Grow Taller by Doing Pull-Ups and Hanging On A Chin-Up Bar

Very early on in the website, I wrote a rather short and superficial article looking at the possibility of using chin-up bars and doing pull ups to grow taller. It is still one of the most searched for terms (available in the post “Grow Taller By Hanging On A Bar”). My opinion back then was that pull-ups and hanging on a bar would not work in making a person taller, but after doing so much research on how the human body works, I have started to reconsider my original thinking about the topic.

People’s opinions and judgements on certain issues change over time, and this one seems to have done just that.

I started to rethink over the exercise recently when I got back into weight training. When I am doing pull-ups (or trying to do them) I could feel my entire body being pulled to the ground. Most people can not even hold onto a bar for more than a full minute before it becomes unbearable and they have to let go.

I think that most people would agree that just like the inversion tables and the gravity boots, you would find that if you did the exercise long enough, the body will naturally started to decompress and loosen up in the vertical direction as the force of gravity exerts itself on every single part of the body to pull it downwards, while the hands holding onto the bar is holding the body upwards.

In the r/BodyWeightFitness subreddit thread, someone did make the claim that they were able to increase their height by 2 full inches just through pull-ups alone. (source : http://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/comments/197ls3/pullups_made_me_grow_vertically/). Refer to our clipped picture to read what the person wrote.

The person increased their height from 1.85 meters to 1.90 meters, and increased their weight from 160 lbs to 174 lbs, which I would assume from that type of exercise is just 14 lbs of muscle. In addition, their back seems to have gotten wider. Based on those figures, it seems that for young teenage males, and adult men trying to get into shape, doing pull-ups or even just hanging on a chin-up bar is some type of miracle exercise that every guy should be doing. The benefits seems quite unbelievable.

(Note: We are fully aware that when it comes to the internet, and most especially in places like Reddit, these types of claims for height increase must always be taken with scepticism. I am fully prepared to accept the idea that the person is lying about such dramatic body changes. All claims about height increase, especially by people who said that it occurred after the age of 20, should be analyzed with great caution. People do like to lie on the internet.)

It is hard for me to believe that a person can get 2 inches out of this type of exercise. What they said as to the reason why they got such a  dramatic change is that their posture before the pull-ups was horrible. The exercises might have completely changed their posture habits. That is a reasonable explanation. If you are already walking around with great posture, it would not be realistic then to expect almost 2 inches in extra height gain.

The idea that the originator of the thread proposed is that you might also be able to increase in height from having strong back muscles, but I am not sure what he means by that. Strong muscles should not be able to hold up their weight.

In response, a poster added that when they started to do what is known as inversion training (using $60 Gravity Boots they got from Walmart), they increased their height from 5′ 6″ to 5′ 7″. To get that increase, they only seemed to have done about 5-10 minutes of inversion training after the normal workout that they usually do. If you plan to do inversion training with those ankle straps, make sure the bar you are hanging on is very secure and strong, NOT one of those pull up bars you hand on the top of the doorway. If you do that, you will fall down and hurt yourself.

Some others things mentioned was this PDF called “Relax Into Stretch – Instant Flexibility Through Mastering Muscle Tension” by Pavel Tsatsouline. I have not had the chance to review it yet. I would guess that it being a stretching guide, it is a reasonable E-Book with at least some level of value in it worth looking it.

His mentioning of an exercise called the Scapular Wall Slides is something new to me. I have never heard of this exercise before. It seems that the Scapular Wall Slides have been able to reduce the curvature of the person’s back. That might be worth adding into one’s exercise routine.

For an idea on how he went through his exercise routine, refer to his post below. It is really simple, with small increments done each day.

As a type of exercise, I recommend it. As a technique to grow taller, I would guess that it is not too reasonable to expect some results. A person did say that those gains are temporary, which is mostly true, but for some people, they would the gains to be permanent, as they change their overall posture and bone structural alignment. Expect maybe a maximum of 1 full inch in permanent increase for a small minority of people. That is still better than nothing.

{Tyler-Remember you have to stretch the bones not the muscles.  The stretch you feel could be a muscular stretch that will not make you taller.}