Uriah

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.