Grip Strength is Functional Strength & Donald Dinnie

🔎 In This Fit Tip Friday 

 Inside you'll find:

• Tip: Grip strength is functional strength

• Finds: Can you lift the inch dumbbell? (and more)

• Story: Donald Dinnie: the stonemason turned athlete

• Quote: The name of WWI heavy artillery shells

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🤜 Grip Strength is Functional Strength

Your grip strength is your body’s strength bottleneck.

Every activity that flows through your hands… whether you are carrying something, playing with your kids, deadlifting, bench pressing, doing pull-ups, kettlebell swings, get-ups, rowing, wrestling… requires grip strength.

It follows that improving your grip strength is one of the most functional improvements you can make for your strength.

A stronger grips benefits not just your PR’s when working out, but anything that requires strength in day to day life.

Here are three of my favorite exercises you can do to develop an iron grip:

• Kettlebell Farmer’s Carries

• Kettlebell Around-The-Worlds

• Pull-Ups

🔎 Finds This Week

To give you more value, I’ve given this section of the newsletter a remodel.

Here are some of my favorite finds on grip this week:

• Is your grip strong enough to lift the inch dumbbell? (link)

• Canada is hosting 2024’s biggest international grip challenge on the planet (link)

• Grip strength in young men has decreased by 20% since the 1980’s (link)

• Grip strength is a predictor of numerous future outcomes, including mortality (link)

Other finds that I enjoyed:

• Boaz’s example of strength in marriage (link)

• Add this song by Kings Kaleidoscope to your workout playlist (link)

• Benefits of training barefoot with kettlebells (link)

• This interactive model of the brain (link)

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Donald Dinnie: The Stonemason Turned Athlete

The Scottish Highlands are known for their rugged landscape, freezing lochs, and harsh living conditions. The only thing tougher than the topography of the Highlands are the people that live there.

In 1837, Donald Dinnie was born in Balnacraig, Birse up in the Scottish Highlands. He was one of 10 children, and his father was a stonemason.

Donald learned his father’s trade and worked as a stonemason for well over a decade.

In his spare time, Donald began competing in local athletic competitions. When he was 16, he won his first wrestling match against strongman David Forbes.

That began Donald’s athletic career.

For the next 21 years, Donald was the 21x successive champion of the Highland games, which included competitive events of sprints, hurdles, stone throws, hammer throws, and wrestling.

But he still worked as a stonemason. In fact, it wasn’t until he was 33 when he went all-in as a full-time athlete.

Once his attention shifted towards his athletic career, Donald’s reputation left the Highlands and expanded internationally, and now he is known as “The Nineteenth Century’s Greatest Athlete”.

Over the course of his career, Donald competed in 2,000 hammer throwing contests, 2,000 wrestling matches, 200 weightlifting contest, and 500 running and hurdle events. From an athletic standpoint, this is about as well-rounded as you can get.

His legend popularly exists through what’s now known as the “Dinnie Stones”.

When Donald was 23, he carried two boulders with a combined weight of 733 pounds for a distance of more than 17 feet.

These days, strongmen from all over the world train to attempt to replicate what a stonemason did in his 20’s.

Donald continued as an athlete and strongman all the way into his 70’s… where one of his acts included supporting a platform made from a table where two Highlanders danced on top of it.

This was a subscriber inspired idea for a story. If you have a story you’d like to share, just reply to this email with the idea.

👍 Did You Like What You Read?

If you liked, enjoyed, or even hated anything in this Fit Tip Friday, just hit reply with your thoughts.

I’ll see you next Friday.

Be strong,

Don