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My mother never taught me how to be physically strong.

Sure, she showed me what it meant to be mentally strong, emotionally strong, and transcend strength into my work, education, and personal aspirations — but being physically strong was not something I learned from her.

I wish it had been though.

Sure, she brought me to soccer practice five days a week and watched my games on the weekends. She made me go to conditioning for swim team when I definitely did not want to. She supported my dreams of becoming a starting center on the basketball team only to have those dreams thwarted when I didn’t grow past 5’1”. And she did it all with a smile on her face while making extensive sacrifices in her own life, and for that I thank her endlessly.

But I wish she had been the one to show me how to work with weights. I wish she had been the one to put a dumbbell in my hand. I wish she had showed me how to wield a barbell, instead of thinking a man had to be the one to do it.

Knowing what I know now, if I had learned how to properly strength train when I was young, I would have been a monumentally better soccer player, a faster and healthier swimmer, and maybe (just maybe) I would have been a semi-decent basketball player.

This is to no fault of my mother’s though. It’s a fault of a generation stuck in a hole of stereotypical thinking and lack of education on the safety of allowing children to strength train. Unfortunately, these are misconceptions that still ring true for far too many.

So, if you’re wondering: “When is it safe for my daughter (or son) to start strength training?” The answer is now. The answer is yesterday. The answer is whenever you feel like they are mature enough to follow instructions and you know of a qualified and reputable coach available to teach them proper technique.

But I hear you.

Is it safe?
Won’t it stunt their growth?
What about growth plate injuries?

Not Only Is Lifting Safe, It Prepares Children for Life

Let me ask you, how many times is that child going to pick up a suitcase? Or lift the side of the couch to reach for a fallen toy? Or sit in a chair and stand up with something in their hands? Or, does that child plan on playing sports? What happens when they collide with another player on the soccer field or tackle someone in football? Are you asking these same questions when they show interest in those sports and activities?

Not only has weightlifting been shown to enhance performance, it prevents injuries in other sports and activities.¹

By teaching young children how to properly perform basic movement patterns (squat, push, pull, hinge, lunge), their biomechanics improve, their body awareness improves, and most importantly their confidence improves. I’ve seen this in multiple instances working in a facility with young athletes. They come to us unable to crawl or skip, and they’ll walk out of the building successfully front squatting with a barbell or deadlifting their body weight, and then some, off the ground.

Furthermore, an injury to a growth plate has never been reported as a result of weight training, and among competitive youth weightlifters, no injuries were reported after a full year of training.² Injuries that have been sustained from resistance training have been primarily attributed to misuse of the equipment, inappropriate technique, and lack of supervision.³ And even still, loading a barbell on their back won’t cause them to shrink or stop growing; youth resistance-training programs have little influence on growth in height and weight.⁴

It is also perfectly safe for a child to find their one repetition max — of course under supervision — as the force they sustain from something like this is no less than forces they would experience in other sports.⁵

Coaching a child through a strength-training program should prioritize technique over everything though — the strength gains are a happy byproduct. By following a strength-training program, children can improve strength by 30 to 50 percent in just 8 to 12 weeks.²

If you can teach children how to move properly, you will give them the confidence to tackle any other obstacle in their life — it’s a liberating experience to be proud of what your body can do.

Confidence in Action

In September 2018 at Smart Fit Girls’ inaugural Unite for Strength powerlifting meet, I had the utmost pleasure of watching a 6-year-old girl by the name of Ava Brewer (remember that name) strut out onto a powerlifting platform like it ain’t no thing. And it is a thing. It’s a very scary thing actually.

The confidence she exuded was like nothing I had ever seen before from a 6-year-old. But it wasn’t always like that. At the age of five, Ava began talking about wanting to diet and be skinny after a boy in her class called her “fat,” despite not even being on the growth chart for her height and weight. “Lifting has completely reversed that,” says Ava’s mom, Laura Hartley. “The biggest thing it has done for her is give her confidence.”

Ava was equally nervous and excited for her first meet. Weighing just 30 pounds and standing no more than 3’6”, she won the hearts of the crowd. “As soon as she did her first lift I knew she would be fine,” Hartley says. And she was. (She only missed one bench press attempt because the blocks under her feet — yep, she’s that small — weren’t in the right position.)

When deadlifts came around, her favorite lift, the 30-pound little ball of energy ripped a 45-pound barbell off the ground and smiled a smile I will never forget, while the crowd around her cheered.

Yet, in my own little circle of social media the concerns and skepticism rolled in.

This looks weird.
Is it safe for a child to be doing that?
Won’t she stunt her growth?
What about her growth plate?

I was discouraged that something so amazing to me was something that was so misconceived by others.

You Can Contribute to This Change

Ava is going to grow up with a training age (how many years you’ve been training) four times mine by the time she’s my age, if she keeps it up. She is going to pursue all the many things she loves to do including cheerleading, roller derby, and skating with so much confidence and gusto in what her body is able to do. And it all started with her mother, who brought home a barbell and a set of weights and showed her what it looked like to be physically strong.

Mothers, we need more of that. Sisters, daughters, friends, nieces, wives, we need you to show up for the girls in your life and show them how cool their body is. And if you don’t know where to turn, or are still a little skeptical, I urge you to look at girls like Happy Luma, Ava Brewer, and Addy Lifts, seek out organizations like Smart Fit Girls that encourage and support girls to pick up weights, and see how strength training has transformed their lives.

When you are able to teach a young child how to move properly you erase self-doubt from their thinking and “can’t” from their vocabulary. You give them the confidence to go after whatever they want in this world.

And I can’t wait to watch how little girls like Ava Brewer continue to change the world and see where they’ll be in five, ten, fifteen years from now because I have a feeling it’ll be somewhere pretty amazing.

References

1. Faigenbaum, A.D., Myer, G.D. Resistance training among young athletes: safety, efficacy and injury prevention effects. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2009. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40039109_Resistance_training_among_young_athletes_Safety_efficacy_and_injury_prevention_effects
2. Byrd, R. et al. Young Weightlifter’ Performance Across Time. http://www.treinamentoesportivo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Young-Weightlifters-Performance-Across-Time.pdf
3. Dahab, K., McCambridge, T. Strength training in children and adolescents. Sports Health. 2009. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445252/
4. Malina, R.M. Weight training in youth-growth, maturation, and safety: an evidence-based review. 2006. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17119361
5. Faigenbaum A.D., et al. Maximal testing in healthy children. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2003. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.491.8731&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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When Eric Ripert, the chef mastermind behind three-Michelin-star seafood restaurant Le Bernardin (and close friend of Anthony Bourdain), tells you how to cook something, it would be best to listen to him. His latest recommendation is probably not one you’re expecting, though. It doesn’t involve any fancy, expensive machinery that you’d only find in a professional kitchen. In fact, all you need is a toaster oven.

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When you head to a restaurant this time of year, you’re probably in search of a nice meal, a pleasant evening, and maybe a festive cocktail or two. You’re probably not heading out in search of a cold to catch. But it’s the season of germs everywhere, and ABC News set out to find where those germs lurk in restaurants around the country — and it may make you rethink using the salt and pepper shaker.

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Around the holiday season, people who like to siphon that fun, carefree feeling from the spate of year-end celebrations go into overdrive. People rail against Starbucks holiday cups and over-the-top Christmas light displays. The latest controversy – care of the CDC — concerns one of America’s favorite pastimes: eating raw cookie dough. But unfortunately, this one seems pretty valid.

Almost every year around the Christmas season, the CDC re-ups its warning against consuming raw cookie dough in any form. This year is no different, and if you’re feeling a bit of holiday mischievousness brewing, make way for the much more familiar feeling of holiday downer as you take a read-through.

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There’s hardly a roast more alluring, majestic, and intimidating than beef Wellington. A fillet of beef gets wrapped in puff pastry with the hope that both the beef and pastry will bake up to a gorgeous, golden brown on the outside and tender, pink perfection on the inside. And Gordon Ramsay’s version is as infamous as it is beloved.

You might already know Ramsay as the hot-tempered chef at the helm of shows like Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares, and MasterChef. He’s a stickler for perfection — so when it came to making one of his dishes for the first time, beef Wellington stood out as the standard-bearer.

Now, I’ve made beef Wellington a handful of times, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to try Ramsay’s version. I wanted to see if the final product lived up to its pristine reputation, and if it was worth both the hefty price tag and the days-long prep.

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If you serve up a tray of sliders at your holiday party (or truly, any get-together), it’s a pretty sure bet they’ll be devoured almost instantly. This season, we’re upping the ante by skipping the classic beef patties and opting for an appetizer that’s best described as French onion soup meets slider. They’re piled high with sweet and savory caramelized onions that melt in your mouth, tender slices of roast beef, and a blanket of gooey melted Gruyère, all sandwiched together on pillowy sweet Hawaiian rolls.

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Pork loin isn’t a cut of meat that most of us cook as often as we should. It’s cheaper per pound than pork tenderloin or pork chops, easily serves a crowd, and can be tender and juicy when cooked right. The problems that plague pork loin roast are often the results of these common mistakes. Here are five roadblocks to perfect pork roast and how to avoid them.

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What can’t you do at IKEA? You can furnish a whole house in one trip. If you don’t find something you like, you can hack any number of IKEA offerings. You can get an entire meal or stock up on specialty groceries. Hey, I even know moms who spend rainy days at the superstore, because it keeps their kids entertained for hours at a time.

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The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the variables don’t affect each other. Others will be useful, where the correlations indicate real causality, or at least a real relationship.

One of my favorite health markers—one that is both modifiable and a good barometer for the conditions it appears to predict—is grip strength.

The Benefits of Grip Strength

In middle-aged and elderly people, grip strength consistently predicts mortality risk from all causes, doing an even better job than blood pressure. In older disabled women, grip strength predicts all-cause mortality, even when controlling for disease status, inflammatory load, depression, nutritional status, and inactivity.

Poor grip strength is also an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes across all ethnicities, and it can predict the presence of osteoarthritis in the knee. Among Korean adults, those with lower grip strength have a greater risk of clinical depression.

Even when hand grip strength fails to predict a disease, it still predicts the quality of life in people with the disease. The relative rate of grip strength reduction in healthy people is a good marker for the progression of general aging. Faster decline, faster aging. Slower (or no) decline, slower aging. Stronger people—as indicated by their grip strength—are simply better at navigating the physical world and maintaining independence on into old age.

Health and longevity aside, there are other real benefits to a stronger grip.

You command more respect. I don’t care how bad it sounds, because I agree. Historically, a person’s personal worth and legitimacy was judged by the quality of their handshake. Right or wrong, that’s how we’re wired. If you think you feel differently, let me know how you feel the next time you shake hands and the other person has a limp, moist hand. Who are you more likely to respect? To hire? To deem more capable? To befriend? To approach romantically? I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it’s simply how it is. We can’t avoid our guttural reaction to a strong—or weak—handshake. To me, that suggests we have a built-in sensitivity to grip for a very good reason.

So, how does one build grip?

10 Exercises To Build Grip Strength

Most people will get a strong-enough grip as long as they’re lifting heavy things on a consistent-enough basis.

1. Deadlifts

Deadlifts are proven grip builders. Wide grip deadlifts are also good and stress your grip across slightly different angles.

2. Pullups and 3. Chinups

Both require a good grip on the bar.

Any exercise where your grip supports either your weight or an external weight (like a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell) is going to improve your grip strength. But there are other, more targeted movements you can try to really turn your hand into a vise. Such as:

4. Bar Hangs

This is pretty simple. Just hang from a bar (or branch, or traffic light fixture) with both hands. It’s probably the purest expression of grip strength. As it happens, it’s also a great stretch for your lats, chest, shoulders, and thoracic spine.

Aim to hit one minute. Progress to one-hand hangs if two-handers get too easy. You can use a lower bar and keep one foot on the ground for support as you transition toward a full one-handed hang.

5. Sledgehammer Work

Grab the heaviest sledgehammer you can handle and use it in a variety of ways.

If you had to pick just one sledgehammer movement to target your grip, do the bottoms up. Hold the hammer hanging down pointing toward the ground in your hand, swing it up and catch it with the head of the hammer pointing upward, and hold it there. Handle parallel to your torso, wrist straight, don’t let it fall. The lower you grip the handle, the harder your forearms (and grip) will have to work.

6. Fingertip Pushups

Most people who try fingertip pushups do them one way. They do them with straight fingers, with the palm dipping toward the ground. Like this. Those are great, but there’s another technique as well: the claw.  For the claw, make a claw with your hand, like this, as if you’re trying to grab the ground. In fact, do try to grab the ground. This keeps your fingers more active, builds more strength and resilience, and prevents you from resting on your connective tissue.

These are hard for most people. They’re quite hard on the connective tissue, which often goes underutilized in the hands and forearms. Don’t just leap into full fingertip pushups—unless you know you’re able. Start on your knees, gradually pushing your knees further back to add resistance. Once they’re all the way back and you’re comfortable, then progress to full pushups.

7. Active Hands Pushups

These are similar to claw pushups, only with the palm down on the floor. Flat palm, active “claw” fingers. They are easier than fingertip pushups.

8. Farmer’s Walks

The average person these days is not carrying water pails and hay bales and feed bags back and forth across uneven ground like they did when over 30% of the population lived on farms, but the average person can quickly graduate past average by doing farmer’s walks a couple times each week. What is a farmer’s walk?

Grab two heavy weights, stand up, and walk around. They can be dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, or trap bars. You can walk up hill, down hill, or around in circles. You can throw in some shrugs, or bookend your walks with deadlifts or swings. The point is to use your grip to carry something heavy in both hands.

9. Pinch Grips

Grasp and hold weight plates between your thumb and each finger.

10. Hammer Curls

Next time you do some curls, throw in a few sets of hammer curls. These are identical to normal bicep curls, except you hold the weights in a hammer grip, with palms facing toward each other—like how you hold and swing a hammer. Make sure to keep those wrists as straight as possible.

The thing about grip is it’s hard to work your grip without getting stronger, healthier, and faster all over. Deadlifting builds grip strength, and it also builds back, hip, glute, and torso strength. Fingertip pushups make your hands and forearms strong, but they also work your chest, triceps, abs, and shoulders. That’s why I suspect grip strength is such a good barometer for overall health, wellness, and longevity. Almost every meaningful piece of physical activity requires that you use your hands to manipulate significant amounts of weight and undergo significant amounts of stress.

For that reason, the best way to train your grip is with normal movements. Heavy deadlifts and farmer’s walks are probably more effective than spending half an hour pinch gripping with every possible thumb/finger permutation, because they offer more full-body benefits. But if you have a few extra minutes throughout your workout, throw in some of the dedicated grip training.

Your grip can handle it. The grip muscles in the hands and forearm are mostly slow-twitch fiber dominant, meaning they’re designed to go for long periods of exertion. They’re also gross movers, meaning you use them all the time for all sorts of tasks, and have been doing so for decades. To make them adapt, you need to stress the heck out of them with high weight. Train grip with high reps, heavy weights, and long durations. This is why deadlifts and farmer’s walks are so good for your grip—they force you to maintain that grip on a heavy bar or dumbbell for the entire duration of the set with little to no rest.

Oh, and pick up some Fat Gripz. These attach to dumbbells and barbells and increase the diameter of the bar, giving you less leverage when grabbing and forcing you to adapt to the new grip conditions by getting stronger.

Now, will all this grip training actually protect you from aging, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and early all-cause mortality? Maybe, maybe not.

But it—and the muscle and fitness you gain doing all these exercises—certainly doesn’t hurt.

How’s your grip? How’s your handshake? How long can you hang from a bar without letting go?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and go pick up and hold some heavy stuff.

References:

Sasaki H, Kasagi F, Yamada M, Fujita S. Grip strength predicts cause-specific mortality in middle-aged and elderly persons. Am J Med. 2007;120(4):337-42.

Leong DP, Teo KK, Rangarajan S, et al. Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. Lancet. 2015;386(9990):266-73.

Rantanen T, Volpato S, Ferrucci L, Heikkinen E, Fried LP, Guralnik JM. Handgrip strength and cause-specific and total mortality in older disabled women: exploring the mechanism. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003;51(5):636-41.

Van der kooi AL, Snijder MB, Peters RJ, Van valkengoed IG. The Association of Handgrip Strength and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Six Ethnic Groups: An Analysis of the HELIUS Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9):e0137739.

Wen L, Shin MH, Kang JH, et al. Association between grip strength and hand and knee radiographic osteoarthritis in Korean adults: Data from the Dong-gu study. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(11):e0185343.

Lee MR, Jung SM, Bang H, Kim HS, Kim YB. The association between muscular strength and depression in Korean adults: a cross-sectional analysis of the sixth Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES VI) 2014. BMC Public Health. 2018;18(1):1123.

Lee SH, Kim SJ, Han Y, Ryu YJ, Lee JH, Chang JH. Hand grip strength and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Korea: an analysis in KNHANES VI. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2017;12:2313-2321.

Iconaru EI, Ciucurel MM, Georgescu L, Ciucurel C. Hand grip strength as a physical biomarker of aging from the perspective of a Fibonacci mathematical modeling. BMC Geriatr. 2018;18(1):296.

The post Why Grip Strength Matters—and 10 Ways to Build It appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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I do my best to avoid calling any recipe “life-changing” because the hyperbole is overused, but what I will say is that this sheet pan quesadilla has changed my dinner life.

Classic quesadillas are simple enough, right? A little fat in a hot pan, toast a tortilla stuffed with cheese, flip, and eat. That’s all great, until you need four (or more!) warm quesadillas at one time. That’s where this brilliant sheet pan method comes into play.

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