Grip Strength Calculator

Grip strength is measured with a hand dynamometer, and it is a far better indicator of general health than a hand-squeeze test has any right to be. In the PURE study (Leong and colleagues, The Lancet, 2015), which followed roughly 140,000 people across 17 countries, each 5 kg drop in grip strength was associated with about a 16% higher risk of death from any cause. It predicted cardiovascular death better than systolic blood pressure did.

Nobody thinks squeezing a dynamometer is what keeps you alive. Grip is a cheap proxy for total muscle strength and neuromuscular function, and those are what actually matter. That is also why it is worth measuring: it is a five-second test that tracks something real.

The norms this page uses

The reference is Dodds and colleagues (2014), who pooled 49,964 people from twelve British studies into centiles for every age from 4 to 90. These are the 10th, 50th and 90th centiles in kilograms:

Grip peaks around 30 to 40 and holds through midlife. The decline is slow in the fifties and fast after 70: the median man loses 3 kg between 50 and 60, and 7 kg between 70 and 80. In pounds, multiply by 2.205: 51 kg is about 112 lbs.

The calculator uses the paper’s full five-year table and reads between the rows for your exact age. Norms differ by country: Leong and colleagues (2016) built ranges from 125,462 healthy adults in 21 countries and found large regional differences, with lower values in South Asia. Read a British percentile as a British percentile.

How the rating works

• Low: under 27 kg for men or 16 kg for women. These are the cut-offs in the European sarcopenia definition (EWGSOP2, 2019), and they come from this same British data: 2.5 standard deviations below the young-adult peak.
• Below average: under the 10th centile for your age and sex.
• Average range: between the 10th and 90th centile.
• Above average: over the 90th centile.

The percentile is read from the three published centiles, treating each side of the median as a bell curve. It is an estimate, and it gets rough below the 10th or above the 90th.

Measuring it properly

Peak grip is fussier than it looks, and most of the ways people get a wrong number are avoidable:

• Sit with the elbow bent to 90 degrees and tucked in, forearm neutral. That is the standard position in most of the studies.
• Squeeze hard for 3 to 5 seconds. A quick jab under-reads.
• Three attempts, rest between them, take the highest, not the average.
• Use the dominant hand for comparison. The non-dominant hand typically reads about 10% lower, which is enough to move you a band.

It responds to training. Resistance training reverses a good part of the decline at any age, including in people in their eighties and nineties. Deadlifts, farmer’s carries, rows and dead hangs all work. If your number is low, it is a finding to act on rather than a verdict.