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Fitness

Grip Strength and Sitting-Rising Percentile

Two cheap physical tests with unusually strong mortality associations, scored against the published reference tables.

Formula lll-grip-sitrise-1.0.07 sources7 stated limitations

This page has no named medical reviewer on file. The equation it implements is published and cited below, but the page itself has not been signed off by a member of the review board, and we do not present it as if it had been.

Enter your numbers

5 questions. Questions that only apply to some people appear once your earlier answers decide that they do.

From your health data

4 of these questions can be answered from lab results and device data you have already connected: Age, Sex at birth, Best grip strength, Sitting-rising score. Connect them once in your member account and they arrive here pre-filled and labelled as coming from your health data — and you can always type over the value.

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This public page never reads your health data. Pre-filling happens inside the signed-in app, which is a separate, access-controlled surface.

Grip Strength and Sitting-Rising Percentile inputs
Which test?
Sex at birthFrom your health data — connect to fill this automatically

Used because the reference data and published equations are sex-specific. If your sex at birth differs from your gender, the equations were derived on sex-at-birth cohorts.

More questions will appear once the answers above decide which ones apply.

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How this is calculated

Formula version lll-grip-sitrise-1.0.0

Grip strength is placed against the Dodds 2014 pooled British centiles for the nearest tabulated age within two and a half years, by linear interpolation between the published 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th centiles, and is separately compared with the EWGSOP2, AWGS and FNIH low-grip cut-points. The sitting-rising score is placed in a quartile band transcribed from the Araujo 2020 reference figure, and where the score falls in one of the Brito 2014 bands the published adjusted hazard ratio and its confidence interval are reported. Values outside published anchors are reported as bounds; ages outside the published tables return no percentile at all.

What it cannot do

  • Grip reference data are British and pooled across several dynamometer models, which do not read alike.
  • Dodds 2014 publishes centiles only at five-year ages and did not publish the underlying LMS parameters, so no continuous curve or T-score is possible.
  • US grip norms exist but the only accessible version of the table was a figure image rather than text, so they are deliberately not shipped. See GAPS.md.
  • The sitting-rising reference is published as a colour-banded figure, so only quartile resolution is honest. Numeric percentiles for adults are not published.
  • The quartile bands here are a transcription of that figure, cross-checked by two independent extractions, and are labelled as such rather than as published numbers.
  • The four sarcopenia grip cut-points disagree by up to 2 kg in men and 2 kg in women.
  • Sitting-rising mortality hazard ratios come from a single research group and a single clinic population, and in the larger 2026 follow-up only the two lowest score groups remained statistically significant.

Sources

  1. Dodds RM et al. Grip strength across the life course: normative data from twelve British studies. PLoS One 2014;9(12):e113637DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0113637 (opens in a new tab)PMID 25474696 (opens in a new tab)
  2. Cruz-Jentoft AJ et al. Sarcopenia: revised European consensus on definition and diagnosis (EWGSOP2). Age Ageing 2019;48(1):16-31 (with corrigendum 2019;48(4):601)DOI 10.1093/ageing/afy169 (opens in a new tab)PMID 30312372 (opens in a new tab)
  3. Chen LK et al. Asian Working Group for Sarcopenia: 2019 Consensus Update. J Am Med Dir Assoc 2020;21(3):300-307DOI 10.1016/j.jamda.2019.12.012 (opens in a new tab)PMID 32033882 (opens in a new tab)
  4. Studenski SA et al. The FNIH sarcopenia project. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci 2014;69(5):547-558DOI 10.1093/gerona/glu010 (opens in a new tab)PMID 24737557 (opens in a new tab)
  5. Brito LBB et al. Ability to sit and rise from the floor as a predictor of all-cause mortality. Eur J Prev Cardiol 2014;21(7):892-898DOI 10.1177/2047487312471759 (opens in a new tab)PMID 23242910 (opens in a new tab)
  6. Araujo CGS et al. Sitting-rising test: Sex- and age-reference scores derived from 6141 adults. Eur J Prev Cardiol 2020;27(8):888-890DOI 10.1177/2047487319847004 (opens in a new tab)PMID 31039614 (opens in a new tab)
  7. Araujo CGS et al. Sitting-rising test scores predict natural and cardiovascular causes of deaths in middle-aged and older men and women. Eur J Prev Cardiol 2026;33(12):2170-2178DOI 10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf325 (opens in a new tab)PMID 40569873 (opens in a new tab)

The formula version is pinned so that a result you saved or shared can be reproduced. When we change a coefficient, the version changes and old results stay attributed to the version that produced them.

Questions people ask

Is grip strength really a mortality predictor?
The association is consistent and large across many cohorts. It is almost certainly a marker of overall muscular and neurological condition rather than a cause, which matters: training your grip specifically is not the intervention the association implies.
My score is much worse than the reference. Should I worry?
Take it to a clinician rather than to the internet, particularly if it has changed quickly. A fast decline is more informative than a low absolute value.