LSJL Might Work

The year 2014 is about to come and I wanted to write one last post for the year to cap it off. I wanted to write a quick post on my thoughts on LSJL after not looking at it for so long.

About 2 months ago Tyler finally came on the website to start writing here to help out the cause. He gave that announcement on his website Height Quest and so far he has produced around a dozen super informative articles, some of which helped piece together a few issues which I had been having questions about.

I have been at this research for just around a year and a half now, and I wanted to give some thoughts about the technique Tyler has been promoting for more than half a decade. When I first interviewed him in the 2nd podcast episode (Listen Here) he had stated that he had been interested in figuring this thing out for almost 5 years when he started writing about it back in 2008. That means for probably a decade now Tyler has been doing research on this issue.

That is what I call supreme dedication. Now, obviously the big question is “Is all this theoretical research going to pay off in the end?”

Obviously the hope by everyone who reads this website is that all this stuff if going to reach a happy ending at the end. Recently there have been a few comments made by people who said that there is too much theory and research going on with not enough experiments. They want so real stuff that they can do, like some pill they can take, or exercise they can do.

The most recent post about Running DC stimuli on Silver Acupuncture Needles was the one that made me realize that there is HUGE potential in using PEMF Devices. Using electric currents at a certain frequency and low intensity has a high correlation to bone ossification rates. There is also a anabolic effect on chondrogenesis on the chondrocytes in articular cartilage which is validated by certain studies.

My recent focus will be on the effects on bone and cartilage tissue from various types of electrical stimuli. That is what I plan to look at for the first 3-6 months of next year. There will be a few sporadic posts here and there but there is where I heading.

However, this post about LSJL. This post about my thoughts on why it just might work. Back in Sept 2012 I had wrote a rather infamous post entitled “Sky’s Mistake, Why He Never Increased In Height“. Sky was a former height increase seeker who started a rather large movement back in the time frame of 2005-2010 to try the technique of induced microfractures to lengthen the shin bones. He started at 5′ 8″ and saw no gains after years of trials. He has since left the community and moved on with his life. I do hope the best for him in whatever he tries to accomplish. Looking at the way he did it, it was obvious it would not work.

If something as simple as hanging 30 LB weights on ones lower leg would increase height was effective, it would already been accomplished thousands of years ago. Throughout human history I would guess millions of people who were not happy with their height probably tried something similar. They tied some heavy to their feet or ankles, held on to a high bar, and tried to stretch their body out. That was too obvious. People before Sky would have tried it already. Thousands probably already had the same idea as him. The moral of this story is that there have probably been thousands of people before who tried the same thing he did and failed. Why would he think it would work for him?

Plus, I had calculated using simple tensile load (aka Pressure) over area calculations what it would take to possibly stretch out the bones beyond the elastic region in a stress-strain graph to the elastic region before reaching the Ultimate Yield Strength. I took tensile force values obtained from experiments done on young rabbits with healthy growth plate cartilage and mutipled those values by factors of 20X and 50X to reach a values of around 25,000-30,000 Lbs of force needed to strength the femur of an adult human male{Remember according to the definition of microstrain, bone is continuously changing in length throughout the entire day-Tyler}.

However, this post is about why LSJL just might work.

From a historical perspective, Sky’s method must have already been tried thousands of times before he came along. That didn’t work.

What Tyler proposed from the study “Lengthening of mouse hindlimbs with joint loading.” was a truly revolutionary idea. Sure, it may be true that even in aged rats/mice the growth plate cartilage never fully go away but the technique is unique because of the specified region he claims you should be pushing down on.

Thinking back on it, if Tyler had suggest any other place besides the synovial joints, I would have discounted the idea by now. However, based on the location and angle on which to load the bones, the technique is something which has probably never been attempted before, especially for any person trying to lengthen long bones.

Throughout human history, there have been people who have probably loaded almost every other area of their body. Every single military unit and group in history had their bodies trained to be strong and tough. It is especially well known that in certain Martial Arts like Karate and Kung fu that practitioners will purposely hit their bodies on hard surfaces to destroy nerves in the area and make that part of the body stronger. Just watch any video from YouTube where Master Ho Eng Hui breaks open a coconut with his finger, which has become thick and disfigured from years of finger loading. (Watch Here). {There’s a better image of the kung fu cocunut funger here in this video, it looks like there is some compression too which could explain why the finger doesn’t grow longer-Tyler} Spartan soldiers from thousands of years ago probably had every part of their body hit upon to be made tougher. Throughout the millenias it should not be too hard to suggest that other tough cultures and soldiers had unusual rituals where certain body parts were been hit over and over to be made tougher. However, we still have never heard any ancient society which had grown overly tall individuals.

Loading the fists, knuckles, feet heels was probably a major part of the regime of a person training in martial arts. Add in the fact that Muy Thai which involves using the shins, elbows and knees to hit in practice did not result in longer bones shows that loading in most of the major well known areas have never worked.

This suggest that Wolff’s Law (aka Bone Remodeling through Mechanical Loading) used on common body areas would NEVER result in ordinary long bones with NO growth plate cartilage becoming longer. They would however make the trabecular bones become more dense and possibly increase periosteal bone growth making the long bones thicker however. (Whether loading long bones w/ epiphyseal cartilage in certain ways to increase longitudinal growth is something which we think is totally possible)

I have looked at various articles and studies on the piezoelectric nature of the bones and what happens to the potential gradient in the bones as you push down on certain areas of the bones. The science that Tyler is showing can be validated if a person took the time to read over the studies he references. The hydrostatic pressure increase does have some type of effect on the differentiation, proliferation and hypertrophic rates of the MSCs in the epiphysis core.

The point from all this talk is to show that if you are going to try something like loading the bones in a place which other people possibly also loaded on, it would not work. That is why I don’t believe that loading the ankles would work. If it worked on the ankles, most people who have done yoga and pressed their full torso/body weight down on the ankles in the lotus position (or while meditating) would have noticed their lower legs becoming longer. Obviously that didn’t happen.

The unique approach of this bone loading method is to load the sides of the long bone at the epiphysis which is completely novel in approach. I can not think of why anyone in the past would ever want to try to load the sides of the epiphysis.

Based on this idea, on the fact that no one has probably ever done this technique purposefully in a diligent way, shows at least that it has not been completely disproven base on the trials and failures of thousands of people before us. If thousands and millions of desperate people have already tried this method before us, we would not need to be still discussing the efficacy of this method. I still have hope that for a small minority of people, the technique does have some chance.

I know the argument is not completely logical, but because very few people before recent years have probably ever been loading the sides of the epiphysis before (Why would any sane normal person who did not read the Zhang/Yokoto papers have any type of motive or incentive try something like that?) the technique has been at least NOT been proven wrong. 

(Note: I realize this type of strange logical argument is something people who believe on god would use when debating an atheist about the existence of god would also be using. Just because you can’t (or haven’t yet) disproved something yet does not mean it exists or is right. It is a sort of big leap of faith I am taking.)

So, Lateral Synovial Joint Loading just might Work.

Read the post “A Simple Step By Step Guide For Lateral Synovial Joint Loading“ to try it out.

In addition, I did want to tell the people that Yokota has gone into writing up a proposal to the building of the loading device. Check out the paper “Development of a Portable Knee Rehabilitation Device That Uses Mechanical Loading“

Have a good New Years guys and happy 2014.