For men, I like to see about a one-to-one ratio for the bench press such that you should be able to bench press your body weight. So a 200-pound person should be aiming for something like 200-pound bench press. For women, it's about .
6. Upper body strength is significantly less in women in general, and so you're going to have to scale that down a little bit more. Now for the back squat, it's hard to give you numbers because it is so technically demanding.
I think it's easier to give you something more like a leg press value. For men, you want to shoot for something like double body weight and for women something like 1 1/2 times or so. So that hopefully gives you a little bit of context of the numbers to go after.
The last thing I want to add here is actually something we'll talk about a lot more in the future, and that is grip strength. It is incredibly important and a great insight into your overall health for both athletes and non-athletes. Easy to test.
There's a number of ways that you can grab hand grip dynamometers. They're cheap and available almost anywhere. For men, just again, a rough number here.
I like to see individuals over 45 kilograms and then for women over 28 kilograms or so. Another thing to keep in mind here is asymmetry really matters. Now this is the first test I've given you where you can isolate, you know, your left side from your right side.
Really important to test your grip strength in both. Recent papers have come out suggesting that an asymmetry of more than 10% specifically increases your risks of sarcopenia and heightened denervation of muscle groups by 2. 67 fold.
And so we will talk about that more in detail later. But really, really important, you want to understand whether or not you have major asymmetries in strength between both your sides. Again, some asymmetry is probably okay, maybe even advantageous for some sporting applications.
But asymmetries outside of that are potentially concerning. If you're unfamiliar with that term, sarcopenia describes the excessive loss of muscle mass with age. We know there's going to be some sort of natural decline in the amount of muscle mass you have.
In fact, on rough average, men will lose about 40% of their muscle mass from the ages of 25 to 80. So we know what's going to happen. We've talked about how strength training and adequate nutrition can reduce that loss of muscle, but some of it's going to happen.
So sarcopenia really refers to the excessive or additional loss of muscle beyond the normal loss with aging. So those strength standards I gave you are rough guidelines, but I want you to get as strong as possible. I don't necessarily need you to be squatting or benching 1,300 pounds, but I don't want you to just stop at body weight either.
So outside of, of course, leading to injury and getting hurt, which is something we don't want to do, there's no disadvantage to getting stronger. I've tried to make that argument with muscle mass earlier in the show, but I can really make that heavily with strength. In fact, if you were to compare the two, muscle mass to muscle strength, muscle strength is by far a stronger predictor of both how long you're going to live as well as how well you will live within those years.
That's number one. Number two, getting stronger only continues to reduce your risk of developing things like sarcopenia or late onset dementia. In fact, one particular study of note here, this study had around 500,000 or so individuals pulled from the UK Biobank, which is a similar setup as what we've got here in America that I talked about earlier in our NHANES database.
Now, they studied these individuals across nine years, and during that time, around 4,000 or so of the individuals developed dementia. And so what's interesting is they were able to go back and say, okay, what unique characteristics existed prior to the dementia as well as after the onset? And how did that compare to the individuals who didn't have the dementia set in?
And in this one certain study, in just one study, so we want to be cautious of overinterpreting here, what they found was 30% of the dementia cases were attributed to having low grip strength, and this was independent of a number of other important confounders. We will talk about these things more in future episodes, and I don't want you to get overly concerned with that specific result or those specific numbers. I just wanted to highlight, though, the critical importance of getting stronger really helps overall global health.
And what's furthermore interesting about this paper and many, many, many others is there doesn't seem to be an upper limit. So when you continue to increase strength you continue to reduce risk of all-cause mortality, dementia, and similar other things. And so we don't see this really even an asymptote.
We don't see a tapering off of benefit. We just continue to see rises in improvements in risk reduction factors, hazard risk, mortality risk, a number of other things important to overall health when we continue to get stronger, whether we're talking about grip strength, leg strength, or anything else. And so it just, right now, according to the data across, again, multiple areas, just continuing to get stronger seems to continually benefit human health and performance.
