Showing posts with label About Me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About Me. Show all posts

Sunday, March 14, 2010

About the Loads I use

I have been weightlifting for six years.  I decided I really wanted to grow taller for five.  Easyheight provided a lot of inspiration for me but I was sick of seeing the same old cobra stretches and scam crap like Growtaller4idiots.  Easyheight gave me the mindset that I am an experimenter.  Everybody who does a height increase routine is.  We are all scientists.

I don't know what the best exercises are to do.  Nobody does.

People don't even know what the best exercises are for weightlifting.  We know which lifts are good for using a lot of weight but not which are good for hypertrophy.  I am in this to win it.  In Back to the Future, Christopher Lloyd said "If you set your mind to it you can accomplish anything..." except for height increase.  For years, I've heard people say you can't grow taller with 'proof' riddled with logical fallacies or just blanket statements like "it's impossible."

I use as much weight as I do because I'm an experimenter.  I want to put every possible tool I can available in order to gain height.  Sometimes, I've lost track a little bit but this blog has helped me focus.  I saw the movie Julie & Julia and thought if a blog about cooking could bring people together imagine what a blog about something really important like height increase could do.

This blog is a filtering service.  I go through pubmed articles and other available research to see which is applicable to height increase.  Sometimes that research is my own.  The key to injury prevention is practice and control(work your way up in weight) even exercises like the upright row which cause shearing forces on the tendons and ligaments(anatomical parts that do not heal as well as muscle and bone) take a while to deal any significant damage.

I'm a researcher.  I'm presenting my research.  Over time, we'll know more about which exercises are best to increase height but right now we have to decide how badly we really want this and if we're willing to take chances that are head of the curve(even if that risk is wasted time and ridicule).

Monday, February 1, 2010

About Me

Taking a page from pro wrestling, today I'm going to focus less on the science of growing taller and more about my individual drama of attempting to "grow taller."

I was going to UCSD and majoring in economics.  There's nothing to do at UCSD in between classes so I went to their gym and did random exercises as often as possible to try to do anything to "get buff."  Eventually I started to do some research on the internet and saw the current bodybuilding mantra of only doing a body part once a week.  I did a HIT routine(High Intensity Training).  Doing a body part only once a week left my unsatisfied bodybuilding wise.  So I researched on the internet to try to find a routine that would allow me to train more often, this routine was HST(Hypertrophy Specific Training).  What was interesting about the routine is that it mentioned that the lighter weight higher rep sets were good for building tendon and ligament strength.

There was more to the body than muscle I realized.  My thirst for physical improvements was not quenched for HST and I started watching pro wrestling, World's Strongest Man, and Olympic Lifting.  I heard color commentators call 5'10" males small and make 5'9" females seem like the norm.  It seemed that one inch of height was worth a lot more than any amount of muscle.  Other determinants of skeletal size were largely ignored including wingspan, foot length, etc.  It was all about what your X'XX" was.  On bodybuilding forums, your height is always listed first followed by your weight.

I started going to a chirapractor and asked him about how bone works.  He mentioned something about bone remodeling(which is quite often confused with bone modeling) which states that the bone tissue is renewed over time.  He would crack my back and I would be 1/2 an inch taller(I vary between 5'7 1/2" and 5'8 1/2") but that wasn't good enough.

At this point I graduated from UCSD and got a job working in a research lab as a favor to one of my parents.  The job was close to 24 hour fitness so I went to that gym.  The job had a lot of spare time so I researched bone growth.  I found easyheight.com and read about microfractures and the different ways of how to cause them.  So I started to experiment and created my own routine which I performed at 24 hour fitness.  Easyheight.com had a lot of good ideas but it was missing something, it was virtually nixing out heavy weights.  If you're going to cause impact why not cause IMPACT?

So I performed my routine at 24 hour fitness(revolving around what management would and would not let me perform) but I wanted more information about bone.  So, I started to get an Exercise Physiology degree at Mesa College.  In the Human Anatomy and Human Physiology courses that I took there was hardly even a page about how bone grows.  And the fact that growth plates close after puberty in no way prevents height increase from other means.  In the professional field I was hearing the same things I read on internet sites including stuff like "Arnold Swarzennager is actually not that tall" so I dropped out of the program.

Eventually, I wanted to use heavier weights than 24 hour fitness could provide so I began working out at World's Gym and that's where I am today.  All in all, my height increase journey has been 6 years(so far).  I'm writing this blog to try to find information about height increase that I haven't heard before.  I tried reading articles on pubmed but it was hard to find any that were relevant.  The information about bone in school is sparse and you have to wade through a lot of other irrelevant information.  So, I decided to write a blog to try to meet up with similar height increase enthusiasts and I decided to monetize it as well because frankly I would much rather make money doing something I love(questing for height) than anything else.