Somewhere right now, someone hangs from a pull-up bar in their garage, red-faced, breath held, forearms trembling, while a phone propped against a water bottle counts the seconds. When they finally drop to the ground, they post their time on Instagram with a caption implying they just bought themselves another decade of life by completing a dead hang.
The dead hang challenge has been circulating on social media, and some people claim the workout is tied to longevity. The dead hang’s popularity skyrocketed after its appearance on an episode of the Mel Robbins Podcast. In the episode, a doctor said the main benefit is better grip strength, which they linked to improved cardiovascular and cognitive health. The goal? Hang for one or two minutes.
As a board-certified internal medicine physician who specializes in longevity, I can see the appeal. The challenge costs nothing. You can do it at a playground jungle gym, and it gives you a number you can track. The trouble may be how social media assigns value to that number.
What Does Grip Strength Have to Do with Longevity?
The longevity claim borrows credibility from grip strength research, and that evidence is substantial. In a 2015 Lancet study, researchers followed nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries and found that every 11-pound drop in grip strength was associated with a 16 percent higher risk of death from any cause. In a 2018 British Medical Journal analysis of roughly half a million participants, lower grip strength was linked to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and several cancers.
Those studies used a handgrip dynamometer, a device you squeeze as hard as you can for a few seconds to register peak force. A dead hang is a far more complex measurement. It tests how long you can hold your body weight, bringing body mass, forearm endurance, shoulder function, technique, and practice into play.
“Unlike a maximal strength test, a dead hang requires an individual to maintain force over time,” Prashan Anbalagan, an exercise physiology researcher at the University of Western Australia and the National University of Singapore, told me. Gravity doesn’t grade on effort, apparently. A strong person carrying more mass may drop off the bar before a lighter person with weaker hands.
Anbalagan cites a 2025 training study in which hang times improved across all groups, while maximal grip strength improved less consistently. The finding suggests that the dead hand test and maximal strength test track different qualities. In other words, hang time measures sustained upper-body endurance relative to your weight, not grip strength itself. To date, no study has shown that hang time predicts mortality, so applying the grip data to the bar remains an assumption.
Even the grip research describes an association. Grip partly stands in for overall strength: a 2018 meta-analysis of roughly 1.9 million adults found that leg strength also predicted lower mortality. Grip and leg tests often flag different people at risk, suggesting grip carries some independent information about muscle health.
None of this shows that training your hands alone lowers your risk of disease or prolongs your life.
Does Dead Hang Time Predict Longevity?
Anbalagan cautions that a longer dead hang shouldn’t be read as better cardiorespiratory fitness, metabolic health, lower body strength, or balance. “These qualities require their own appropriate training stimuli,” he said.
That doesn’t make dead hangs useless. Climbers have used hangboards for decades to build the forearm endurance and shoulder strength that hard routes demand. For the rest of us, sustained grip is a capacity that matters more with age: holding a railing on a slick staircase, catching yourself during a stumble, carrying a heavy bag up a flight of steps.
As for a reasonable time, targets of one to two minutes circulate widely online, and they can serve as useful training goals, but no measurement of length has been validated as a longevity threshold.
If You Want to Measure Your Grip Strength—Do This
Anbalagan advised against testing yourself against a universal benchmark, since age, sex, body mass, and training history all shift results.
To measure your grip strength, the number worth watching is your own. The key is to measure it the same way each time. Use the same bar, the same grip width, chalk or no chalk, and a fixed rule on whether regripping counts. If that number rises over a few months, you’ve improved your grip, which is a real and worthwhile result.
I tell my patients to treat the dead hang bar as one tool among many, and to build it into a program that also includes aerobic work, leg strength, mobility, and balance training.
According to Anbalagan, “The goal should be to develop physical capacities that support long-term health and everyday function, rather than relying on a single exercise to predict longevity.”
About the author: Dr. Ingrid Yang, MD, JD, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, is an internal medicine physician, longevity doctor, and bestselling author. She previously practiced law before venturing into the medical field. Dr. Yang is also an integral member of Outside’s Medical Review Board. When she’s not treating patients, you can find her doing yoga, meditating, or traveling.
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