Well, ladies
A woman sat in my studio on Monday and said something that has been stuck in my head all week. She said I just do not feel strong anymore.
She was not talking about lifting. She was not talking about a workout or a goal or a number. She was talking about a pickle jar.
She said she stood in her kitchen on Sunday night trying to open a jar and she could not do it. She ran it under hot water. She used a towel. She banged the lid on the counter. It did not open. Her seventeen-year-old son walked in, opened it with one hand, and walked out without saying a word.
She sat down at her kitchen table and cried. Not about the jar. About the feeling of not being able to do a thing her body used to do without thinking. 😂
I did not laugh at the time. I am using the emoji because if I do not make this a little lighter I will write something too heavy and Sonia already covered grief this week and she did it better than I would.
But I want to talk about what is actually happening in that story because it is not weakness.
Grip strength declines after forty. It is one of the first things to go and nobody warns you because nobody thinks about grip strength until a jar makes them cry. The muscles in your forearm that close your hand lose mass, lose responsiveness. Not because you are aging badly. Because you stopped asking them to work.
Think about your day. You type. You scroll. You hold a coffee cup that weighs nothing. You open doors with handles designed to need zero effort. Your hands spend sixteen hours a day doing nothing that requires force. The jar is not the problem. The jar is the audit. 🔥
I gave her something simple and I am giving it to you.
Pick up something firm. A tennis ball. A rolled-up towel. A water bottle with the cap on. Squeeze it as hard as you can for ten seconds. Then release. Feel your forearm let go. Feel the blood come back into your palm.
Do that three times with each hand. Once a day. While you watch something, while you wait for coffee, while you sit in a parking lot.
That is it. Not a program. A reminder to your hands that they are still hands.
She has been doing it for two weeks and she texted me yesterday and said she opened a jar of pasta sauce without thinking about it. She did not realize it had happened until after. That is how it is supposed to work. Not a victory. Just a return to normal. 🙌
I told Clare about the pickle jar story and she said "I open jars fine" which is the most Clare sentence ever spoken. Then she paused and said "but I cannot open the sparkling water bottles anymore." So.
Sonia would not care about the jar. Sonia would care about the woman sitting at the kitchen table. That is why we are three people and not one.
Squeeze something today. Hard. Ten seconds. Let go.
Your hands are not weak. They are just under-asked.
