function, bone density, recovery from illness.

But correlation is doing the heavy lifting there. There is no good evidence that squeezing a gripper for ten minutes a day extends your life. Grip strength is a proxy for total-body strength, not a lever you pull on its own. What the dynamometer is really measuring is whether you have been using your body. The number is a symptom, not a cause.

Which is oddly freeing, because it means the answer isn't a gadget. It's the same answer as always: lift things, carry things, hang from things, and stop letting equipment do the holding for you. Farmer's carries and suitcase carries build grip while also building your legs, your core, and your posture. Dead hangs cost nothing and take thirty seconds. Plate pinches handle the pinch grip nobody trains. Reverse curls build the forearm. And every so often, deadlift without the straps and find out what your hands actually do.

My sister and I are in the middle of a block that has farmer's carries in it, which she reports she does not enjoy and has been doing anyway. That's most of the method right there.

Your body will thank you the day the wheels on your suitcase break and the escalator is out.

Question: Can't I just squeeze a tennis ball?

Answer: You can, and it will help — a tennis ball, racquetball, or squash ball is a reasonable way to work crush grip, and it costs nothing.

But it trains the smallest version of the problem. A ball in your palm doesn't ask anything of your forearm under load, and it doesn't teach your hands to hold on when your whole body is working. If you're already lifting, put grip work where you're already standing: farmer's carries on leg day, dead hangs on pull day, a set of reverse curls after your curls.

Squeeze the ball in the taxi. Do the carries at the gym.

Myth: As long as I'm lifting regularly, my grip will take care of itself.

Reality: Partly true, which is what makes it a problem. Pull-ups and deadlifts do build grip, but they build one kind of it — support grip, held for a few seconds under a bar, and only up to whatever your current lifts demand. Crush and pinch go untrained entirely. Meanwhile, the lifting straps you bought so you could pull heavier are quietly outsourcing the job, and your grip stops being the thing that adapts and becomes the thing that gets protected. The first time you notice is the day your hands fail before your back does.

Grip isn't a byproduct of training. It's a training target that happens to be attached to everything else.

Traveling through Brazil with a ten-year-old (yes, I have another niece) means my current diet looks like the Lego cartoon version of itself. So this week's Fuel Box is not a recipe. It's what's in the bag.

The carry-on kit:

And when there's a real meal available, it's churrasco: order the picanha, take the grilled vegetables, walk past the buffet.²

Harvard Health, "Forearm workouts: Strengthening grip for everyday function."

A short, free, plainly written piece that does two things I appreciate. It lists what weak grip is actually associated with — low total strength, reduced bone density, falls and fractures, sleep and memory problems, death from any cause — and then, in the same breath, says there's no evidence that building forearm strength by itself improves longevity.

That's the honest version of the story, and almost nobody tells it that way. The exercises at the end are gentle enough for anyone rehabbing a hand or starting from nothing, which makes it a good thing to forward to a parent.

The farmer's carry. If it isn't already in your rotation, this is the week.

Pick up two dumbbells heavy enough that you're not certain you'll finish. Stand tall, shoulders down and back, ribs stacked over hips. Walk about 30 meters without letting the weights swing or your shoulders creep toward your ears. Set them down. Rest a minute. Three rounds.

If you want the harder version, do it one-handed and try not to lean. That one is called a suitcase carry, for reasons that are about to become obvious.

Stay strong, {{first name | reader}}

P.S. I still can't tear a deck of cards. I can carry both suitcases up a broken escalator. Only one of those has ever been useful.