Interesting perspective. If I were asked about the difference between the grip strength in men and women, a priori I would have guessed the overlap between the strongest non-athlete women and the weakest non-athlete men was bigger, so this is a bit of a surprise. Though to be fair, I’ve been lifting for several years and live in a very gym/sports-forward social bubble, so I’m generally biased towards overestimating the average cis woman’s strength.
Another sorta related thought: While it seems that women ask for help opening jars more often than men, my intuition is that it’s not always that women physically can’t open them. Many people are conditioned to think that “feats of strength” are uniquely “manly”. Women might not know how strong they are as they don’t have much experience consciously using their strength. In the case of jars, I think it might present as a woman somewhat trying to open it, failing, and delegating it to a guy even though she probably would have opened it on her own if she tried harder, but the internalized belief that women doing feats of strength bad/scary/unheard of/etc. prevents her from putting all of the strength she can into it.
Admittedly, I’m depending a lot on personal experience here. I definitely fell victim to that way of thinking in the past. I’d struggle to open a jar, ask my husband to help, and he’d say something like “If you give it another honest try and fail, I’ll open it for you, but I genuinely think you’re strong enough to do it on your own”, and what do you know, 9 out of 10 times he’d be right. The remaining 10% of cases would usually turn out to be a particularly stubborn jar that he’d also end up struggling with. And please note that this was before I started working out—back then I was definitely on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to cis woman’s strength. (By the way I feel like this can be generalized to many other beliefs I did or do still have, but that’s a whole other can of worms, so let’s just stick to the case of jars for now lol).
That being said, hell yeah, accessible packaging rocks & I wish more brands put thought into this.
Jars aside, my experience is that training your grip strength is just a cool thing to do! It’s relatively low effort (for example, get a hand grip ring and use it while reading or doing work that doesn’t engage both hands at the same time), but can yield some nice benefits, like making it easier to hang on to slippery things, or decrease the pain you feel when fighting with particularly stubborn jars. I found the hand grip tools to work pretty well as fidget toys, too. Iirc there’s also been some Lancet studies exploring correlation between grip strength and overall longevity and health? My intuition is that it’s probably more of ‘a grip strength improvement correlates with overall strength and fitness improvement correlates with better cardiovascular health’ situation, but I’d have to find and read the study to be sure. I’ll probably look it up when I have some time later.
Interesting perspective. If I were asked about the difference between the grip strength in men and women, a priori I would have guessed the overlap between the strongest non-athlete women and the weakest non-athlete men was bigger, so this is a bit of a surprise. Though to be fair, I’ve been lifting for several years and live in a very gym/sports-forward social bubble, so I’m generally biased towards overestimating the average cis woman’s strength.
Another sorta related thought: While it seems that women ask for help opening jars more often than men, my intuition is that it’s not always that women physically can’t open them. Many people are conditioned to think that “feats of strength” are uniquely “manly”. Women might not know how strong they are as they don’t have much experience consciously using their strength. In the case of jars, I think it might present as a woman somewhat trying to open it, failing, and delegating it to a guy even though she probably would have opened it on her own if she tried harder, but the internalized belief that women doing feats of strength bad/scary/unheard of/etc. prevents her from putting all of the strength she can into it.
Admittedly, I’m depending a lot on personal experience here. I definitely fell victim to that way of thinking in the past. I’d struggle to open a jar, ask my husband to help, and he’d say something like “If you give it another honest try and fail, I’ll open it for you, but I genuinely think you’re strong enough to do it on your own”, and what do you know, 9 out of 10 times he’d be right. The remaining 10% of cases would usually turn out to be a particularly stubborn jar that he’d also end up struggling with. And please note that this was before I started working out—back then I was definitely on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to cis woman’s strength. (By the way I feel like this can be generalized to many other beliefs I did or do still have, but that’s a whole other can of worms, so let’s just stick to the case of jars for now lol).
That being said, hell yeah, accessible packaging rocks & I wish more brands put thought into this.
Jars aside, my experience is that training your grip strength is just a cool thing to do! It’s relatively low effort (for example, get a hand grip ring and use it while reading or doing work that doesn’t engage both hands at the same time), but can yield some nice benefits, like making it easier to hang on to slippery things, or decrease the pain you feel when fighting with particularly stubborn jars. I found the hand grip tools to work pretty well as fidget toys, too. Iirc there’s also been some Lancet studies exploring correlation between grip strength and overall longevity and health? My intuition is that it’s probably more of ‘a grip strength improvement correlates with overall strength and fitness improvement correlates with better cardiovascular health’ situation, but I’d have to find and read the study to be sure. I’ll probably look it up when I have some time later.