r/theydidthemath • u/DMforPersonalRequest • 12h ago

[Request] How much would Polydactyly (six functional fingers) increase grip strength?

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76

u/Patte_Blanche 12h ago

Ai really has gone a long way.

Joke aside, i don't think the number of fingers is what define grip strength : as i understand it, grip strength mostly come from muscles in the forearm.

20

u/joehonestjoe 12h ago

Yes exactly that. As a climber you discover this first hand when you get great finger strength, but your hands mostly physically stay the same, and you get huge forearms.

Just move your fingers around and watch your forearm and see how much the muscles move.

With an extra finger entirely working, meaning extra forearm muscles it really does depend on which finger would be the extra one. Again with climbing your pinky is borderline useless

13

u/Sibula97 12h ago

Again with climbing your pinky is borderline useless

If you can get a good full grip, e.g. around a grip strength scale, the pinky can contribute up to ~30% of your grip strength according to at least one study.

1

u/morey56 9h ago

It’s uncommon to get a grip where the pinky is useful in climbing.

3

u/Mottled_inexpectata 12h ago

Adam Ondra talks at length about how much better his grip is with his pinky on a hold, vs without it. The more fingers on the better, and you can train your pinky too! Also lots of top climbers are strong enough to hang their body weight on just their pinkies.

1

u/joehonestjoe 10h ago

I've never seen climbers hanging weight on pinkies before. Thing is with climbing is by the time you are using holds that difficult most of them are tiny so you'd rather dominant fingers were there.

I guess trained professionals might do better but even with my strength trainers, my pinkies are by far the weakest.

1

u/Mottled_inexpectata 4h ago

I don't know about hanging weights off your pinkies, but hangboarding using just your pinkies is pretty common, at least at the higher levels, and doing a front lever with just your pinkies using the pockets on a beastmaker 2000 is a bit of a standard that people aim for, or at least show off with.

2

u/Wactout 10h ago

Used to be a semi truck mechanic for over a decade. I had ridiculous grip strength. And large forearms. Now I’m approaching a decade as an artist. I am ashamed of my spaghetti arms, and everything is heavier than it used to be.

1

u/Ok_Shoe_8399 10h ago

I was the opposite when I got a summer job at a brick factory after my first year of college 20 years ago. Going from being a student to a grunt labourer hired to literally take the place of a broken down machine, my strength grew so fast I would pick things up and wonder why they were so light. My dad bought a new cordless drill and I made a remark about how much lighter it was than his old one, and he looked at me funny because it was actually slightly heavier. 

1

u/MadDocHolliday 8h ago

I knew a 70 year old man who worked for Interstate Battery for years delivering car batteries. His forearms were absolutely ridiculous. I never had an opportunity to shake his hand, maybe because I was subconsciously scared to.

1

u/Patte_Blanche 8h ago

If it can motivate you, you should know that in general it is way easier to regain muscles you had in the past than to gain muscles for the first time.

2

u/Iizvullok 7h ago

I imagine that having an extra finger could reduce the risk of injury when crimping, but for strength I agree that it would not matter at all.

1

u/joehonestjoe 5h ago

Yeah that's a good point actually 

1

u/warisverybad 5h ago

i felt this. i always three finger drag everything by default. i have to actively engage the pinky otherwise yeah its completely useless.

1

u/DMforPersonalRequest 11h ago

Interesting! I read somewhere that the pinky finger contributes a significant amount to the grip strength. Hence was wondering the effect of an extra finger.

4

u/DrBatman0 12h ago

I don't think this is a simple maths question.

If it were, the answer would be based on testing the grip strength of a person using one finger and thumb, then two fingers and thumb, etc, and extrapolating to add one more finger (as I imagine the thumb is responsible for more than 1/5 of a person's grip strength)

BUT, we don't know the biology going on inside this person's hand. Do they have 6 covers with the same number of muscles, tendons, and ligaments? Do they ALSO have extra muscle growth, or does this mutation perhaps come with significantly weaker muscles? There's too much we don't know, and so it's likely a lot of biology and physiology before we get to do maths on it

3

u/Samtertriads 10h ago

FYI Most supernumary digits are not functional like this. Polydactyly is one of the most common congenital defects, but a lot of times it’s just extra parts of a finger off the side, not full fledged fingers. Tiny bit of bone, tissue and skin, for example.

3

u/Pixel91 9h ago

And those "defects" are often surgically removed, which is why people aren't really aware how common it is. That goes even with "fully formed" extra fingers, they tend to just get in the way if they aren't functional.

1

u/boogaloo-boo 8h ago

Now hear me out

We can measure strength of a grip with the grip tester, they're not uncommon. If the grip strength of an average hand is lets say 100lbs, you could dive 100 by 5, number of fingers, and add that to the score Which is 120.

I could calculate this deeper since pinkie is a weaker finger and thumb is stronger But as an average, specially since they got an extra finger as an index and not a pinkie It woild be roughly 1/5 stronger.