Your physical strength today predicts your mental strength tomorrow

Grip strength has long been used as an indicator of how long you’ll live, but it’s not just your hands that predict your future: Finnish researchers have found that the stronger you are physically overall, the stronger you’ll be mentally in later years.

A research team from the University of Eastern Finland studied more than 330 men and women with an average age of 66, measuring the strength of their grips as well as how well they performed on three tests of lower-body strength (leg extension, leg flexion and leg press) and two of upper-body strength (chest press and seated row).

Participants were also judged on their cognitive function — that is, how effectively their brains could receive, store, process and use information.

While handgrip strength is a popular benchmark because it’s easy and fast to measure, the Finnish study — published in the journal European Geriatric Medicine — couldn’t find any link between grip power and brainpower.

Only when upper and lower-body strength scores were factored in did a positive link between muscle strength and cognitive function emerge.

“The findings suggest that it may be justified to go beyond the handgrip and to include the upper and lower body when measuring muscle strength, as this may better reflect the association between muscle strength and cognition,” said the study’s first Heikki Pentikäinen, a University of Eastern Finland researcher, in a statement.

It’s probably not that a strong body directly causes a strong mind but rather that exercise and movement makes you stronger both physically and mentally — exercise has been proven to not only maintain cognitive ability, but also improve it.

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