Tools

Why there's no percentile here

The obvious thing to build would tell you what percentile your hang time is for your age. We started to build exactly that, and then went looking for the data it would need.

It doesn't exist. Handgrip strength does have proper population norms — it's been measured in large representative health surveys for years, which is why you can meaningfully be told where your grip sits. Dead hang duration has nothing comparable. The "average hang time by age" tables circulating online trace back to gym convention and small samples, not to anything you could compute a percentile from. Presenting it as one would have been inventing a statistic and putting a decimal point on it.

So the tool gives you bands instead, and says on the page that they're training reference points rather than population statistics. The comparison that actually means something — and the one that motivates people — is against your own first attempt, which is real, is yours, and is what the tool tracks.

What else we won't do

The plan runs four weeks and then stops. A twelve-week schedule generated from a single test looks more valuable and is mostly fiction, because nobody can know your rate of adaptation before you've trained. Four weeks, then re-test, then a block built from the new number.

And nothing in it asks you to hang to failure. Accumulating time under load below your limit is how grip and shoulder endurance are normally built, and it matters more after fifty, where connective tissue recovers more slowly than muscle.

The tool will also decline to give you a plan at all if you flag a shoulder problem, a bone density diagnosis, a cardiac issue or nerve symptoms — or if you haven't confirmed that your bar is safe. You still get your number. What you don't get is a programme we have no business handing you.

Educational guidance, not medical advice.