Something I had mentioned before in the post “Increase Height And Grow Taller By Stretching” was that there was probably only 4 main exercises which are stretches that can help one potentially increase their height, at least temporarily.

One of them was the forward stretch, the second was the Cobra Position in basic Hatha Yoga, the third was where one was sitting in with the legs wrapped in the lotus position with the arms being brought above the head to the other side stretching vertically one’s lats and side stomach muscles. The last was the idea of twisting the torso from side to side.

I wondered whether the last method might be more effective than the other types of stretching since it is only type of stretching that can lossen the vertebrate and disks between the bones slightly more than the others. It is also an uncommon position for the body to be in.

I would guess that since this type of stretch is not a natural type of movement that the human body was ever needed to be in, it would be more likely to result in a disruption in the way that the human body would normally deform. This means that maybe the way that the bones are held up would change slightly, pulling at the ligaments and cartilage that hold the individual bones together to become more elastic and looser for a greater range of movement and mobility.

Like I showed in the recent post on the analysis of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome “A Study On The Possibility That Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Might Lead To Adult Height Growth“, it is possible that increased joint mobility may result in a slight increase in height since the bones don’t have to be in their fixed locations all the time. When a person is using their muscles to stretch out their entire body body by extending their arms and shoulders as high as possible, maybe the upper torso can be pushed up just slightly.

The other 3 types of stretching that I referred to in the stretching post, humans have had to do for a long time.

The forward stretch has been done by most people who were standing up and needed to pick up something on the ground without bending their knees. Even little kids in elementary school would have done this exercise.

The cobra position is probably the other position that has the most effectiveness in increasing body flexibility and realigning the spinal curvature. Most kids would also do a lot of this when they are playing to push themselves off of the ground.

The laste position where the arms are being extended over their head to the other side is something that primitive ancestors probably did to try to reach for fruits in tall trees. I doubt that this stretching would be the best type of stretching to increase height, but it might help a little.

I am not sure if this idea is even valid due to the curvature of each individual person head relative to the vertebrate. However maybe the easiest way to increase one’s height is to develop a more confident, upwards posture.

The three parts towards displaying confidence through body language in males is to…

1. Breath in the stomach
2. Pushing upwards the chest
3. Lifting the Shoulders

It is basically the idea that having one’s chest pushed outwards means that the vertebrate will be more likely to be straighter.

What I am describing is what most people do when they are getting their height measured, which is to try to maximize the height measured.

Most people who stand have some curvature in all of the sections of the vertebrate, from the cervical to the thoracic to the lumbar area.

In general there is little that simple posture and stretching can change the lumber are of the back. Only rolfing or a chiropractor can have a chance of causing the vertebrate to be aligned striaghter.

The thoracic section is usually curved and that is also not easy to straighten out. The cervical region is the area which is the most flexible.

The human body is designed so that most people can only bend in the forward direction. Contortionist are the exception. What we want to focus on is to decrease the natural curvature of the vertebrate to something that is straighter. If the series of vertebrate bones are kept taut and aligned properly, there will be less height lost from curvature.

So there is basically one concept in this idea on possibly increasing ones height. It is to use the muscles in the torso to expand out to pull the upper body area up against the gravity, thus resulting in a slightly increased measured height. However I have wondered whether lifting the shoulders up, breathing in the stomach, and pushing out the chest would mean that the overall torso would move upwards or it just seems that way.

Something else to note

Most people are actually really bad at estimating height, except for people who are 2 inches taller or shorter than them. (Whatever most men may think of themselves at being better than average height guessers, most are very wrong)

What most people do to compare their height with someone else is to look to where where they eye level is compared to the other person. For most people, as long as the eye level height of themselves is higher than the other person, they automatically assume that they are taller. What is not known to most people is that the distance from the middle of their eye level to the top tip of their head is around 4-5 inches long.

This might explain why more dominant , alpha males always tilt their head up and look straight forward instead of  lowering their head and look down on the ground.

The main point is that maybe from good strong, dominant body language where the shoulder, stomach, and chest are held in position that makes one look more dominant, it would appear to other people that one is taller.

If it actually works in using the body’s core abdominal muscles to temporarily hold up the upper torso higher to elevate one’s height is not known.

When the site first began I did a somewhat detailed and extensive post entitled “Grow Taller By Feet And Heel Implantations, Macrolane And Bio-Alcamid” on the ideas of implanting some type of foreign collagenous, elastic material into the heel to make a person taller.

Recently someone emailed me to take a closer look at the science and I felt that it was appropriate now to look back at this idea in a more scientific and analytical manner than when the site was only 1 month old when I much less information and knowledge on how growth in the human body works.

This idea on implanting a type of silicone into feet to gain upwards of only 1 inch was also mentioned in a thread entitled “Silicone implants in feets (LL 2-4cm)” on the Make Me Taller Forum

Analysis #1:

The actual article that is referenced in the thread is entitled “The latest in cosmetic surgery is hyaluronic acid“. The section that is taken and put on the Make Me Taller forum is actually sort of revealing. There is two options, go with the Microlane one or the Bio-Alcamid one. The Bio-Alcamid one is supposed to be permanent. The maximum height achievable with oen surgery is supposed to be 2 cms. For getting the temporary type of injection using the Microlane, one would pay around $1500 while the Bio-Alcamid would coast slightly more. If one wanted to increase their height more than 2 cms, they need to come back for subsequent surgeries.

The actual surgery seems to be extremely simple. There is the anesthetic injection in the beginning. Then the prosthesis is injected into the feet heel.  The prosthesis is not actually a physical device, but a polymer. The polymer seems to be a rubber like liquid form, which is injected into a needle into the heel of the foot. It takes only 30 minutes

As for the actual article reference , the stuff on hyaluronic acid, the idea is reasonable but would not work. Hyaluronic acid is one of the major components of the proteoglycans and glycoaminoglycans in the cartilage matrix and act as the lubricant in joint cavities. Along with aggrecan, hyaluronic acid is the most common element in synovial joints like the knee.

Hyaluronic Acid does have some good application in medicine and cosmetics (source). It has been used to remove wrinkles temporarily, decrease neck lines, make face look fuller, improve acnes scars.

The compound is very safe and is organic, and is made by the human body. It is shown to also stimulate collagen production a little. I even wrote a few posts about the possibility of using hyaluronic acid to gain a little bit of height in the posts…

1.  “Increase Height And Grow Taller Using Hyaluronic Acid” 
2.  “New Proposed Method To Increase Height And Grow Taller Using TGF-Beta1, Hyaluronic Acid, And Autologous Synovial Fluid” 

I would even list Hyaluronic Acid as one of the only compounds, besides Glucosamine Sulfate which has a chance to help adult humans increase their height, if just a little in the Supplements Guide section. The way that hyaluronic acid lubricates joints means that there is a chance that joint cavities will expand slightly from increased Hyaluronan consumption.

Interpretation

I would guess that most people who wish to gain some extra height would wish it to be permanent, not temporary. If the surgery was to just make a person 2 cms taller temporarily, it might just be smarter if the person wore lifts and elevator shoes, or get those height increasing socks with the thick insoles in them. The cost is around $1500 for the MicroLane is not permanent but lasts just 12-18 months. It is composed of hyaluronic acid which is hardened to be more polymer-like.

I would rather do more research on the permanent option, which seems to only cost a little more ($300). Let’s see what the Bio-Alcamid can do.

Analysis #2

From an article on website called DailyXtra.com entitled “The Bio-Alcamid Disaster” it is revealed that this compound was manufactured by a company based in Italy but it resulted in some severe facial deformities as side effects and complications.

Bio-Alcamid seems to have been used in the past in helping improve the facial appearance of people who had HIV and suffered through lipoatrophy, which is when the collagen and fat in the face becomes removed due to the antiretroviral drug cocktail solution taken to treat HIV (developed in the 90s)

Apparently the Bio-Alcamid was supposed to be designed with some type of protective layering around itself but there was none. From one source, it states about the protective layer…

“Once implanted, Bio-Alcamid, unlike many other injectable fillers, becomes covered by a very thin collagen capsule (0.02 mm) which completely surrounds the gel, isolating it from the host tissues and making it a real endogenous prosthesis…”

The primary active ingredient is called polyalkylimide which is a type of polymer. From the study “Cheek augmentation with Bio-Alcamid in facial lipoatrophy in HIV seropositive patients.”…

“Bio-Alcamid, which is an injectable, biocompatible, nontoxic, nonallergenic soft tissue filler designed to correct tissue deficits of various volume by intratissue administration…”

The composition of the BIo-Alcamid are “… a gel polymer comprising exclusively of networks of alkyl-imide groups (approximately 4%) and nonpyrogenic water (approximately 96%). Alkyl-imide belongs to the family of acryl-derivatives and its polymeric structure does not contain free monomers.”

Interpretation

The idea of injecting polymers into heels to gain around 1-2 extra inches is not reasonable. The people who tried the Bio-Alcamid polymer on their face was trying to make themselves better looking after loosing so much collagen and fat. The Bio-Alcamid would over time settle in a way that distorted the face to look ugly. If the same Bio-Alcamid was injected into the feet, over time the polymer would start to loss it’s strength and start to distribute on the heel in uneven ways, making the heel also deformed. If the face which has no loading applied to it causes the Bio-Alcamid to start having problems, there is no way that Bio-Alcamid would ever be able to keep its structure and integrity (in a strength of materials sense) permanently. It would break down eventually, go into the body stream, and converted in the same way that adipose tissue and collagen are in the body.

So the idea of injecting any type of polymer as heel implants won’t work. The implant at the bottom of the bottom would get so much loading from the daily wear and tear of walking that it would eventually break apart, turning it into a jelly-like substance that gets absorbed into the body.

Many months ago I wrote only a short post looking at the phenomena of indeterminate growth and wondered whether it was possible to trigger that type of evolutionary or ecological step in humans entitled “Indeterminate Growth And Mammals“. Humans, like most mammals, experience determinate growth, which means that at some point, their growth will be stopped due to bone constraints. The bone constraint is when the bones don’t get any longer because the force to expand the bone volumetrically in any direction is too large for anything reasonable to do.

The reason why indeterminate growth is possible in some creatures is that the tissue that is holding the overall body form in place is cartilage, not bone. Bones are strong, light, and porous but they are too strong as well as being too brittle to be plastically deformed. Even if the necessarily high force was applied in a tensile way, the bones would rather fracture and break in half than to stretch out.

The types of animals which most people know do experience indeterminate growth lare fish and reptiles. The sharks, the largest types of fish in the world actually don’t have bones but cartilage which create the overall body shape. The backbone or vertebrate structure of sharks are cartilage, not bone tissue. This means that with enough nutrients being difussed through the cartilage backbone of a shark, the cartilage can theoretically get larger in size, making each of the cartilage vertebrate bigger, pushing the fish longer and longer. For fish, height for them is length. The bigger the cartilage get, the longer the fish become.

The size of how big fish can get can be huge. A good example is how big some catfish becomes. It may be hard to find catfish these days over 50 lbs and 3 feet long but there were stories of catfish growing to over 12 feet long when the European settlers first came to the Americas. Certain fish can live very long, and they never stop growing. The only way that fish size is usually limited is because the bigger fish are either caught by humans or eaten by something slightly bigger than them. This shows that as long as a fish is not eaten by a bigger animal or caught by humans, certain fish species will grow longer and longer until they become monsters. I am not sure whether some aquatic animals ever grow so big that they have no natural predators and actually die from natural causes like disease and infections. I guess the idea of the squid which grows into the giant squid might answer the issue with an affirmation.

The issue for humans to develop anything like indeterminate growth is to turn their bones into cartilage which can continuously get nutrients through diffusion through cartilage matrix collagen, produce chondrocytes from a mesenchyme location, and never experience growth plates closure.

Of course the likely result is that the cartilage is not strong enough to support the adult weight of the human individual. the cartilage tissue collapses in thickness, and the result is the vascularization of the cartilage area leading to calcification and bone tissue.

The reason why fish can experience indeterminant growth and have cartilage as the main supporting tissue is because they are living in the water, which has a bouyancy force that is pushed upwards. The effect of earth’s gravitational force is actually decrease substantially, if not completely negated. (forgive me if my conceptual physics understanding is completely wrong here)

If we do a fluid statics problem to see how the hydrostatic forces act in water in terms of point to point, we know that from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere to the ground sea level, the average atmospheric pressure is 1 atm or 760 mm Hg (Hg is the shorthand for mercury).

Usually Patm= 1 atm = 101325 Pa

To find the downward pressure at any level of water (or fluid) below the surface of the water, which is assumed at ground level, we use the formula…

Patm + rho*g*h = P

rho is density and the density of water is around 1000 kg/m^3. g is the gravitational constant which is about 9.81 m/s^2. So the pressure exerted on a fish or aquatic creature in the back (assuming that they are swimming in a horizontal direction with a dorsal and ventral side) is determined by the depth at which they live. However, from basic hydrostatic pressure principles, they also have a force that is pushing upwards on their body. This means that instead of in terms of the vertical growth that humans are thinking of, pushing upwards against the gravitational downward force of gravity, aquatic animals focus on growing longer, increasing in the horizontal direction. Since there is no forces that is pushing in the lateral direction, except for the hydrostatic pressures, the fish don’t have a force that is holding them back from growing longer.

They can have cartilage tissue instead of bones because the environment they live in does not have the forces pushing in the direction which would inhibit their growth, which is to grow longer horizontally.

Recently I wrote a post entitled “Growth Plates In Elephants Never Close Or Close Extremely Late Suggesting They Experience Indeterminate Growth (Important)” showing that the largest animals on land, the elephant might actually live to be around 150 years old and some elephant species might have cartilage belts in their legs meaning that they never stop growing throughout life. Even for elephants who are in their 5th to 6th decade, there is still cartilage found in their long bones indicating that they are still growing.

Something that was interesting is that even if the cartilage in the elephant’s legs have ossified, their vertebrate bones still have growth plate cartilage, so they might not be growing vertically longer but they are growing horizontally longer as their vertebrate bones get wider and bigger.

Implications For Height Increase

Humans are a land living, air breathing mammal species. For almost all of us, the cartilage which we were born with which allows us to grow taller eventually disappears. For some creatures, their body is held up in their respective structure by a type of tissue that is not as hard and brittle and strong as the bone.

Sharks and most fish have cartilage and that is okay since they live in the water, which forces them to focus on growing longer. Reptiles like snakes also have vertebrate which are very flexible. Snakes also supposedly never stop growing. However these types of species are all focused on growing longer, not taller.

To grow taller, we have to like the elephant. The elephant supposed have growth plates in their legs for a very long time. They also seem to keep growing horizontally due to unfused vertebrate almost to old age, at least from mammoth and asian elephant studies.

I am not sure which mechanism allows elephants to keep their growth plate for so long, especially since they are so much heavier than humans and there might be more weight or load per square inche of cartilage and chondrocytes than the average human body.

It is suggested that we study the signalling pathway of the growth plate process in elephants and compare them to human vertical growth to see what they are doing right in being able to keep their growth plates around for multiple decades beyond what the human species can do.

Something that I am starting to use as a rule of thumb to find possible chemical compounds that can lead to at least a little bit of height increase in adults is that if it seems to have ability to decrease the symptoms of arthritis or osteoarthritis, there is a good chance it would help in improving the physiological function and structure of the articular cartilage in the end of our long bones, like the hip and knees. As a result, it might mean that it makes the cartilage layer thicker, giving us a few millimeters of extra height.

Something I did find which is used in improving knee osteoarthritis is known as sodium pentosan polysulfate. There are just a few of the studies I’ve found which shows its possible clinical uses.

Study #1: Sodium pentosan polysulfate resulted in cartilage improvement in knee osteoarthritis – An open clinical trial

Background

Pentosan polysulfate sodium (pentosan) is a semi-synthetic drug manufactured from beech-wood hemicellulose by sulfate esterification of the xylopyranose hydroxyl groups. From in vitro and animal model studies, pentosan has been proposed as a disease modifying osteoarthritis drug (DMOAD). The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy, safety, and patient satisfaction in patients with mild radiographic knee osteoarthritis (OA) findings and OA-associated symptoms and signs.

Methods

“…Treatment consisted of 6 weekly subcutaneous injections (sc) of pentosan (2 mg/kg). Patients were clinically assessed at entry and 1 to 8, 11, 15, 24 & 52 weeks post treatment.”

Study #2: Pentosan Polysulfate: A Novel Therapy for the Mucopolysaccharidoses

Abstract

Pentosan polysulfate (PPS) is an FDA-approved, oral medication with anti-inflammatory and pro-chondrogenic properties. We have previously shown that animal models of the mucopolysaccharidoses (MPS) exhibit significant inflammatory disease, contributing to cartilage degeneration. Enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) only partly reduced inflammation, and anti-TNF-alpha antibody therapy significantly enhanced clinical and pathological outcomes. Here we describe the use of PPS for the treatment of MPS type VI rats.

I did some research on the references and citations of the 2nd study and it did mention one study published which I think most other height increase researchers would agree makes the Pentosan a very good candidate as another possible chemical compound which has chondrocyte proliferation and eventual height increasing potential. The study is…

Pentosan polysulfate promotes proliferation and chondrogenic differentiation of adulthuman bone marrow-derived mesenchymal precursor cells.

Authors: Ghosh P, Wu J, Shimmon S, Zannettino AC, Gronthos S, Itescu S.

From the conclusions…

“This is the first study to demonstrate that PPS promotes MPC proliferation and chondrogenesis, offering new strategies for cartilage regeneration and repair in osteoarthritic joints.”

Results

Significant MPC proliferation was evident by day 3 at PPS concentrations of 1 to 5 microg/ml (P < 0.01). In the presence of 1 to 10 microg/ml PPS, a 38% reduction in IL-4/IFNgamma-induced MPC apoptosis was observed. In 5-day MMC, 130% stimulation of PG synthesis occurred at 2.5 microg/ml PPS (P < 0.0001), while 5.0 microg/ml PPS achieved maximal stimulation in the 7-day and 10-day cultures (P < 0.05). HA and DS at > or = 5 microg/ml inhibited PG synthesis (P < 0.05) in 5-day MMC. Collagen type II deposition by MMC was significant at > or = 0.5 microg/ml PPS (P < 0.001 to 0.05). In MPC-PPS pellet cultures, more PG, collagen type II but less collagen type I was deposited than in controls. Real-time PCR results were consistent with the protein data. At 5 and 10 microg/ml PPS, MPC osteogenic differentiation was suppressed (P < 0.01).

Interpretation of the Abstract

Just from a small dosage ranging from 2.5-10 micrograms/mL of the PPS, 5 major things happened.

1. Increase in the adult adipose tissue derived mesenchymal stem cells
2. Reduction in Interleukin-4 induced MSCs apoptosis
3. Stimulated more proteoglycan synthesis
4. Collagen Type II by the stem cells were increased
5. The PPS also managed to suppress the stem cells from turning into bone cells.

All I can say it that this new compound Sodium Pentosan Polysulfate, aka Pentosan, has some really promising features which would make it good as an additional compound used for the height increase research.