The training that doesn't look like training - a squeeze test and a wobble drill - is carrying more predictive weight than almost anything else in your programme.
Ask most masters athletes what their training is "for" and you'll get an answer about a race, or a lift, or a park run PB. Ask what's actually predicting how they'll be doing in twenty years, and the honest answer is less exciting: how hard they can squeeze, and how well they can stand on one leg. Neither makes for a great session photo, but both are backed by some of the largest, most robust data in exercise science.
What grip strength is actually telling you
The Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study, published in The Lancet in 2015, followed nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries and measured grip strength alongside a full set of standard health markers, including blood pressure. The findings were stark. For every 5kg reduction in grip strength, the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was 1.16, for cardiovascular mortality 1.17, and for non-cardiovascular mortality 1.17 - all highly statistically significant. Weaker grip was also associated with elevated risk of myocardial infarction (hazard ratio 1.07) and stroke (hazard ratio 1.09) per 5kg reduction.
The detail that made the study a landmark was that grip strength was found to be a better predictor of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular death than systolic blood pressure, a measurement that dominates almost every routine health check. Grip strength isn't just a party trick or a proxy for how much you deadlift, it's a genuine marker of overall physiological robustness. Plus, it's cheap and fast to train directly - farmer's carries, dead hangs, thick-bar work, or simply not neglecting grip as an accessory to your main lifts.
What balance training is actually protecting against
Falls are the injury masters athletes tend to associate with "other people" - until a bad step on a trail run or an icy pavement puts training on hold for months. The Cochrane systematic review on exercise for preventing falls in community-dwelling older adults, one of the most rigorously assessed bodies of evidence in this field, found that exercise reduces the rate of falls by 23% overall (rate ratio 0.77) and cuts the proportion of people who fall at least once by 15% (risk ratio 0.85) - translating to roughly 195 fewer falls per 1,000 people followed over a year.
The review didn't treat all exercise as equal, and this is the part worth actually programming around. Balance and functional training on its own showed a 24% reduction in fall rate, rated high-certainty evidence - the strongest classification the review gives. Programmes combining balance and functional work with resistance training showed an even larger 34% reduction, though rated with slightly lower certainty. Tai chi showed a 19% reduction, rated low-certainty. Notably, the review found insufficient evidence that resistance training alone, walking, dance, or flexibility work delivered a fall-prevention benefit on their own - the balance component specifically is doing the work.
Building it in without it eating your programme
Neither of these justifies its own training day. Grip work can slot onto the end of a lifting session - a few sets of dead hangs or farmer's carries cost you five minutes. Balance work is single-leg stands, controlled step-downs, or a short balance-and-functional circuit two or three times a week, the kind of thing that fits into a warm-up or a recovery day without displacing anything that feels like "real" training. Or simply standing on one leg whilst brushing you teeth!
The mistake is treating both as optional because they don't look like performance training. They're not there to make you faster next season. They're there to make sure you still have a next season, and the one after that, at a standard worth showing up for.
The long game
The training that gets logged, celebrated and posted is rarely the training doing the most for how long you keep training at all. A squeeze test and a wobble drill aren't glamorous, but the evidence behind them is about as solid as exercise science gets. Do the boring work consistently, alongside everything else, and you're not just training for this season - you're protecting your ability to have the next dozen.
Sources
- Prognostic value of grip strength: findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study. The Lancet, 2015. - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982160/
- Exercise for preventing falls in older people living in the community. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Sherrington C et al., 2019 (CD012424). - https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD012424_exercise-preventing-falls-older-people-living-community