Improve Your Grip Strength
These tips can help you handle a variety of everyday chores and activities
You try to open a pill bottle and can’t get the top off, or maybe it’s getting harder to hold on to your dog’s leash. It’s common to have troubles with your grip as you age, but some factors—including arthritis and underlying health issues—may exacerbate this shift.
“Grip strength can be a marker of so many things, all the way from how a patient is doing nutritionally, to cardiovascular health and even their expected longevity,” says June McKoy, MD, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. It is also useful in helping to assess overall strength. “Evaluating it is a quick, inexpensive, accurate way of understanding the risk for frailty,” says Stacey Schepens Niemiec, PhD, an associate professor of research in the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy in Los Angeles. Being frail or weak makes it harder to weather health challenges and increases your risk of chronic conditions and dying early.
The Big Picture
If you notice hand weakness, your doctor can determine what’s causing the problem. “Often, poor grip strength is telling us something’s not right on the inside,” McKoy says. “If we strengthen and fix the underlying problems, that will help.
Hands-On Training
Activities such as squeezing a tennis ball (or therapy putty, a product similar to play dough) can help improve grip and finger strength, especially in people with arthritis. They can also be part of a plan that addresses your overall health. A small 2018 study published in the journal Arthritis Research & Therapy found that people with osteoarthritis who did hand-strengthening exercises and were given information about improving function saw a small increase in grip strength over an eight-week period. Those in the group that weren’t assigned to do the exercises and got routine care experienced a drop in grip strength. “Osteoarthritis creates stiffness in the joints, so you want to do things that make the fingers more flexible, or even heat therapy to relax the muscles,” McKoy says.
2 Key Exercises for Grip Strength
Check in with a doctor if you are having trouble with your grip, so you can get an overall evaluation of your health. But in the meantime, the two exercises below may help improve grip strength and function. (You’ll need some therapy putty, which you can find at a drug or discount store, such as CVS or Walmart.) Do each exercise daily, in order, first with one hand and then with the other.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article also appeared in the May 2022 issue of Consumer Reports On Health.
