Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
People who squeeze harder with their dominant hand tend to have denser, more complex bone structure in certain wrist bones, but this doesn't mean squeezing causes the change—it just goes together.
Correlational
In Parkinson’s, the brain’s dopamine system gets worse by about 4% each year, and that’s linked to worse movement — but your hand strength doesn’t get weaker at the same rate.
Descriptive
As Parkinson’s symptoms get worse, people’s hand strength tends to get weaker too — but not because their brain dopamine is dropping; something else is causing both.
People with early-stage Parkinson’s have about the same hand strength as healthy people, and their hand strength doesn’t tell us how much brain dopamine they’ve lost.
To see how hard a muscle works just to bend the elbow, you have to measure its max effort in each hand position — otherwise, you can’t tell if it’s working harder because of bending or turning the hand.
Your body switches which forearm muscle does most of the work when bending your elbow — your bicep stays steady, but your other muscle steps up when your palm is down.
When your palm is down, your bicep can’t pull as well because its tendon gets twisted — so your body makes your other forearm muscle work harder to bend your elbow.
Mechanistic
Your bicep doesn’t work harder or softer when you turn your hand palm-up, palm-down, or straight ahead — it just keeps doing the same amount of work.
When your palm faces down and you bend your elbow, your forearm muscle (brachioradialis) works harder than when your palm faces up or straight ahead — but your bicep works the same no matter how your hand is turned.
Using straps might help you lift faster and feel less tired during deadlifts, so coaches might want to consider using them to help people train harder.
Using straps helps your hands feel less tired after doing deadlifts, no matter if you lift the same weight as before or more because the straps help.
When people use straps but lift the same weight they normally lift without straps, they feel like it’s easier — but if they lift more weight because straps help, it feels just as hard as lifting without straps.
When people use lifting straps for deadlifts, they feel more confident and stronger — even if they’re lifting the same weight as without straps.
Using lifting straps while doing deadlifts lets you lift the weight faster, but only if you use the same weight you’d lift without straps — if you increase the weight because straps help, you actually lift slower.
No one has proven yet that using straps over months or years makes you stronger or bigger — it’s still just a guess.
Straps might let you move the bar farther or with more effort during deadlifts, but we don’t know if that actually helps you get stronger or fitter.
Even though people think straps help muscles work harder, they probably don’t — they just help you hold the bar better.
Using lifting straps might help you lift heavier weights and feel like you have a better grip, but we don’t fully know why yet.
Some people inherit strong hands from their parents, but it’s not consistent — and there’s no proof that the genes that help people live to 90 also make their hands stronger.
Using spouses as comparison groups helps scientists tell apart what’s due to genes vs. what’s due to shared lifestyle — like eating the same food or living in the same house.
Even though people with long-lived parents live longer, they don’t have stronger hands in middle age — so their longer life isn’t because they’re physically stronger earlier on.
How strong your hands are in your 50s and 60s mostly depends on how old you are, whether you’re male or female, how much fat you carry, and how much muscle you have in your arms and legs — not whether your parents lived to 90.
People whose parents lived to 90 or older don’t have stronger hand grips than their spouses in their 60s and 70s, even though they live longer — so strong hands aren’t the reason they live longer.
We don’t know if straps made people pull harder because they changed how they moved, or just because their hands held on better.