Every 5 kg lower grip strength is associated with a 16 to 20% higher risk of dying, consistently across studies involving hundreds of thousands of people. It is a strong association, but not a proven causal relationship. Muscle power (explosiveness) turns out to be an even stronger predictor than grip strength alone.
Grip strength is a surprisingly good predictor of how long a person lives. In large studies involving hundreds of thousands of participants, including the UK Biobank (500,000 people) and the global PURE study (140,000 people in 17 countries), every 5 kg lower grip strength was associated with a 16 to 20% higher risk of dying during the study period. That is a strong and consistent relationship. Note: these are associations, not proof that higher grip strength itself extends life.
The association holds for multiple causes of death. For cardiovascular disease, the hazard ratio is 1.17 to 1.22 per 5 kg lower grip strength. In the PURE study, grip strength even proved a better predictor of cardiovascular mortality than blood pressure. The strongest association has been found for death from lung diseases such as COPD: hazard ratio 1.24 to 1.31 per 5 kg lower grip strength. For cancer mortality the association is weaker (hazard ratio 1.10 to 1.17), and for prostate cancer no association was found at all.
There is an important nuance. A 2025 study (CLINIMEX) shows that muscle power, meaning how explosively your muscles work (force multiplied by speed), is a far stronger predictor of mortality than grip strength alone. In that study, people in the lowest muscle power group had up to nearly 7 times the risk of dying compared with the strongest group. Grip strength on its own was no longer statistically significant in that analysis once muscle power was also taken into account. Grip strength is therefore a useful measure, but the complete picture of muscle function carries more weight.
Grip strength also says something about your overall health beyond mortality. It is associated with bone density, bone fractures, cognitive functioning, depression, sleep problems, diabetes, malnutrition and quality of life. Several research groups therefore propose treating grip strength as a kind of 'fifth vital sign', alongside familiar measurements such as blood pressure and heart rate.
Grip strength changes with age. Men reach their peak of on average around 51 kg between the ages of 29 and 39, women their peak of around 31 kg between the ages of 26 and 42. After that, strength gradually declines. At age 80, roughly 1 in 4 people has a clinically weak grip strength: the cut-off values for this have been set at less than 26 kg for men and less than 16 kg for women.
The claims are based on several large prospective cohort studies (UK Biobank n~500,000, PURE n~140,000, CLINIMEX 2025) and observational research on normative values. No randomised controlled trials are available that prove causality. All associations are observational.