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Published May 10, 2026 — University at Buffalo / JAMA Network Open

Muscle Strength May Matter as Much as Cardio for Healthy Aging

Cardiovascular fitness gets most of the attention in healthy-aging advice, but a large new study led by researchers at the University at Buffalo suggests muscle strength deserves equal billing. The team found that older women with greater strength had a significantly lower risk of death — even after accounting for their physical activity levels, cardiovascular fitness, and inflammation markers.

The Two Tests Researchers Used

Published in JAMA Network Open, the study followed more than 5,000 women between the ages of 63 and 99 for eight years, part of the long-running Women’s Health Initiative. Researchers focused on two simple, commonly used clinical measures: grip strength, tested with a handheld dynamometer, and a chair-stand test — timing how quickly someone can stand up from a seated position, typically without using their arms.

Women with the strongest grip had a 33% lower risk of death compared to those with the weakest grip. Women who completed the chair-stand test fastest had a 37% lower risk of death compared to the slowest group. Both associations held up even after researchers statistically controlled for activity levels, sedentary time, walking speed, and inflammation — meaning strength was predicting outcomes independently, not just standing in as a proxy for being generally more active.

Why Strength Might Predict Mortality on Its Own

Grip strength is considered a reliable marker of overall skeletal muscle strength and neuromuscular function, while the chair-stand test more specifically reflects lower-body strength and functional capacity — the ability to actually get up, move around, and recover from a fall. Muscle strength integrates multiple physiological systems at once, including neuromuscular coordination and metabolic health, which may be why it captures something that activity-tracking alone misses. Study co-author LaMonte noted that the findings support giving muscle-strengthening activities much greater emphasis in public health recommendations, which currently center almost entirely around aerobic activity.

Testing Your Own Strength at Home

The chair-stand test costs nothing and takes seconds: sit in a firm chair with feet flat on the floor and arms crossed over your chest, then stand up and sit back down as many times as you can in 30 seconds without using your hands. Grip strength technically requires a hand dynamometer to measure precisely, but a physical therapist’s office or gym will often have one, and everyday signals — struggling to open jars or carry groceries — are worth paying attention to as informal indicators.

If the results suggest you could use more strength, building it doesn’t require a gym membership. A simple, consistent resistance routine is enough to move the needle over time:

• Bowflex SelectTech 552 Adjustable Dumbbells — covers presses, rows, and squats across a full range of resistance
• Resistance Bands — a lower-impact way to build grip and lower-body strength if dumbbells feel like too much to start

The Bottom Line

Two of the simplest strength assessments in medicine — a hand squeeze and standing up from a chair — turned out to independently predict mortality risk in this study, even accounting for how physically active someone otherwise was. Strength training deserves a permanent place next to cardio in how we think about long-term health, not an afterthought reserved for people who happen to enjoy lifting weights.

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Source: University at Buffalo. This simple strength test could predict how long you live. JAMA Network Open. May 10, 2026. | This article was published September 2026.