Uriah

Armwrestling is not a big money sport, so it can hard to find good rankings or birth dates for the best guys. I managed to track down some names using this outdated list as a guide. I found birth years for 16 guys and the average age was 42 https://www.walunderground.com/rankings/html/rankings/?date=2017-02-01&arm=left&gender=men&level=pro&class=top_10 …

At the time those rankings were compiled there were as many competitors in their 20's (2) as in their 50's. Only 2 of the 16 were under 35 with 5/16 being between 42-45. This suggests that it is ideal to be young as possible while staying on the right side of the millenial line

Say you’re a millennial patriot and don’t like hearing my taunts about how girly you are. You might point to today’s ultra-muscular and athletic millennial athletes. And you’d be right, even more right than you knew. But grip strength is only marginally related to overall muscle.

There is zero relationship between hormones and grip, which means that many muscular men have surprisingly weak hands. A 1979 study measured the grip strength of NFL football players and found them to be only about 2/3rds sds stronger than average https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140137908924693 …

I’ve always been fascinated by that guy. He was so bizarrely different from everyone else, like a guy who was raised in the Depression and traveled forward in time to the 1980’s. He was athletic, but in a way people had trouble defining.

Richard Carson recently wrote an enormous paper arguing that grip strength is primarily independent of muscle mass in other parts of the body and that individual variations in grip strength are for the most part due to variations in neural health: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_36d985e/UQ36d985e_OA.pdf?dsi_version=255cf2f829ab01c05aff584f92d3e379&Expires=1601770436&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ&Signature=PjbHudBI3P1PmtonH3RK7u3Yn8Vd98vpu-vX-lcpYgwwoDKTxnrBY6GZzPb9GPWAW~42dgvESdvHkDn1zk-5JwVKLdumT~WIPXwfw5apKJmp4UPVfldIFq3XPGQAwPrrpAklrAPOAVVJjbt6-UlJ7nghmOAhzMPNW90fDGbl10L34jVRpzwhCbNlMgdxO1EozPc2rnbdb8Pi0Sm5Dn5ycEk7PT3gPksLrpKUzkA0SkKqmfc04XiEPk58gZrHwq4UvpU2Y7istk6c9d1DqI1gNsONx57odvLOxafWIXTQDOEJISIHxrI5kI-2r~PoWxxJ44W7eLIsaQMPhtc5wuKQNw__ …

To give an idea of what “neural” means here, grip strength is positively correlated with a large number of fmri brain measures such as primary motor cortex volume. Grip declines with age in a way independent of muscle mass and is a better predictor of mortality than sarcopenia.

When fingers flex as a unit they generate half as much force as when moved individually, so "in these circumstances the level of neural drive received by the actuating muscles is also diminished, suggesting that the limiting factor is neural rather than biomechanical."

The central argument I’m making here is the apparent physical decline in grip strength suffered by millennials is actually a mental defect in disguise, a failure of their nerdy brains to effectively coordinate muscle at every level of the body.

One of the ways people born after the onset of the autism epidemic resemble autistics is in the dulled emotional tone of their voices: they have a hard time sounding genuinely threatening when they need to be or charming or…any emotion really.

There are generational changes that everyone notices but never really talks about. When you listen to tape recordings of even average Joes from the 50’s or 60’s it’s remarkable how crisp and clear their diction is, whereas millennials slur together syllables like drunks.

When people notice this they tend to say things like “we need to start emphasizing enunciation just like the old schools did”, but again I think this is actually a cohort effect and you can tell by looking at elite talkers: sports broadcasters, talk show hosts, etc.