Sugata, who is a regular reader of the website sent me this link to a website WiderShoulderBones.com which is claiming something new for me.
The people there claim that they have programs which can help you increase your shoulder width, lengthen your forearms, and lengthen the lower legs.
They seem to be based off of London, UK. The term “Harley Road” comes up over and over again for the website.
They state from the home page…
“Our achievements proves non surgical methods do work providing the correct methods are used and the right expertise is given. Bare in mind there are no known surgical methods that can widen the shoulder bones, this proves the individuals who have achieved wider shoulder bones in our Vlogs could only have achieved the results from using our program.”
Here we offer to reveal secrets that will help you to achieve the wider upper body frame you have always wanted. It is now possible to increase the width of your shoulder bones by just following our non-strenuous exercise program daily which is specifically designed to widen the bones in your shoulders in just months. You can now add inches to the width of your shoulders without having to lift any weights to bulk up muscle mass on your shoulders to acquire the additional width you want. You can of course do both. Use our program to widen your bones on your shoulders to improve your existing frame for a better structural foundation and after add muscles by exercising with weights to achieve an even more impressive frame for perfection.
If what is preventing you from having the perfect physique is the lack of width on your shoulders, then look no further, you are unlikely to find anything more simple and effective to acquire wider shoulder ‘bones’ naturally anywhere else.
There are NO apparatus or dumb bells included with our exercise program.The only successful results are achieved with our shoulder widening program that specifically targets the BONES in your shoulders. This will mean lifting weights to bulk up muscle mass on your shoulders is no longer the only method to add extra width to your shoulders. Our exercise program targets the bones in your shoulders directly, widening them, to give you the extra width (from within) you want!.
What we have achieved, is successfully designed and identified exercises that have shown to widen shoulder bones over a relatively short period of time (for bone growth) even in fully grown adults (beyond the age of 21) If they’re performed regularly. The fact is the manipulation of the human skeleton is entirely possible (through exercise) to excite growth. This means applying the correct repetitive exertions (through exercise) to areas of significance on the human skeleton can stimulate new bones to grow. Our exercise program delivers on that exact principle which is recognized and purposely designed, when also performed to an optimal pace and duration will produce the best dynamics to invigorate the growth of new bones in the shoulders. Please make the right decision to choose a program that has already been tested to work. You don’t want to be wasting your time when you can be making progress instead.
Me: I can already guess what the possible idea they are proposing is, and it is based off the basic Wolff’s Law. If you apply some form of external loading stimuli to the shoulder bones, they will react and get thicker in terms of width. Remember that the shoulder bone is not a long bone so it doesn’t really have a longitudinal direction for them to go towards. The shoulder bone will get thicker and wider and that is the proposed idea. They say in the “How Is It Possible?” section that the program/ exercise involves the idea of tissue repairing themselves. They also briefly talk about cell hypertrophy and proliferation.
They state very clearly.. (I highlighted the most important parts)
The emphasis with our programs is not about creating high levels of stress to force the changes to the structure of the bones but on creating the right type of repetitive low levels of stress which had proven more effective to produce the results they are recognized to produce.
When ‘repetitive’ stress is exerted on your bones through exercise, depending on what exercises you perform, the stress will likely to create micro fractures (on a molecular level) in the bones. When the micro fractures heal they can change the structure of your bones (what changes occur will depend on the type of repetitive exercise you perform) minutely from each session of performing our exercises. Which type of micro fractures you create in the bones will depend on the level of stress is exerted on the bones. High levels of stress exerted on the bones from an exercise for example such as constant jumping and landing on your feet from high up can cause much more severe micro fractures in the bones in the lower legs, in those circumstances even after the micro fractures are healed, in exceptional rare cases, some problems can arise in the bones which can be corrected by surgery. What’s important is low levels of repetitive stress exerted on the bones can be healed by the body’s healing properties through the healing process without any problems arising at a later date, this serves our programs really well.
Bones can be altered (but not manipulated to grow) by a primitive method of applying constant pressure directly on the bones itself for a long period of time which is similar to how dental braces work to reposition teeth. However our intelligent advance method of bone manipulation does not involve simply applying direct pressure on the bones itself but through exercises, we have designed, that delivers balanced low repetitive levels of stress (balanced exercises for balance growth) to the bones differently, hence will effect the bones in a different way. This enables the bones to be manipulated to grow in a way which otherwise be unthinkable.
When you exercise, your bones will also be put under stress, and if you exert enough of the right type of ‘repetitive’ low levels of stress over a certain period of time on the same area of bone/s, the result will cause enough stress to initiate the healing process, but its only possible through the repetitiveness of the right type of exercises and application, without the high enough repetitive nature of the exercises, it wont work, hence why most sports activities does not affect the structure of the bones.
Conclusion: In terms of the superficial scientific theory, they are actually completely right. In some ways, the program they offer can potentially lead to increased shoulder bone width size. You load the bone and it will get bigger in response, just like when you hit your skin hard, and then it become engorged with blood and results in a bump showing inflammation. They have figured out that a constant load wont do the trick so the idea is to use a dynamic, loading sequence (like tapping) to get the bone to respond. They say there is only two types of exercises you need to perform and they only take less than 8 minutes. The idea on microfractures is very similar to Sky’s old idea as well as Pierre Pozzuto’s theory too. You do the dynamic loading on the bone, they can potentially cause microfractures, and after the microfractures heal they do change the bone morphology. In terms of causing the shoulder bone to get bigger, that is theoretically possible if they hit the right area of the shoulder with a large enough area. If they use a small loading surface, that would only cause a section of the shoulder bone to enlarge. However I am not sure how much of an increase the bone will go through, although I am rather certain that the shoulder bone will respond by getting thicker, thus “bigger”. As for the claims that the programs can make the forearm and the lower leg bigger, they are using the same operating principle. If there is any increase in length of the lower limbs, that would be from loading in the bone protruding areas and the results would be from appositional growth responses. However this is a similar proposed belief by most people who are currently explaining away the results seen from people who have grown taller from LSJL.
As for the microfracture theory, I can say with some confidence from teh failure of Sky’s experiments that the microfracture theory and practice will probably not be successful, but the repetitive loading idea may cause bone thickness to increase.
The payment system they use is Paypal and I think they either send you a DVD through the mail or even give you an E-Product, which I have never believed in.
