You may or may not be interested in grip strength, but outlasting your predecessors in longevity and in the bedroom is likely high on your list, and I would hope you’re interested in outperforming both in quality and quantity. Relentless self improvement, after all, is exactly what this site is about. And although I have absolutely no illusions about living to 300 (scientific models based on genetics predict the end of the road is coming at 115 for pretty much everyone), my obsession with relentless self improvement extends to aging as well, as I’ve no real interest in being what is traditionally considered to be an old man.

Nor do I need to- a quick look at guys like Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves shows that even what would be considered casual lifters can hold it the fuck down with their physique, athletic performance, and boyish good looks even as they’re about to turn the corner to 60. Clearly, most of us aren’t multi-millionaires who can shovel cash into the hungry maw of plastic surgeons so they can recreate our faces in the likeness of our bland and shiny, overly contoured Instagram appearance, but we don’t need to be. We’ve got a literally failsafe method for preserving our youth, vitality, and strength into old age, irrespective of famines, global economic depression, illness, injury, or war- doing a few sets of forearms at the end of each workout.

“No one lives forever, no one. But with advances in modern science and my high level income, it’s not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300.”

This shit might sound as weird to you as it does to me, because never in my life have I read that Popeye-looking motherfuckers with ham hocks for forearms live forever- longevity advocates are always skinny, infirm joggers who endlessly chug stupid shit like colloidal minerals in the hope that some fictitious mountain spring and it’s cabal of three hundred year old forest-dwelling villagers in some far flung corner of Tibet hold the key to a long, vital life. Longevity advocates have always touted a near-starvation diet for long life, which seems self-defeating to me. What the fuck is the point of living if you cant enjoy a few slices of cheesecake post workout every day? As such, I basically accepted the idea of whyling out in the gym and life until 70 and having my heart explode, and it frankly isn’t the worst way to look at life. Over the course of the last few months, however, I discovered that the lifting world has quietly had a shitload of extremely long-lived lifters, almost all of whom existed with dimensions natty “scientists” like Lyle McDonald claim to be outside of the “natty limits” that are apparently keeping him and his peers from exceeding a level of development any useful lifter would deem pathetic.

Thus, with the idea that a person can be built like a brick shithouse and expect to stay so into their old age, my interest was piqued, and a bit of research led me to discover that science agrees- grip strength seems to be a pretty good determinant of overall health and longevity. While it isn’t precisely a crystal ball into your innards, it might be the best thing a doctor would have in the apocalypse (as he’d lack anesthesia and antiseptic to do exploratory surgery- don’t get it twisted motherfuckers, the apocalypse would be miserable and you’d die of some insanely treatable thing in a great deal of pain). That might seem an odd aside, but we all take for granted the fact that we a re healthy and pain-free, which is not a natural state for most humans throughout history. Pain was considered to be a part of life, and at least since ancient India it’s not been a standard practice to use pain relievers or anesthetics because one’s ability to endure pain was part of your character… and they also thought your body was basically just a disgusting meat bag filled with pus and maggots that were released as part of healing and/or death up until the Age of Science.

Due to that thinking, people have traditionally placed a lot of faith in what they could discern from one’s outer appearance, be it the Greeks’ belief that outward beauty reflected inner beauty or the belief that a firm handshake is indicator of good character. As one’s handshake is often taken

Testing your grip (often in conjunction with a test of leg endurance and/or strength) can lead to accurate predictions of what stage of cancer a person is in, whether or not they have prediabetes/diabetes or osteoporosis, diagnose malnutrition, and it correlates heavily with cognition, sleep habits, and [Editor’s note: except in Australia] depression (Bohannon).

While I think it’s a stretch to say that grip specialists are going to outlive or outperform us on graduate entrance exams just by virtue of their prodigious grips (you have to recall it’s in proportion to leg strength anyway), relationships in nature seem to be mostly reciprocal. As such, it doesn’t surprise me that guys like John Y. Smith, Charles Vansitaart, and Professor Anthony Barker lived to be 75, 90 and 106 in a time when the life expectancy for an American male was roughly sixty if you survived past childhood, because they were both dudes who trained their grip extensively and who maintained their strength throughout their lives. All three men lived through the privations of two world wars, global market crashes at the turn of the century and the Great Depression, and all three men kept their strength until the end. The key, it seems, it their longevity was frequent hard training throughout their lives that focused extensively on their grip.

Before you start naysaying, consider the fact that I will not be using modern examples of this effect for two reasons- one, modern medicine (and in particular vaccines) have extended the human lifespan by almost double in the developed world, which muddies the results. Additionally, the addition of steroids to any conversation immediately derails it in the under-150lbs/70kg crowd, as those people generally disbelieve anything anyone says about human performance if the event occurred after 1955. Thus, I will be examining turn-of-the-century acrobats, strongmen and wrestlers for examples of this phenomenon.

Life expectancies are a tricky thing to analyze, especially because back in the day childhood disease killed more motherfuckers than Jason Vorhees, Leatherface, Freddy Kreuger, and Hitler combined, so the average white American male was to live about 35 years, though if they survived to 30 they were pretty assured they’d see 60. And then they’d die usually before their seventieth birthday, but at that point they’d been aged and infirm for about three decades- it’s not like they were enjoying their twilight years. Hell, even our hardiest president of that era, Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919), died at the relatively young age of 60, and as I mentioned in the Empire Builder Diet series, even with a full belly in the US, life was pretty rough.

Most other countries had lower life expectancies, but most of the world “enjoyed” the same level of filth, open sewers, bad hygiene, ailments, infirmities, and handicaps Americans did (or in most cases they lived harder, filthier lives), and that is evident when you look at the life expectancy of black American males in the same period, which is roughly half that of their white counterparts. If you’re curious about where I got my numbers, go here for an exceptionally complex explanation of decennial tables and their analysis, but otherwise you are free to sit back and review the litany of strength I have delivered.

And I didn’t restrict this to America- if nothing else, the inclusion of Russians from the Imperial Era in this list is proof that either Russians are the hardiest people in the history of human evolution or that lifting weights on the daily will allow you to live on a diet of vodka, goulasch, and heavy kettlebells even into your nineties, no matter how little medical attention you receive throughout your life. All Russians who lived in the countryside were essentially slaves (though they were called serfs) until 1861, but even when serfdom was abolished it still took 20 years for many of Russia’s peasants to receive the land they were promised in 1861, and nearly all of them were insanely, grindingly poor.

Not poor like they had a cellphone three generations behind the newest one “poor”, but poor in a way you cannot understand. By 1861, the Russian population was only 35% slaves, down from an average of 50% in previous generations. Upon their emancipation (which occurred the same year the US went to war with itself over slavery), the slaves became indentured servants working lands that had to be paid off in five generations. These indentured servants had worked collectively on their owner’s lands previously, but private ownership meant the loss of communal lands and access to tools, an increasingly fractured landscape, and with every generation far smaller plots of land (serfs had huge families to share the backbreaking work in frozen fields, which were then split among successive generations) until much of the populace was landless and penniless.

Beyond the trainwreck that the deconstruction of the serf system produced, Russia of the 19th century was a fucking mess.  In 1800 the literacy rate was only 3-5%, compared with somewhere between 66% and 75% of Americans (Northerners, that is- the South was considerably lower) and Brits, 40% in Prussia, and 30% in France, and about a quarter of the population of Spain.  By 1897 the overall literacy rate of the Russian Empire was just under 25%, with a rural literacy rate of just under a quarter. As such, they had almost nothing in the way of industry or a scientific community, but that shouldn’t come as a shock in a nation with a big-cocked, unwashed, drunken hobo of a wizard ranking first among the ruler’s advisors.

While the rest of the world was slowly figuring out how to emerge from the dark ages Russia was getting worse by the minute, downing in the Tsars’ mismanagement and their staggering illiteracy rates.  Travel by train, which was common in the United States by the middle of the 1800s due to the early adoption of wood-and-iron railways and gravity rails at the beginning of the 1700s, was barely more than an idea in Russia until after 1900. Travel by road was equally difficult, as Russia’s unpaved roads were as effective a tactical obstacle to invasion by foreign powers as they were to domestic travel. But maybe that was a blessing, given the fact that Russia was so far behind the rest of the developed world in medicine that keeping people from travelling was the only way to prevent the spread of disease, which was fucking everywhere.

“Sanitary conditions in the Russian Empire were among the worst in Europe at the time. The country was constantly ravaged by outbreaks of infectious diseases, especially epidemic typhus with over one million people infected from 1907 to 1917. In 1915 approximately 800,000 cases of epidemic diseases were registered in the Russian Empire including 43,000 cases of cholera and 178,000 cases of typhoid fever. Smallpox killed 32,000 people in 1909. Social diseases like syphilis, trachoma, gonorrhea and tuberculosis were widespread. Total mortality was 25-30 per 1,000 individuals and average life expectancy was approximately 40 years. Of about 6 million babies born annually, 2 million died of diseases and due to malnutrition. Average infant mortality at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX century was 250 per 1,000 live births.

In Western Europe and the USA demographic characteristics and health indicators were far better. In 1910, total mortality was 17.7 in France, 13.5 in Great Britain, 16.2 in Germany and 15.9 in the USA (per 1,000). Average life expectancy in these countries exceeded 50 years for both sexes. However, birth rates were 20-30% lower than in the Russian Empire (45 per 1,000 before 1914). In 1910, in several less economically developed countries (India, Egypt, Thailand, Costa Rica etc.) birth rates and mortality rates were 30-45 and 25-33 per 1,000 individuals respectively. The main driving forces behind high mortality rates in the Russian Empire were infectious diseases (smallpox, epidemic typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia etc.), while in developed European countries and the USA the major causes of death were noncommunicable diseases like cardiovascular disorders and cancer” (Reshetnikov).

In other words, there’s more to the story and impact of their longevity than their age. Context ALWAYS matters, motherfuckers.

The “Russians” (Prof. von Krajewski, Peter Krylov, Ivan Poddubny, Guido Meyer, and George Hackenschmidt) lived up to 90 years in a frozen, war-torn hellhole

Let us not quibble about what does and does not constitute Russian/Ukrainian/Estonian, for it both pointless and exhausting as we’re talking about a region rather than an ethnicity, and Russia’s laid claim to all of that shit at some point. Russia of the 1800s was filled with kettlebells but had no gyms, few hospitals, few schools, and little of anything other than mud and misery. That changed in 1885 when Prof. von Krajewski began lifting and began the first athletic society in Russia out of his home in St. Petersburg. That home gym spawned Russian weightlifting, bodybuilding, wrestling, boxing, and kickboxing, and it produced the early 20th century’s answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Estonian weightlifter and wrestler George Hackenschmidt, who lived to the ripe old age of 90 due to the fact that he, unlike his compatriots, got the fuck out of Russia as quickly as humanly possible, in addition to the man who replaced Hackenschmidt as Russia’s top lifter and was eventually studied for his longevity by Soviet doctors.

Led by Prof. von Krajewski, it featured four standout Estonians in Alexander Aberg (1881-1920), Gustav Boesberg (1867-1922), George Lurich (1876-1920), and George Hackenschmidt (1877-1968), as well as Ivan Zaikin (1880-1948), Ivan Poddubny (1871-1949), Guido Meyer (1875-1953), Alexander Znamensky (1877-1928), Peter Krylov (1871-1933) and Sergei Eliseev (1876-1939), who was the aforementioned (and totally unknown) replacement for Hack. These guys had all begun their lifting careers with kettlebells, and as a result had serious grip strength from manhandling their usual training weight of 88lbs/40kg. Once they got to St. Petersburg they began using non-rotating globe plate barbell for training, in addition to massive kettlebells (Hack trained with a pair of 150lbers). Obviously, they weren’t all terribly long-lived, because as I mentioned above, life was fucking rough in Russia at the time. Aberg and Lurich were trapped while trying to flee Russia during the Civil War and died of typhoid during a siege. Boesberg, who is considered to be the father of Estonian weightlifting, bought it shortly thereafter, though he was in his fifties when he died of pneumonia brought on during a depression resulting from Estonia’s successful two-front war for independence against the Germans and the Soviets (which in that context is remarkably long-lived).

If you didn’t know, on top of being the most backward place in Europe by an order of magnitude, Russia underwent their first socialist revolution in 1905, which was a result of Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese war, a series of terrible tsars, and the aforementioned problem with land distribution. So the Tsar Nicholas did what any sensible man would do- he ignored the advice of anyone with a degree in anything and relied instead on the unwashed, purportedly magical hobo with a big dick who was fucking his wife (Rasputin). And that went about as well as you would imagine, leading to the Russian Revolution of 1919, a horrific civil war, and a lot of bitter motherfuckers getting payback for another half century or more.

In stark defiance to all of that shit stood von Krajewski and a couple of generations of his lifters. St. Petersburg was the nexus of a web of longevity that spread outwards with his lifters. Guido Meyer, Russia’s first weightlifting champion in addition to its first boxing champ and one of their best savateurs, managed to live to 78 in spite of the fact that he lived nearly his entire life in Russia and his contemporaries at university (happily, he ended up teaching sports science in St. Petersburg) were all dead long before they turned 50. Peter Krylov, the “King of the Weights” survived multiple tours with a Siberian circus (I would assume also in exile) on the strength and size of his 14″ forearms (measured straight, not flexed like you and I do it).

Ivan Poddubny lived to 77 in Imperial Russia (which was being run, in part, by a wild-eyed magician from Siberia)

Living to 77 in a country run by a cabal of sociopathic murderers who were advised by purportedly magical and hard-dicked monks would be hard even if there was a rudimentary medical care system, school system, and transportation system, but Ivan Poddubny managed to do it through that, two world wars, and a vicious civil war that killed two of his teammates from the St. Petersburg Athletic and Cycling club. In spite of longevity that beggars explanation beyond a suggestion that the man was semi-immortal, kettlebell champion and wrestling virtuoso Poddubny was even more renown for his grip strength than he was for his longevity, and that motherfucker lived to 77 when the average Russian didn’t even make it to 30, living through the insane privations of almost constant war, two national revolutions, a civil war, and the horrors of the rapid industrialization of Russia under the Soviets in addition to the regular fuckery that went on in pre-industrial Russia.

I’m not trying to belabor the point here, but if you’ll recall the opener, the Russia in which Poddubny grew up was a fucking nightmare. Poddubny and his teammates were regularly detained and threatened by the various forces fighting for control of the lands we consider to be Russia (including the Ukraine and Estonia), Poddubny once had to wrestle famed anarchist general Nesto Makhno for the freedom of himself, Aberg, and Lurich while his forces stood around casually pointing weapons at them.

Periodically performing in the circus between years of random imprisonment by the Soviet secret police, Poddubny was often starved by the government for alleged collaboration with the Germans, yet he kept living. After selling all of his gold medals for food and basically being starved to death, he finally died of a broken heart at 77, unloved as a motherfucker by a country he steadfastly refused to leave in spite of literally any and every reason of which one could conceive.

Poddubny’s broken heart likely mirrored that of another member of von Krajewski’s club, Sergei Eliseev (though I believe Eliseev joined after Poddubny had gone on tour) whom he met in a wrestling match in 1925. Sergei Eliseev was hard in a way neither you nor I can comprehend. Comparing him to steel doesn’t do him justice- the man was like vibranium. He was brought into the St. Petersburg club after Hackenschmidt failed to win the first weightlifting world championship. In spite of the fact that Eliseev was the smallest competitor at 5’8’/172cm and 203lbs/92kg, he managed to win the world weightlifting championship in 1899 before running afoul of the Czar and getting exiled to Siberia in 1905.

Like a man straight out of a Jack London novel, Eliseev battled snow blindness working as a freight loader on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. When he arrived there, like everyone else exiled to Siberia, he was homeless, and had to fend for himself with little in the way of food, clothing, or shelter. In spite of all of that, this unrelentingly bad motherfucker taught lifting in Tomsk for free and continued to lift himself. In 1925, the 46-year-old managed to find work with a circus featuring his old teammates Znamesky and Poddubny, the latter of whom he wrested to a draw. Poddubny outweighed the smaller man by at least 100lbs, yet every time he threw Eliseev, the man managed to land on his feet like a giant, hairless cat, and his strength remained so superlative that not even the King of the Kettlebells could outmuscle him.

In spite of the fact that he was exiled for being a socialist, Eliseev was apparently even persecuted by the Soviets, who studied him for his ability to continue breathing throughout his 50s. At some point, it seems, their “investigations” seem to have grown too intense and Eliseev was no more by 63. Using Poddubny’s life as an example, it is likely his food ration cards were withdrawn periodically for some real or imagined offense, and for people carrying a lot of muscle that gets really difficult in a hurry. Add in the lack of medical care and the insanely brutal living conditions in Tomsk, which at the time of this writing is enjoying an insanely humid (83%) for the temperature 17°F (-8°C) (while the temperature in New jersey is 59°F (15°C)), and it’s fucking astonishing he survived a week of exile. The results of the Soviet doctors were as you’d expect- they concluded that it was his heavy weight training that had enabled him to remain healthy into his 60s, in spite of mother Russia’s best efforts to the contrary.

All of Prof. von Krajewski’s pupils had forearms that were so large they made their upper arms look tiny, and they built those forearms primarily with kettlebell juggling and curling two dumbbells in each hand. Due to the fact that won’t work with modern dumbbells I’ve been doing it with kettlebells for hammer curls, and my forearms get fried. If you’re short on time, follow Peter Krylov’s example and do hammer curls with two 20lb kettlebells… or you could try your hand at kettlebell juggling and see how close you can come to this insane level of grip strength an coordination.

And it’s not as though the United States of the 19th century was any picnic either. As I have written previously, the United States of the second half of the 19th century was a tough place to live, and the British of that era lived about as long as their American compatriots. Thus, the average British woman of this era was going to live to 40 or 50, but likely not beyond.

Vulcana only lived to 72 because she forgot to look both ways before crossing the street

If you learn only three things from this article, they should be: 1) train your forearms regularly, 2) lighten the fuck up, and 3) look both ways before you cross the goddamned street. Vulcana (6 May 1874 – 8 August 1946), hottie that she was, fell victim to her own hubris and was conscious during her initial death pronouncement after being run over, but she managed to live another 7 years with brain damage and some physical limitation, and within months of the deaths of her life partner and one of her daughters (again, loneliness will kill you).

“…Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking” (Greene).

Before, that, however, the woman was nigh on unstoppable, proving herself to be the strongest woman in the world not only for living through six pre-modern medicine childbirths and remaining a strongwoman throughout, even in a time when the maternal death rate in Britain was between 40 and 50 per 1000 births. Not only that, but she stood a ridiculously jacked 5’4″ and 150 natty-as-fuck pounds, making her more muscular than half of Reddit without even the use of a refrigerator.

Vulcana performed until she was 56, which is fucking crazy given the fact Hollywood only just discovered that women over the age of 50 could be anything but weepy or a dowdy broad who exists to be the fodder for jokes. Six years later, she was struck by a car, which more or less ended her story.

Try to be at least as jacked as a natty 19th century strongwoman if you want to see your 80th birthday. Well, that and look both ways before you cross the goddamn street.

Professor Anthony Barker survived to 106 due to his grip strength and his sense of humor.

To that point, Professor Anthony Barker (1868-1974) was born the year the United States passed the 14th Amendment, giving African Americans full citizenship. In a way, it was the year both he and black people in general became people in the eyes of the US government. Rad in and of himself due to the fact he was still strength coaching and encouraging people to lift when he was over the age of 100, Barker’s probably more well known and important for producing his proteges, strongman William Lincoln Travis (1876-1941) and vegetarian, hyperverted bodybuilding publisher Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955). Barker himself was an early circus and vaudevillian strongman in addition to a personal instructor of lifters and a gym owner, and travelled the country doing an act that was half improv comedy and half strength exhibition. As should any good teacher’s students, Barker’s pupils vastly surpassed him in strength and renown as strongmen (though not as instructors themselves), so he spread his love of the early strongman mainstays, teeth/neck and grip strength, onto his almost equally long-lived students (though teeth lifting thankfully fell out of popularity as his pupils aged).

Barker’s pupils couldn’t have been more dissimilar in their training methods or their appearance, as Macfadden was a 5’6″145lb vegetarian and Travis was a doughy 5’8″ and 185lb strongman, or their longevity, as McFadden lived to be 87 while Warren Lincoln Travis’s heart popped at the age of 65 while he was in the middle of a performance on Coney Island. Though both might have seemed to have lived full lives, MacFadden would have outlived his predecessor were it not for the fact that the fitness industry is a fickle mistress, and the combination of the Depression and a move towards conservativism in the US crushed MacFadden’s finances and sanity, and he died a very bitter pauper who openly regretted helping a single lifter put a pound onto any lift.

In spite of the vastly different trajectories of their careers, both men clearly benefitted from Prof. Barker’s instruction, particularly where grip strength was concerned. And more than that, Barker’s legacy was seen even in a second generation of lifter, as Travis’s pint-sized protege Joe Rollino (1905-2009) was both a grip specialist and a centenarian who was killed by a minivan while crossing the street at the age of 104.

Prof. Anthony Barker’s workouts were almost all upper body movements using a combination of kettlebells, dumbbells, and barbells. The man loved two things- training arms and telling jokes, and science supports the influence of both on longevity.

“The findings show that for women, high scores on humor’s cognitive component [i.e using humor as a coping mechanism in uncomfortable situations] were associated with 48 percent less risk of death from all causes, a 73 percent lower risk of death from heart disease and an 83 percent lower risk of death from infection. In men, a link was found only for the risk of death from infection—those with high humor scores had a 74 percent reduced risk. The gender differences could be due to a slight decline in humor scores as the men aged, the authors suggest” (Scientific American).

Bernarr MacFadden had planned to outlive Prof. Anthony Barker, but was killed by his own bitterness at 87 in spite of his badass forearms

Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955) was so entirely self-made that he might as well have come straight out of a Dickens novel. Orphaned at 11 and told by his aunt he’d be dead soon of tuberculosis like his mom at his mother’s funeral, he fucked off to America to work on a farm as a sort of indentured servant for two years. After completing his service, he worked any job that required strenuous physical activity and performed as a strongman and wrestler, until opening his own physical culture business at the age of 25. Over the years he built a massive fitness culture empire that spawned the following firsts, though he went utterly broke during the Depression and his fitness empire was conquered and rebuilt by successive businessmen like Bob Hoffman and Joe Weider (in much the same way the Romans did when they created their culture out of the existing Etruscan and Greek models).

• created modern bodybuilding contests,
• invented the entire genre of fitness periodicals,
• promoted sex-positive attitudes, vegetarianism, natural foods, and all of the other health fads of the day,
• founded a fitness-based utopian community in New Jersey

In spite of the fact that he was born in a time when even a rich person who had managed to live to adulthood could only hope to live to 60, Bernarr MacFadden man managed to live to 87 before dying broke, bitter as hell about the fact the lifting world abandoned him, and hating the industry he’d basically built himself.

Hate can only take you so far- at some point you’ve gotta plaster a fucking smile on your face… and train the shit out of your forearms. A negative mental outlook is more than likely what killed MacFadden, so do what you can to make your life as happy and healthy as possible (that means making friends and maintaining those friendships) in between bouts of frantic forearm training. Also, if you’re pissed, laugh it the fuck off, because science says so.

And McFadden’s obsession with training began when he learned to love chopping wood as a teen, and that’s been a training mainstay of fighters since time immemorial- it’s in Rocky 4 for a reason, motherfuckers. Don’t forget you can go old school when training if you want to mix it up, and those thick, veiny forearms you build with wood chopping can keep your body alive even long after your heart goes cold and dead.

Up next, I’ve got more scientific reasons to train your grip in addition to more anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness, in addition to some old-timey training methods. Again, I will encourage you to recall the fact that these guys did not follow a set program resembling anything to which you’re used, and they trained in a manner you’d likely find off-putting. The “how” is not nearly as important as the “what” and the level of intensity you put into it.

Sources:

Bohannon, RW. Grip strength: an indispensable biomarker for older adults. Clin Interv Aging. 2019; 14: 1681–1691.

Firth J, Firth JA, Stubbs B, Vancampfort D, Schuch FB, Hallgren M, Veronese N, Yung AR, Sarris J. Association Between Muscular Strength and Cognition in People With Major Depression or Bipolar Disorder and Healthy Controls. 2018 Jul 1;75(7):740-746.

Firth J, Stubbs B, Vancampfort D, First JA, Large M, Rosenbaum S, Hallgren, Ward PB, Sarris J, Yung AR. Grip Strength Is Associated With Cognitive Performance in Schizophrenia and the General Population: A UK Biobank Study of 476559 Participants. 2018 Jun 6;44(4):728-736.

Greene, Mark.  The terrible price of our epidemic of male loneliness. Medium.com.  11 Dec 2017.  Web. 16 Dec 2021. https://remakingmanhood.medium.com/the-terrible-price-of-our-epidemic-of-male-loneliness-5be6463fd0e0

Gustafson, Colin.  Remembering ‘Hebrew Hercules’.  Queens Chronicle.  5 Apr 2007.  Web.  6 Nov 2020. https://www.qchron.com/editions/central/remembering-hebrew-hercules/article_997e6fb5-d823-5b68-b909-fd9ec67342ef.html

Jowett, George.  Geroge Jowett’s training courses.  Reprinted from original.  Neckberg. 19 Sep 2019.   https://neckberg.com/george-f-jowett-workout-courses/

Reshetnikov VA, Ekkert NV, Capasso l, Arsentyev EV, Mikerova MS, Yakushina II. The history of public healthcare in Russia. Medicina Historica 2019; Vol. 3, N. 1: 16-24

Rodriguez, Tori.  Laugh lots, live longer.  Scientific American.  1 Sep 2016.  Web.  16 Dec 2021.  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/laugh-lots-live-longer/

Van Cleef, Ray. Warren Lincoln Travis– Dean of American Strongmen. Reprinted from 1940 original. The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban. 27 Aug 2008. Web. 22 Nov 2021. http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/08/travis-at-work-with-his-special.html

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