clubhouse chat: get a grip

september theory says every summer situationship gets its answer by labor day. the club has a faster test, and it does not involve texting anybody: hang from a bar and count. thirty seconds if you are nineteen and new to the weight room, forty five if you are thirty four and a year in, a full minute if you are fifty eight and carrying your own luggage on principle. we already argued for lifting heavy after forty. this is the thirty second version. read to the end: your hands have been keeping score.

the glow file

what does grip strength say about your health? more than almost anything you can check at home. the PURE study followed 139,691 adults in seventeen countries, and every five kilogram drop in grip came with a sixteen percent higher risk of dying from any cause. the grown up part: grip out predicted systolic blood pressure. your hands are not magic. grip reads how much muscle you carry and how hard your nervous system can tell it to fire, which is why it moves with everything else. the bar is the cheapest lab in the building. speaking of expensive labs.

the piggy bank

phil and penny knight pledged one point one billion dollars to providence st. vincent for oregon's first hospital dedicated to women's health, announced september fifteenth. labor and delivery, neonatal intensive care, cardiac care, gynecology, and menopause care. a twenty four year old reads that as a nice building. a thirty six year old reads it as where she might deliver. a fifty two year old reads it as the first billion anyone put behind the stretch of her life the system usually shrugs at. and speaking of building rooms.

heard at the clubhouse

christian bale spent nearly twenty years on something that opened this month: together california, an eleven thousand square foot foster village in palmdale with twelve homes, built so siblings in foster care stop getting split up. nearly nine million raised, families move in next month. "it is our job to turn their heartbreak and their pain into love and hope and a sense of future," he said. the kids know him as batman. their parents know he has been quietly at this since long before it was a press release.

the sunshine page

two wins, both about things coming back. more than twenty thousand chinook salmon have run up the klamath river in the two years since the largest dam removal in us history, reclaiming ninety percent of their pre dam range in year one. and a myrtle beach aquarium hatched seven african penguin chicks, a species down to fewer than twenty thousand breeding pairs.

the dress code

daily fit: the base crop tank in ivory, forty dollars, because nothing ends a hang faster than a top that migrates when your arms go up. seen on: milan opens this week with prada first and gucci returning, so style tuesday like a runway exit, not a flat lay. save up: the form high rise seamless leggings in stone grey, eighty dollars.

the passed note

dead hang week, day six. today's ask is one hang to failure, timed and written down, because thursday is report card day. then the protocol you keep: two hangs, thirty to sixty seconds, three days a week. progressive overload applies to your hands, so when it gets easy, drape a towel over the bar and grab the ends. a doorway bar runs under thirty dollars. your hands have been keeping score. tuesday is a good day to read the tally.

send this to a friend. that's how the club grows.

health is hot.