The average 20-to-34-year-old today, for instance, was able to apply 98 pounds of force when gripping something with his right hand. In 1985, the average man could squeeze with 117 pounds of force.

Now, there is a caveat here. The participants in the North Carolina study were recruited from college and university settings, so they’re not representative of the population as a whole. If you were to look exclusively at young adults who never went to college, for instance, you might get different results.

The 1985 study wasn’t nationally representative either. It was built using volunteers from an area around Milwaukee. Many of those volunteers in the 20-to-34 age range were recruited from a university setting.

The North Carolina findings generally comport with what other research has shown. For instance, a 2013 study found that children today are less physically fit than they were 30 years ago. And the grip strength numbers reported in the North Carolina study are similar to numbers reported in a nationally-representative sample of adults the same age, although the two studies are not directly comparable because of differences in methodology.