What about specialized training for grip strength? I believe that if somebody's large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they can deadlift 600 pounds, I don't really care if… the question is can you open the pickle jar? Sure. This is a critical… I just get my wife to do it.

So grip strength is extremely important and you being a neuroscientist, you know the disproportional representation in the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the forearm and everything. And there is another reason why grip is so important. So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you're going to feel the overflow of tension, irradiation going to other muscles.

So pretty much by gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do. And so a very simple example for your listeners, take some pedestrian exercise like curls. And do as many strict reps as you possibly can the way you normally do them. And then start just crushing that bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling.

You will immediately be able to knock out several more reps. So that makes you so much stronger. And again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important. For whatever reason, obviously it correlates with longevity, we don't know why. We have no idea. Correlation is not causation, so we don't know whether getting a stronger grip is going to make us live longer.

But statistically, it's worth a try, right? So one can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly. So either way is great. So the first examples would be climbing the rope or doing pull-ups and weighted pull-ups on a rope.

That's a great way to train, obviously. So what you do, the way you program it is, let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple of days a week you do pull-ups. That's a good way to go about it. And you don't need to do anything else.

And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch. When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading is very, very powerful. And that develops grip very, very well. And again, right now we're talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing grip.

You know, how you squeeze something. There are other types of grip that they differentiated, but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non-athletes the most. And I will also warn you that hanging on the bar and doing farmer's carries, beneficial as they are for many reasons, it's not going to do that much for an athlete.

Interesting. I started incorporating farmer's carries thinking it was going to improve my grip, but... They're healthy. If you look at McGill's work, he will tell you that carrying two heavy objects, it's going to really pound your spine. But on the other hand, asymmetrical carry, it appears to be very beneficial.

Then there's another interesting example. Now right now, I'm not talking about grip training at all. Not even talking about strength training, but I'm talking about sort of a former run. Dr. Mike Prevost, who used to work with the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy, he developed this very interesting protocol and a test called the kettlebell mile, where you take a kettlebell that's approximately 30% of your body weight.

And he has good reasons why it has to be that way. And you pretty much run with this kettlebell, and you switch hands as often as you want. And it's a fantastic way to improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles, and to improve your ability to rock, but it doesn't beat you up as much rocking does.

Rocking carrying heavy weight, it's rough on the body. So it's a fantastic way to train your endurance, an additional way. - How heavy is the kettlebell? - 30%. Because he says when you start going heavier, it's going to affect your gait. So you're not really, you have to kick your hip over to the side.

It becomes something else. - That's a heavy kettlebell. - 30% of your body weight? - Yeah. I mean, I'm 210 pounds. It's not trivial. So it's probably something like 62 pounds or something like that, 70 pound kettlebell. No, no, no. It's not trivial by any means. But it's also not something you jump into immediately.

And also what's very cool is because you get to switch hands very often, you are not destroying your QL and other stabilizers that are contracting isometrically. And so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training. If your muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes, and the contraction cycles are really short, you're able to avoid glycolysis, you're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down.

So to the listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell, switch hands often, then eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually. - Held like a suitcase? - Yes. Only, only like a suitcase. - Okay. So there's a podcast led by a guy named Kim Haynes.

He's a bow hunter. He's one of the people that really brought extreme fitness and ultras to the sport of bow hunting and is legendary there. And for his podcast, he has, you carry the 72-pound rock up, it's about a thousand feet of elevation in the Oregon wilderness. And I've done it, it's hard because of the shape of the thing.

And so you're moving it from shoulder to, you know, to football carry, to, you know, infant carry. And you're not talking about that. You're talking about suitcase on the right. Are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing it? - No, no, no. This is not developing a grip whatsoever.

- And you're running at 10, 20 minutes, 30 minutes? - Well, his goal, he says run for a mile. That's the goal. And he has some numbers. I can give you a link. You can look it up. - Great. - Back to Mike Prevost. And direct grip strength training is great as well.

So for example, the best products for that would be the Captains of Crush grippers from Iron Mind. Iron Mind. Iron Mind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in modern era. And their grippers are the golden standard. Some years ago, my colleague, as strong as Brad Jones and I, we decided to get serious about it and see what that feels like.

And we spent many, many months. We were both able to build up to closing the number three gripper from a parallel set. So that means that gripper takes 280 pounds to close. And when you're using very small muscle groups, it's extremely, extremely hard. And the observations that we both made and other colleagues and people have made that once you're able to do that, everything becomes so much easier.

However, the training itself is extremely hard. Because people are thinking that when you're training the grip, it's just some kind of isolated thing. You can drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little pink thing that you picked up at the department store. No. When you train with a heavy-duty gripper like the one from Iron Mind, it's a full-body effort.

And you need to use pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to exert yourself. So for example, if you have ever seen the Sanchin stance in karate, which is a stance where the knees are kind of pulled inward and shoulders are pressed down, there's a lot of tension, everything is very, very seriously engaged.

The toes are gripping the ground. So you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes. You're contracting your glutes. You're bracing very, very hard. You're compressing your viscera. Your lat is firing and you're sending all this effort. The only thing they're not working is you try to keep your traps and face out of this.

When you're directing this effort into your grip, you get just as tired from doing that work as from doing like heavy squats or something. That's remarkable. But if you like that, it's a fantastic thing to do. The motor neuron recruitment that you are describing is phenomenal. I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and longevity.

Just a little bit of neuroscience. You may be familiar with this, so forgive me if you are, but for the listeners as well. The motor neurons that control movement of the torso lie closer to the midline on both sides of the spinal cord. The motor neurons that are responsible for more distal muscles, that is further from the midline, sit outside of those.

And so as you get out to the movement of the digits, you know, the fingers and toes, those are the most distal from the midline. The rate and pattern of degeneration of motor neurons as a function of aging, even if there's no ALS or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or anything, is always outside in.

We don't know why this is. It may relate to the presence of the enzyme SOD, superoxide dimutase. But it does seem that people that train their peripheral strength, they can offset some of that outside to in, or distal to more close to the midline degeneration. So I believe, and this is just a belief, that it's not just correlative, that when one trains their periphery, they actually can offset some of the degeneration.

It's also the way it's mapped in the brain, which is kind of a discussion outside of here. We'd need to get some diagrams up for people to really conceptualize that. But it's also the case if you look at older people, 70, 80, 90, their calves are generally atrophied even if their torso is still very thick and muscular, if they did training.

So I feel like, obviously, training the core and the torso is so key, but training the peripheral muscles, at least from the perspective of longevity, it makes sense why that would be important. Well, there are so many reasons, obviously, to do that. So I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers, and there are some other devices, obviously, unlimited number of devices and exercises, or as a part of another exercise, like climbing the rope, definitely strongly encouraging your listeners to do that.

I'm going to try this running with the kettlebell on one side. I'll go out for a mile with it on the right, and then... Oh, no, no. You switch all the time. Switch as much as you want. Okay. Because if you try to do it on one side, you are going to pound your stabilizers and just pound them.

You're not going to recover forever. And this way, this is one of the secrets to developing isometric endurance, is very rapid switching, short contractions, and brief rests, and over, and over, and over. That way, the muscle doesn't go into ischemia and keeps getting oxygen pretty much.