If the decline in Western grip strength is due to a decline in daily hand exercise, you wouldn’t expect to see unusual age differences in top level armwrestling because everyone at that level is training hard.
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One of Bird’s secrets was that he had the most powerful hands in the NBA: he could bitchslap stray balls into his teammate’s hands at light speed.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcXv0JtzNQA&t=237s …
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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.
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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__ …
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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.
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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."
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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.
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I am the only person in a million years who would have this thought, but I think the underlying factor is the same one driving the autism epidemic. Autistics are about 1 sd weaker than normal and interestingly their weakness correlates with their autism.pic.twitter.com/oDJ41VAWS1
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It used to be that just about every famous broadcaster had this rapidfire auctioneer’s patter: Chick Hearn, Vin Scully, Bob Uecker, Hot Rod Hundley or the best known example Johnny Carson. They could speak at incredible speed while never sacrificing emotional inflection.
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End of conversation
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