Sunday, January 24, 2010

Finding the right exercises to increase height

Building bone is the key to increasing height. Bone is the limiting factor. Things like spinal fluid and perhaps cartilage in the knee may contribute to height and if those areas are not in check(for example a sublaxed disc) then it may result in a reduction in height but bone is by far the biggest determinant of height. Tendons and ligaments do not heal nearly as fast as bone and if the bone is growing then it is natural to assume that the tendons and ligaments will adapt as well.

In terms of muscle, the longest muscle in the world will look squatty on a short bone.

The height increase sites state that you must first cause microfractures and then you must stretch out these microfractures(mimicing the limb lengthening procedure). But is stretching microfractures really necessary? Certainly causing microfractures is at least a necessary but perhaps not sufficient condition so if you're not causing microfractures any height increase routine will fail. But, what if we define the second part of limb lengthening surgery not as stretching microfractures but as perhaps causing new microfractures or "keeping" microfractures.

If you cause a fracture that creates space for new bone to grow(microfractures are the same as fractures but on a much smaller scale). Fractures fundamentally denature the bone(you don't want to fracture the bone so severly as to say have a chunk of bone chip off) creating space for new bone to grow.

So, all forms of causing microfractures will lead to height increase. The ways of causing microfractures are impact, compression, strain(stretching), and twisting. It may be possible to cause these forces by hand but it is much easier to have a weight do it to you than to try to do it yourself.

Tapping has to be done by hand(can be done with a weight or hammer) and has the advantage that it can be done on short bones(bones that tend to be shaped weird and do not tend to be as load bearing as the long bones such as the head or feet).

You can do jumping but the body will try to absorb most of the impact with the muscle(the more the knees are bent the more impact that is absorbed by the muscle with the exception of the knee being bent to a ridiculous degree in which case the impact begins to be taken by tendons/ligaments).

Impact can be covered by stomping(muscle will always absorb the impact to some degree) and you can use more weight if you stomp.

Strain is your typical hanging from a bar with weights. I find though that holding weights on a decline bench works better than an inversion table.

Compression is putting a bunch of weight on your back or via a leg press(I've found that other positions aren't really designed to take a high amount of load).

Twisting is hard to pull off because a lot of the load goes on the muscle.

2 comments:

  1. There's also an age limit factor that needs to be considered when adding height.

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