Grip Strength

Introduction

Grip strength is the force applied by your hand. It is an important part of daily life from eating to playing baseball. There are three main types of grip strength depending on the way you use your hands. In the crush grip (the most common), your hand wraps around an object so that your palm and all your fingers rest against the object. This grip is used for breaking objects with pressure. In the pinch grip, you grasp an object with only your thumb and one finger. Pointer or middle fingers usually have significantly more strength than ring and pinkie fingers. In the supportive grip, you are measuring your ability to carry an object for a long period of time, such as a sack of groceries. This grip is normally used as an indicator of how much your hand fatigues or tires over time. In this activity, you will use a Gas Pressure Sensor and a 2-liter bottle to compare the grip strength of your right and left hands. Pressure can be used as a relative strength indicator, since pressure is measured in kiloPascals (thousands of Newtons per square meter) and everyone in your class will be squeezing bottles with the same area. After you have analyzed your data, you will compare your grip strength with that of your classmates.

Objectives

In this experiment, you will

• Use a Pressure Sensor and NXT to measure your grip strength.
• See which of your hands has the greater grip strength.
• Learn what happens to your grip strength as time goes by.
• Compare your grip strength with your classmates.