What One Key Exercise Can Tell You About Your Lifespan And Future Health

One of the best tests of healthspan and longevity is an exercise you can do almost anywhere. It requires next to no equipment, and demands a perfect blend of bodyweight strength, muscle control, and mental grit. And while a clean set of 10 to 12 perfectly executed reps will guarantee you a nod of respect in lifting circles, being able to crank out just a few says more about your future health than you may realise. 

It all comes down to a key component of the movement: your grip strength. As a 140,000-person study found, the ability to hold, control, and generate force through your hands and forearms was a stronger predictor of lifespan than traditional biomarkers, including blood pressure. 

Though grip strength can be trained in a variety of ways, including farmer’s carries and deadlifts, being able to execute a perfect pull-up is the gold standard of bang-for-your-buck bodyweight training. Here’s why and, crucially, how this exercise can tell you so much about your current and future wellbeing.

What muscles does a pull-up work?

In a world of 12-week transformations, sub-four-hour marathons, and powerlifting PBs, mastering the ability to move your body upward from a dead hang and get your chin over a bar or beam remains an equally worthy challenge. For many, being able to execute a clean set of pull-ups can take months or years to get right, but the pay-off is worth it — from both a physical and neurological perspective. 

“Pull-ups are one of the purest tests of relative strength and how strong you are in relation to your own bodyweight,” explains elite performance coach and Hollywood trainer David Higgins. “Pull-ups train the entire posterior chain of the upper body: your lats, mid-back, rear delts and biceps.” More importantly, he says, “they teach you how to control your shoulder blades, as most people live in internal rotation: rounded shoulders, tight pecs, weak mid-back. A well-executed pull-up reverses that pattern.”

Higgins describes grip and pull-up strength as being “neurologically powerful”. When you grip hard, you create something called irradiation, a technique used while lifting where “tension spreads through the arm into the shoulder and even the core,” he says. “It’s a full-system stimulus.” Should your grip fail early, however, “your brain won’t let you access your full pulling strength.”

What pull-ups reveal about grip strength, muscle mass, and overall health

Dr. Adam Staten, a general practitioner with the NHS and Medical Director at One Day Tests, recognises the conflicting relationship between grip strength and modern sedentary lifestyles. “Inactive or sedentary people tend to have lower overall body strength and so this is reflected by weaker grip,” he says. “Poor grip strength can help to reveal the problem of a sedentary lifestyle.” 

While pull-up strength relies on the strength of the latissimus dorsi and rhomboids (the largest back muscles), and the biceps and posterior deltoids, your smaller muscles are also firing to keep your hands gripped to the bar. These muscles include the flexor digitorum superficialis and profundus, flexor pollicis longus, thenar and hypothenar muscles, as well as wrist flexors and extensors. 

This multi-muscle, multi-joint movement makes the pull-up a ‘compound’ movement, in which “multiple joints and muscle groups are working simultaneously,” says Higgins. “You burn more energy, stimulate more muscle mass and build usable strength.”

“From a health standpoint,” he adds, “compound movements give you the biggest neurological and hormonal return for your time invested.” 

Grip strength “appears to be a useful marker to help assess overall health in all kinds of circumstances,” says Dr. Staten. “There is a big body of evidence showing that grip strength has usefulness and relevance when assessing nutritional status, overall physical strength and a wide range of other issues."

How many pull-ups should a healthy adult be able to do?

So, how many pull-ups should you be aiming for? Higgins, who has spent years working with A-list actors and other high-performing individuals, recommends that men aim for 8 to 15 strict pull-ups and women go for 3 to 8.

“That’s strict, full hang at the bottom, chin clearly over the bar, no kipping, no swinging and no half reps,” he says. However, “if someone is pain-free, moves well and can’t yet do one, I’m not concerned,” he says. “I’d rather see one perfect pull-up than 15 ugly ones.”

Why is grip strength linked to longevity? 

Research into grip strength as a more general marker of health has been ongoing for decades, says Dr. Staten, covering everything from "acute illness, long term illness, old age, dementia and depression." The conclusion from that body of work is clear: grip strength is "a really good reflection of your general state of health," with baseline readings helping to "predict what your health outcomes are likely to be in the future."

One study following participants over 25 years found that those with weaker grip at the start "were faring much worse in terms of mobility and independent living" by the end. Dr. Staten explains. The same principle applies in the shorter term too — people with good grip strength "will recover more quickly from operations or will spend less time in hospital." As he puts it, this all reflects the same fundamental truth: "if you are already in good health, you will handle a health setback better than people whose state of health isn't so good."

What are the best exercises to improve pull-up ability?

Ready to raise the bar on your pull-ups? It can start with your grip, but it certainly doesn’t end there. “Grip is often the weak link, but it’s rarely just about the forearms,” says Higgins. “Start with accumulating time on dead hangs, farmer’s carries, towel hangs and heavy carries,” he says. “If your grip fails early, your brain won’t let you access your full pulling strength.”

Other progressions to improve your vertical-pulling strength include:

• Scapular pull-ups
• Eccentric, or negative pull-ups
• Isometric holds 
• Lat pulldowns with strict control
• Ring rows or TRX rows
• Dead hangs 

Bottom line: Should pull-ups be the next longevity health check?

Dr. Staten urges some caution before reading too much into the research. Much of it "has been done in very specific patient groups such as people who are already hospitalised, or people who have cancer," and "you always have to be careful extrapolating from that kind of data to the general population." More importantly, he's clear that a grip strength reading is "the start, not the end" — if it comes back low, "you need to work out why and address that underlying issue."

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