Report says millennials have weaker handshakes.
Millennials do certain things better than our grandparents, including TOR’ing Ethereum, Yelping for umami mapo tofu, Wazing their Lyft, and understanding what those phrases mean.
But there are certain things millennials do worse than our grandparents, including saving for retirement, buying big cars and golfing while wearing pleated pants.
And, new research shows, millennials don’t have a firm handshake, either. Just like grandpa always said.
The Journal of Hand Therapy reports that, compared to baselines set in 1985, young people had statistically significantly weaker grips.
The researchers tested 237 millennials. The subjects were asked to squeeze a joystick-like machine. This measured, in pounds, their hand, forearm and arm strength.
The result? Declines among nearly all groups. For example, men aged 20-24 had right-hand grip strength of 101 pounds. Meanwhile, men the same age in 1985 had right-hand grip strength of 121 pounds. That’s a 16 percent drop. Female grip strength for the same age group dropped by about the same percentage over the same time.
No wonder the economy isn’t soaring. How you gonna close the big deal with a handshake like that?
The research is limited. The researchers are physical therapists who conducted the study to set a baseline for grip strength, so that they can measure whether injured patients are improving. And while it’s fun to generalize, the paper does not specifically call millennials “wimps” or “wusses.” That would be unscientific and unprofessional. Instead, it merely reports that “Normative data in all millennial grip strengths showed relative decline in thumb dexterity and forearm acuity, which is somewhat surprising since they spend all day playing Minecraft and jacking it.”
The decline in grip strength, the researchers told NPR, is easily understandable, and comes about because fewer of us make our livings mining, farming and ranching.
But when the day’s headlines includes items such as “Pokemon fatigue syndrome is an epidemic as gamers accidentally get exercise” and “students are more afraid of growing up than in previous generations,” it makes you wonder if your grandpappy was on to something when he told you to “stand up straight, look ‘em in the eye, shake their hands firm, and can you show me how to open this PDF?”
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