I was planning on going through a dozen websites that dealt with height increase and how to grow taller. These were old websites and urls I had found many months ago, around August of last year which were around and that I found which I had always wanted to go back over to see if there might be something of real value that a researcher can glean from them.

1. Height Discussion – URL: www.heightdiscussion.com – Tagline: Grow Taller Community
2. The Centre Of Anthropometrical (Orthopaedical) Cosmetology And Correction – URL: www.rucosm.com – Tagline: expert in legs correction & lengthening since 1992
3. Is There A Way To Get Taller – URL: isthereawaytogettall.blogspot.com – Tagline:
4. Yogasagar Yoga Therapy – Increase Height – URL: www.yogasagar.org/yoga-therapy/increase-height/ – Tagline:
5. Exercises To Increase Height – URL: www.exercisestoincreaseheight.org/ – Tagline:
6. LSJL Tester – WordPress – URL: lsjltester.wordpress.com/ – Tagline: This WordPress.com site is the cat’s pajamas
7. Short No More – www.shortnomore.com/tag/deep-sleep/ – Tagline:
8. Charged Audio – ChargedAudio™ Grow Taller Now NLP Subliminal CD (D19) – URL: www.chargedaudio.com/bodyfitnessseries/d19.html – Tagline: Grow Taller. It’s No Accident. In 14 Days, You Can Learn How!
9. How To Grow Taller Answers – URL: howtogrowtalleranswers.com/how-can-i-open-my-growth-plates-and-grow-taller.html – Tagline: Grow Taller Answers, Advice And Information
10. Helpo Growth Formula – URL: helpo-grow-taller-supplements.blogspot.com/ – Tagline: Tips to help you grow taller
11. Height-Increasing – URL: www.height-increasing.com/category/facts-growth-height/ – Tagline: Your Complete Guide For Height Increasing
12. How To Get Taller – URL: howtogettaller.org/the-role-of-growth-hormone-for-height/ – Tagline: Be Tall and Be Cool

Analysis

The website Height Discussion turns out to be a very new forum which has a few posts and threads. There are a few moderators but it does not seem that this new grow taller forum is going to get enough traction to attract the high number of people needed. There seems to be already a few threads started that are spam like in nature so I would avoid this website/forum for now until they can get the spam issue in check.

I had originally put this website called The Centre Of Anthropometrical (Orthopaedical) Cosmetology And Correction into the Resources section as a link to limb lengthening services offered in a part of Russia. The website does look legitimate and linked to some medical clinic in Volgograd, Russia. The contact us address is listed in Volgograd so this center does seem to exist and offer the limb lengthening servies. They are associated with the Ilizarov Clinic in Kurgan.

The blog called Is There A Way To Get Taller based off of the blogspot platform is now gone. If you put the domain name in, nothing shows up.

The website section on Yogasagar Yoga Therapy for learning how to increase height has also been deleted. It seems that the entire website for yogasagar has been deleted as well. There is just a page with links to yoga articles which is very generic and many ads around. Nothing useful

The website Exercises To Increase Height seems to have also been shut down and the website completely removed. There is nothing there at all.

The blog LSJL Tester seems to be a valid blog which wanted to test the idea that Tyler proposed but it seems that it has not been updated on in quite a while. It was started last year (2012) around the May-April time where the person was doing a good job in documenting the progress. However it seems that no progress had been made and nothing has been written about. The person did disappear for a full year and say that they came back but it seems that disappeared again. Overall, this website also fails in its ability in the person to keep writing posts to inform the readers what is happening.

The website Short No More seems to have also disappeared. If the person who created it thought that the process in doing the research to find a way to “cure” shortness was going to be easy, then they made a big mistake. I checked both the domain names ShortNoMore.com and ShortNoMore.org and found nothing.

The Charged Audio website seems to be selling an Audio product called Grow Taller Now NLP Subliminal CDs which are based on the idea of NLP and subliminal messages reprogramming the subconscious mind. It seems that the website for Charged Audio sells all kinds of CD programs that claim to be able to help a person grow taller using hypnosis and binaural beats technology. I wrote a an old post about the possibility of using Binaural Beats to increase height “Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Brain Wave Binaural Beats“ where I said at the end that the product will not work.

The website How To Grow Taller Answers seems to be another one of those websites created to develop a web of backlinks to help certain websites move up in Google Rankings. The website seems to be just 4 pages long, with Google Adsense ads everywhere, and ads selling the Grow Taller 4 Idiots and Grow Taller 4 Dummies E-Products, which obviously don’t work. There is a section as the bottom which does list soem good height increase resources but everything else is just a long sales page that probably was created 4-5 years ago to sell the scam E-Products.

The blog Helpo Grow Taller Supplements was created to sell the product Helpo Growth Formula.  I wrote a review on the Helpo product many months ago in the post “Product Review VIII: Helpo Growth Formula”. In that review I got slightly angry in bashing the product and whoever sold it to scam people out of their money. This blog is useless as a resource.

The website Height-Increasing seems to be a 2 page website created to give only very superficial information about common sense ideas on how to either eat healthy food or look taller from changing one’s clothing and fashion. It was not helpful at all. Created back in 2006, the website has not been updated or added upon since 2009. The number of posts is only around 5-6, but the articles are reasonably informative, which is something one can find in any Grow Taller E- Book.

The website How To Get Taller (dot org) is another website created by someone back in 2009 with two posts on the wordpress and left to die out. Nothing has been added upon in years.

Analysis On Additional Websites…

Since this post is to do a batch like process of going through and reviewing as many other height increase websites and blogs as possible, I wanted to add a few more websites to the group for a 2nd round of analysis.

1. Growing Taller Stretches – URL: growingtallerstretches.com/ – Tagline: Growing Taller Stretches
2. How to Grow Taller Naturally and Increase Height – URL: www.growtall.asia – Tagline: Increase stature and grow taller tips, growing taller secrets, grow taller stretches and grow taller exercises
3. All Height – URL: allheight.blogspot.com/ – All about height. – Tagline: Serving detailed height measurement information.
4. Grow Taller Secret – URL: grow-taller-secret.blogspot.com/ – Tagline: Free tips on How to Increase your Height
5. Grow Taller Naturally – URL: www.coprobol.org/ – Tagline: Easy techniques to help you grow taller.
6. Hypnosis 2 Height – URL: www.hypnosis2height.com/ – Tagline: Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Grow Taller with Hypnosis

Full Analysis 

The website Growing Taller Stretches seems to be another sales pages created with SEO in mind. There is only 4 posts ever written with Google Adsense strategically placed selling the Grow Taller 4 Idiots product. The website is not helpful as a resource.

The website Grow Tall with a dot asia ending is one of those websites which turns out to be much more useful and informative than 95% of the grow taller websites I find out there. It seems that the person who created the website back in 2008 really was trying to do some research to see if anything would work. He/she wrote a few posts which are similar in subject as what are found in this website, looking at how the element of stature/height affects society and people’s perception of what it means to be tall or short. From April of 2008 until 2010, the creator did put up around 60-100 posts which are very short in length and have useful information.

Something I would want to criticize the website designer is the fact that the way they put Adsense Ads so blatantly on the webpage and keep trying to push certain supplements which they say can help people grow taller by using Amazon Affiliates. They wrote very short posts about reviewing Robert Brand’s books and Peak Height but they still are promoting those produts when it should not help.

In the end, I am not sure whether this Grow Tall website was created just to make money through ads and affiliate marketing, or was it created to maybe help people. By judging the website for the quality of the posts it writes, I would say that the website was made more likely to get traffic, and eventually sell products which would never work.

The website All Height which is based on the blogspot platform seems to be created by a filipino and used to document the heights of filipino celebrities and a few other foreign celebrities and famous people. the person started the website around the same time that I did and the amount of content they have written is quite high so this website is a very good resource for a person who might be interested in knowing how tall a filipino celebrity is.

The website Grow-Taller-Secret which is also created using the blogspot platform from 2006 to 2009 has been one of the only websites that I have seen which has actually some really good, useful, in depth content. This is a website I did put in the Resources page.

The website CoProBol.com turns out to be just another website that is used as a sales page linked to the E-Product Smaller To Taller, which a regular reader of this website has given me.

The website Hypnosis 2 Height which is called The Step-By-Step Guide To Grow Taller With Hypnosis is one of those websites which is actually kind of informative and useful if a person wanted to try the ida of using hypnosis to increase their height. The website is only 9 pages large with a small section for each part, but I would say that the information is still kind of good, although not a lot in quantity. It was referenced by Giant Scientific in the resources section for years so it is somewhat credible.

Conclusion: 

These 18 websites I have found referenced around the forums and other websites on the website are mostly useless, sales pages selling E-Books but a small percentage have been helpful. A lot of the websites are now gone and some of them will probably also disappear in the years to come.

Update #3: What Has Changed Over The Last Month Towards Me Getting A Taller, Slimmer Body – June 1st, 2013

It is already June, and this website/blog has been around almost a year. The research has been wonderful and in this month actually there was a few big breakthroughs. I’ve found evidence that growth plate regeneration has already been done by a few biomedical researchers in university laboratories in the USA so now the big thing to figure out is what is the least invasive approach to embed the growth plates into the adult human bone without causing too much pain and decrease the amount of time needed to recover.

So what exactly has been going on in my life? Have I got any taller from May to June?

Diet & Weight: I have recently dropped in weight from decreasing my food intake over the last month. These are the things I have done to loss weight.

• I managed to decrease my soda/pop addiction to a fraction. Where it used to be I would drink Sprite & Cola every other day, I am now drinking 2 liter bottle of water each day for the Summer heat. 
• Since moving back to Seoul I had to give away the bike and put that in storage.
• My exercise program now focuses on doing pushups using Push Up Handles, Jump Rope for the aerobic workout, and sit-ups to decrease the fat content in my stomach.
• I’m supposed to do 40 pushups, jump rope 800 times, and do 60 situps today. That is not a lot compared to most guys who work out but I just got back to exercising after not doing it for over a year.

I don’t have a weight scale around the apartment so I am just guessing right now. I have noticed that right after I wake up, my stomach seems to be smaller and thinner. Current Weight: about 209 lbs.

Height Increase: There are no swimming pools in Seoul that are cheap and convenient so one of the only exercises I really like is not available. The good one I have found is in Everland but there is no way I am going to get on a bus for 2-3 hours just to use a pool.

So I stick to stretching. The main stretches I do, which I do 3 times a week, usually around 10 PM is with a yoga mat…

• Yoga – The local E-Mart sell perfectly reasonable priced yoga mats for 12,000 won and that is what I use to do the stretching. I focus on 3 main stretches, which is to… 1.Twist the torso, 2.Pull down on the torso, 3.Pull up on the torso.

Height Gain From May: 

I did not see any increase in height this month. My hair has grown out so the measurement error has gone back up so any slight increase I notice from the morning measurement I don’t trust.

If you want, you can read the update I did in May in the post “Update #2: What Have I Been Doing To Grow Taller And Become Healthier – May 1st, 2013”

There are all sort of exercising and training programs out there. Some are for aerobic stamina and health and others are anaerobic. I know that there are some exercising programs which advertise that they can help a person gain increased height. These include yoga and pilates. Something that I saw recently made me wonder whether there might be a much better program to  give better, more drastic results that what a person could get from yoga or pilates.

It is called Plyometrics. It seems to be derived from this idea of alternating one’s muscles dramatically from contracting one’s muscles to extending as fast as possible to stimulate speed and strength in the muscles.

A look on Google reveals that there has been a few articles that have already been written about the idea

“Grow Taller By Means Of Plyometrics Training” is a short article that was the first thing that popped up but it never explains in detail on the science why plyometrics would ever lead to increased height. In general, this article was useless and not helpful at all.

Another website called HowToJumpHigher202.com does have a few articles but a click to the website lead to nothing.

Yahoo Questions – Someone states that “Plyometrics can negatively affect your height by damaging the growth plates in your long bones….Wait until you’re 18….The reason plyometrics are so effective at building explosive power is because they focus on the eccentric (lengthening) contraction of the muscles but they place a lot of strain on your joints.”

In a Eric Cressey post entitled “Plyometrics and Growth Plates” Cressey suggests that “About the only thing you’ll get from adding a lot more plyos in is an increased risk of overuse injury” He does not say that plyometrics will lead to growth plate fracture and injury specifically but does make the point that it will cause increased risk in injuries in general.

Side Note: It seems that plyometric may actually help improve one’s vertical jump height (source: Does plyometric training improve vertical jump height? A meta‐analytical review, Does Jumping Height Increase From Plyometric Training)

The idea that I originally thought where our height might be increased through this type of rapid  muscle extension-contraction alternationg does not seem to have any validity.

Plyometrics can be used to possibly strengthen the core abdominal muscles, which would mean the upper torso muscles like the deltoids and pecs would be pushed upwards, leading to less loading on the lower vertebrate but the effect the upper torso and overall height should nearly none.

When I was reading over the sections that Matheus had written for me to look over, the issue of growth plate senescence would come up over and over again.

He would mention how senescence is from two factors, oxidative stress and free radicals. Also, Matheus suggested that free radicals and homocysteine would cause oxidative stress. A quick check with google search seems to validate his point that oxidative stress is caused by homocysteine (source: Homocysteine and oxidative stress)

It made me wonder just what types of factors would cause increased senescence. Matheus actually disagrees with Tyler’s opinion that the replication possibility of the chondrocytes from the resting zone is finite, but limitless.

One point which is very interesting he made which made me rethink how the growth plate really work is when he made the point that the speed at which the physeal chondrocytes proliferation and replicate is much faster than all other types of cells in the body. This is why these types of cells, the growth plate cells are the first types of cells that really go completely extinct, because the speed or rate at which they divide and go through their life is much faster than other cells.

While I am not a real biologist, the reasoning makes some sense. The chondrocytes do seem to be proliferating, which is just mitosis, at a much faster rate than the other types of cells. If the other types of cells like neurons, adipocytes, and others were proliferating at the same speed, we as a species would have a much shorter lifespan.

I would think about my chemical engineering days and realized that one of the easiest to identify and quantify factors which would probably effect growth plate senescence, and thus adult height is temperature.

From elementary chemistry, based on the Arrhenius equation,

Arrhenius’ equation gives the dependence of the rate constant k of a chemical reaction on the absolute temperature T (in kelvin), where A is the pre-exponential factor (or simply the prefactor), Ea is theactivation energy, and R is the Universal gas constant.

k = A*exp ( -Ea / R*T )

Under the factors that influence chemical reaction…

• Temperature: Usually conducting a reaction at a higher temperature delivers more energy into the system and increases the reaction rate by causing more collisions between particles, as explained by collision theory. However, the main reason that temperature increases the rate of reaction is that more of the colliding particles will have the necessary activation energy resulting in more successful collisions (when bonds are formed between reactants). The influence of temperature is described by the Arrhenius equation. As a rule of thumb, reaction rates for many reactions double for every 10 degrees Celsius increase in temperature, though the effect of temperature may be very much larger or smaller than this.

If we then just imagine the process of any type of cell mitosis as a chemical reaction, then clearly the rate of chondrocyte proliferation would be increased with increased Temperature.

Let’s also remember how reaction rates are actually written and set up (source: Wikipedia article on reaction rates).

Then if we assume that the mesenchymes which differentiate into the chondrocytes in the resting zone are substrates in a chemical reaction as well as the rate limiting factor, then the most simplified way to describe the height increase growth in humans is just

r = k(T) * A^(n) where A is the only element that is the substrate and n is the number of moles in the system we are analyzing.

the r would just be the loss over time of the one reactant, so r = – dA/dt

is -dA/dt = k(T) *A

So from just a simple explanation of chemical kinetics, it is very reasonable to assume that increased Temperature can increase the rate at which the growth plates reach senescence.

Then I would evidence from an old study I found entitled “Stimulation Of Bone Growth by Short-Wave Diathermy”

I am also reminded of the evolutionary-ecological heuristic rule of thumb called Bergmann’s Rule, which state that on average, people further away from the equator, in colder climates are bigger in size than people closer to the equation. This hypothesis has been challenged a lot and some people have proved that Bergmann’s Rule is actually wrong.

However the implications and hypothesis for me is very interesting. I would actually write quite extensively about this idea in multiple posts including “Bergmann’s Rule, Application On The Human Species”

I would post even further this idea that colder temperatures would be better for increased final adult height in the post “A Study Of Temperature Variation On Sea Slugs Can Explain Why People Are Taller In Colder Environments”

Interestingly, the same studies on deep sea gigantism in shellfish or crustaceans lead to the same conclusion. The specific study was “Bergmann’s Principle and Deep-Water Gigantism in Marine Crustaceans”. From the Wikipedia article on Bergmann’s Rule…

“…In marine crustaceans, it has been proposed that an increase in size with latitude is observed because decreasing temperature results in increased cell size and increased life span, both of which lead to an increase in maximum body size (continued growth throughout life is characteristic of crustaceans).”

There was even an extension to Bergmann’s Rule called Hesse’s Rule which states…

“…species inhabiting colder climates have a larger heart in relation to body weight than closely related species inhabiting warmer climates”

This rule, which I just discovered may explain why bergmann’s rule may be valid for humans.

Larger hearts, if they are not due to a disorder or pathology, means that more nutrients can be pumped to all of the regions in a person’s body. The larger heart, means higher pumping rates of the blood to all the cells, so the cells manage to live longer.

The leap in logic then is to assume that from the extra rates of blood nutrients being pumped to the growth plate region, there would be more progenitor mesenchyme cells in the epiphysis region for eventual differentiation. We already know that some compounds like Niacin do increase the proliferation of stem cells, as long as the blood flow rate is increased,leading to blood vessel dilation, which causes niacin to increase the cells.

I had mentioned the hypothesis that the recent Chinese Olympic Swimmer Ye Shiwen’s performance can be explained by two thing, her puberty induced 4 inch growth spurt, and an above average sized heart in the post “Personal Theory: Ye Shiwen Olympic Performance Of Increased Swimming Performance Can Be Explained By A Massive Growth Spurt And A Physical Abnormality” There might even be a correlation between height and heart size. 

Growth plates can be actually modulated and controlled by two factors which is related to temperature, which are heart size and rate at which the chondrocyte proliferate.

The two things that happen to a person’s body when that person is born in a colder environment are…

1. Their heart becomes bigger from prenatal growing process in the mother’s womb.
2. The rate at which the resting zone mesenchyme are depleted/differentiated into chondrocytes into the proliferation zone is slowed down.