Interesting Facts, and the Evidence behind them!: Being stronger = reduced risk of premature death. Lift, and thou shalt live.

Image source: pasukaru76 - cc

There are lots of perks for being stronger, especially as a man.

You can perform better at sports, look better, impress others, move your own furnitures, feel more confident about yourself, and the list goes on.

But wait, there's more!

Rasmussen and coauthors published a research in the British Medical Journal 2012.
This study examined the data of one million (1, 142, 599 to be exact!) Swedish male adolescents from the Swedish military conscription register.

Conveniently for them, the Swedish law used to mandate military service for all men between age 18-47 years old till 2010. As part of this mandatory examinations were performed on all young Swedish males, regardless of whether they eventually went on to military service. These data were included in the Swedish military conscription register, and the authors went through them and used knee extension, handgrip, and elbow flexion strength tests as measure of strength.

Median follow up of the study subjects were approximately 24 years. Subjects who performed better with knee extension and hand grip tests were shown to have up to ~20% lower risk of premature death from any cause. In this study the majority of death were due to suicide (22.3%), followed by cardiovascular diseases (7.8%). The subjects with better knee extension and hand grip test results were shown to have up to ~20-30% reduced risk of death from suicide, and ~35% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Elbow flex test did not have significant association with mortality benefit.

This study concluded that higher muscular strength (as defined by better knee extension and/or hand grip test result) is associated with reduced risk of premature death by any cause and/or by cardiovascular disease, and therefore "low muscular strength in adolescents is an emerging risk factor for major causes of death in young adulthood".

This is a reasonable conclusion, bearing in mind that association does not indicate direct causal relationships, however does point to the presence of a link between the factors. Being stronger therefore appears to be associated with reduced risks of premature death. More specifically, it is really "being stronger with knee extension and handgrip" that is associated with these benefits. Being stronger at elbow flexion did not help with the mortality.

To take this study and apply to real life situation: get off the couch and hit the gym. In fact, if the goal is just to live longer, then forget about those bicep curls (aka elbow flexion). Instead, focus on the knee extension and hand grips - get down and start squatting, and also seated leg extension, and get some Captain of Crush handgrippers!

SQUAT! SQUAT!