Strength is a basic capacity

A newspaper ran a full page on sarcopenia this week — muscle loss hitting Indians in their forties, diet and diabetes driving it, strength training named as the fix. About damn time muscle got the recognition it deserves. We spent decades fixated on bone and cholesterol while the tissue that actually keeps you moving quietly wasted away.

So this is progress. But look at how they tell you to measure it — a hand-grip squeeze, standing out of a chair five times, a six-metre walk. And here’s where I’d push back.

These tests are just the start. Bare minimum, table stakes. You don’t stop once you clear them.

They have their place — a cheap grip test genuinely predicts frailty and worse outcomes down the line, so as a screen it earns its keep. But clearing it tells you almost nothing about what you can actually do, and nothing at all about how to build it. A decent score isn’t a standard of physical capacity. It’s a starting line we’ve somehow started mistaking for a finish line.

Because strength isn’t a specialty. It’s a basic capacity, like reading, writing, arithmetic, or holding a conversation. You don’t learn to read in order to become a novelist. You learn it so you can function in the world at all. Strength is the same. It isn’t for athletes or the gym-obsessed. It’s the baseline that lets you keep your agency — pick your kid up, get off the floor, carry your own bags, climb your own stairs — for as long as you’re around.

The clearest way to see why is to invert it, the way Charlie Munger would. Don’t ask how to build a good old age. Ask how you’d guarantee a miserable, dependent one. Easy. Weaken every joint. Let the muscles waste. Invite the aches in. Arrange things so you need help for the most basic acts — standing, walking, reaching, carrying. Strip away independence one joint at a time.

Nobody wants that existence. So do the opposite, on purpose.

Move every joint you own — knees, hips, ankles, shoulders, spine, elbows, wrists, neck — through the fullest range you can control. Give each of them regular doses of activity designed to take them where they evolved to go, with stability. Get the muscles around them firing. Stiffen the tendons that carry the force. And strength train — with thoughtful exercise selection, sane dosages and honest framing — because it is simply the most efficient way to get all of that done at once.

The grip test is where you find out you’re already in trouble. Training is how you make sure you never have to take it.

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