I had said in the last post that somehow I had found a blog written in Spanish by a guy named Alexei who had been writing the blog El Zar De La Estatura

Well I took some time to read the posts and see what he has to say and one post which was interesting lead me to the a blog with a post entitled “Long Legs On Demand”

The article was also in Spanish so the Chrome browser translated it for me. The translated blog is below…

Long legs on request 

On the comments below there was a commenter who talked about this Dr. Gilles Musy, A French Orthopedic Surgeon based off a hospital in Paris who was performing. of course this post was written in 2007, almost 6 years ago but the information is still relevant today.

I did a google search for the name of Dr. Gilles Musy and he is a real doctor and has his own website www.allongementosseux.fr

His office/clinic is indeed based in Paris.

Dr Gilles Musy

Spécialité :
Chirurgie Orthopédique et Traumatologie

Clinique :
Clinique Milan
17 Rue de Milan
75009 Paris

Contact #: 08 99 10 28 37

Site Web : http://www.allongementosseux.fr

Update 3/11/2013: I sort of forgot that apparently the Google Browser Chrome will automatically try to translate any foreign language webpage to English if you set that option up. I just did that and the blog is now in English and everything makes sense. So switch from your Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari to Chrome for the privileges for automatic foreign language translation.

So today on one of the comments left on the site someone brought to my attention a blog that was written back in 2010 – 2011 named El Zar de la Estatura.

The url is http://elzardelaestatura2011.blogspot.com/ – You might want to take a look at the site/blog before it is taken down as well. It seems that for height increase research websites they have a certain shelf-life.

The first interesting thing that is obvious is that the person is using the same theme for blogger as Tyler from HeightQuest.com. A Coincidence?

Maybe since blogging platforms often have popular themes and maybe the bookshelf theme for Blogger is really popular with height increase researchers.

The entire thing is in Spanish and since my Spanish does not go beyond a few hundred words even though I took 4 years of Spanish through middle school and high school, I still can’t translate the words except for a few words.

This is the message the guys writes write off the bat…

” El Zar de la Estatura te revelará todos los secretos acerca del aumento de la estatura de tal manera que puedas tener una idea mucho mas clara acerca de este tema, saber que realmente funciona y que producto es inservible y tambien encontrarás info acerca de mi último proyecto que permitirá alargar las piernas sin necesidad de corte o cirugia incluso despues de los 18 años. Gracias por visitar mi Blog!”

If I put it through something called the Bing Translator and this is the translated stuff I got.

“The Tsar’s stature will reveal all the secrets about the increase of the height in such a way that you can get an idea much more clear on this subject, know that it really works and that product is useless and will also find info about my latest project that will lengthen the legs without cutting or surgery even after age 18.Thank you for visiting my Blog!”

So it seems that what we have is another real increase height and grow taller research blog, but the person writing stopped around 2011. There are some some posts which were informative and it is a shame he stopped working on it.

The post he wrote about which really cause my attention was the one about Ginza Kojima’s device which I had recently written about. However it seems that he managed to find another new website which had more pictures of the device, but the pictures show a much more primitive looking machine and straps.

Website url: http://www.shincho-nobashi.jp/stretch/rakuraku.html

I have managed to clip a few pictures of the website below.

You can see that the device of the picture I clipped is basically what is revealed in the other website. This one is more like a prototype and the device is like the medieval body stretching machine Pierre Pozzuto has on his A-Grow-Bics class based in London.

I think I am confident to say now that I am going to start looking at the resources on the internet that are Non-English based since they also contain a whole lot of good information.

So I decided to try something else today instead of just writing about the idea like so many other posts.

As for the technical details, I proposed in the video actually two places for the chisel to be hitting at. I pointed at the wrong place the first time but meant to point at the 2nd locations. The place to hit is supposed to be higher up, since the lower areas are covered in non-bone tissue. We are trying to hit the bone, not puncture the skin.

Exact Location: This idea I am proposing is supposed to be used only on the proximal section of the lower leg bone, the tibia. The fibula does not need to be hit. The exact location is on the horizontal closed circular path where the area under the knee ends. Note the picture on the right side. Where the bottom line is point at where the term “medial collateral ligaments” is the at the horizontal plane or line which you should lightly be tapping at to induced fracture. However you can only get about 180 degrees of the entire bone surface due to the non-bone tissue surrounding it on the under part of the knee.

Remember, the idea is to gently tap at the bone just strong enough to cause some small fractures and to cut past the periosteum layer, which is only maybe 10-20 cells thick.

I created a video using my iphone and the video quality seemed to have come out better this time. The problem this time seems to be the audio quality, which is low in volume. You’d need to turn up the volume higher to hear me clearly.

The video is taken from the Natural Height Growth Youtube Channel which you can subscribe to.

This was a sort of thinking (or actually rambling) in my head that came to me after I was going through the old threads and posts on the dead GrowTallForum.com which I found using the Wayback Machine. You can find the link by clicking HERE 

The thread I found was sort of arguing whether playing basketball can be the cause of greater height and that really got me thinking.

One poster wrote…

“Here’s one for the basketball players. A really good exercise that helps you grow taller is jumping! Several nerves are connected at the sole of your feet that are also connected to your thyroid and pituitary gland, which is responsible for releasing the hormones needed for your body to grow. Jumping allows for the production of electric current to flow through your body and to tell your brain “hey I wanna grow!” That’s why basketball players are very tall, they jump and reach out every day, they can’t help it but grow very very tall.”

Other posters say…

“Bababooey explained it somewhere on this forum. Basically, jumping involved in Basketball increases fluid flow in the growth plates so more IGF-1 goes into height increase.”

What is most interesting was the poster Bababooey…

HYPOTHESIS:

The jumping involved in playing basketball–as would jumping in any activity–triggers growth on the growth plate perhaps by increased blood flow to the growth plates (in the legs and spine) or some such result of the act of jumping. The act of jumping temporarily suspends the spine and legs in the air followed by a compression with the combined force of gravity and an individual’s body weight. The compression perhaps increases blood flow to the non-bone segments of your body impacted by the compression–namely, your growth plates. Increased blood flow to the growth plates may direct growth-related hormones specifically to the growth plates–where it is needed the most for height increase.

Analysis & Interpretation

These three explanations forced me to consider the possibility that maybe, just MAYBE that basketball might be one of those activities that does result in slightly more growth vertically than say another sport like soccer. A long time ago I had written a post “Grow Taller By Playing Basketball, Or Not” arguing the idea that correlation does not suggest causation. I had said that the more likely thing that happened was that your natural genes make you taller, and you went into the sport of basketball naturally because of the height.

Now I have to rethink the basic premise and wonder whether whether the reverse causation might be possible.

I first look at what might be different in body mechanical movement of basketball players than other athletes playing others sports. In soccer and rugby, there is a lot of running. In rugby and american football, there is also a lot of hitting besides running. In baseball, there is a lot of down town followed by a short burst of running.

Then there is gymnastics, swimming, tennis, cheerleading, or whatever popular sports one might find in the american high school athletic program.

So what is the main body movement that basketball players do which the other sport do a lot less of in terms of frequency?

A lot of people argued that maybe it was the act of jumping. Bababooey’s comment was most interesting because he looks at the real physics and mechanics of what is happening to the body if one starts playing basketball.

Jumping in adolescents with still open growth plates suggest that the plates may be having occasional shocks to the system. A basketball runs most of the time but sometimes in reaching for the ball for a rebound, they do jump up. The jump means a fraction of second of weightlessness and then the plates are compressed. I have found around 1-2 PubMed studies (source 1) which showed that axial compression on the leg or growth plates will indeed stunt longitudinal growth. That is a given. But that might only assume a constant, continuous load which is static. What if the compression is dynamic and also only happens occasionally.

This is what we know.

• Jumping might lead to growth plate fractures if the player lands wrong. It is still cartilage

What I am proposing in this post is that maybe the jumping might cause the growth plates in young people who play basketball which is at the point of just about to completely ossify to fracture at the line where the bone bridge is finally starting to show. The jump fractures the bone bridge which is what leads to the cartilage turning into a line causing the bone to still have at least a natural distraction that remains.

The distraction that remains may have a little bit of epiphyseal cartilage still left but that is enough to keep the basketball player to add a little height.

Where as the soccer player is always running, and getting a steady rate of pounding/compression on the growth plate, the occasional elevated jump made by a basketball player means that a sudden extra intense compression could crush not just the cartilage, but also the bone.

Humans have always been walking and running so the growth plates and surrounding bones are supposed to be strong enough to take those activities on the leg, but the plates and bone may not be designed to take the unusual frequency of jumping.

Thee 2nd point I would say that might give the basketball jumping credibility is that fact that longitudinal growth is not linear, which I would learn about very recently. It seems that longitudinal growth comes in very short “mini-growth spurts”. We know that the growth rate of children is higher at night than during the day. We also know that the growth rate of children during the summer is higher than the other seasons. We also know that the growth rate in one 2 week interval can be very different in another 2 week interval. This means that the GH that the hypothalamus and pituitary are releasing is not in any type of sinusoidal cyclical fashion. It is irregular in when the pulse of growth hormone is released.

It could be that indeed the jumping affect causes a slightly higher amount of blood and the growth factors inside to  reach the fractures that are created when the basketball player jumps and lands down on the ground. fractures are created in the groove or surface-to-surface edge between the cartilage and the bone. This means that the body has to respond to heal the fracture. more blood goes to the fracture region which are carrying the growth factors like the BMPs and the TGF-Betas needed.

The jumping might be rythmic with the bouncing of the ball, and the pulsation of the pituitary gland might actually sync up with the bouncing of the ball.

If this is indeed the case where basketball which has a bouncing, rythmic effect on how the GH in the brain is released, sort of syncing up the frequency of growth hormome release with the bouncy of the ball like what happens during resonant frequency, and the fact that occasional jumping prevents the growth plates from being able to close when they are supposed to from breaking down bone bridges formed, it might suggest that indeed basketball might be one of those activities that young kids can do to increase their height and also make the growing period be slightly longer.

Afterthought:

The problem of course is that there is a clear counter-arguement when we look at the case with gymnastics and gymnasts. Gymnasts are known very well for their short height but they get about the same frequency of jumping, like in the high bar, the vault, or the tumbling. Many martial artists also have have a lot of jumping but they seem to be average height. I could argue on the issue with gymnasts that the type of jumping and landing they do is at an intensity too high where the growth plates are more likely to be crushed than to stimulate gh release.

Personal Opinion

If I was to make my own personal guess at the relationship between basketball and tall stature, I would still have to say that it is more likely that you are first tall naturally,then you get picked by the local school coach (or more likely coerced) into playing on the JV or Varsity basketball team, than if in the case where you grow tall from playing basketball. If scientist or researchers would ever try to spend millions of dollars to see what is the correlation, whether is is causal or reverse causal, i would bet that they would find little evidence that playing basketball would lead to increased height, if they averaged out the individual cases, and normalized all the numbers into a normal bell curve distribution. I hope this issue is finally resolved and never brought back up.

Just a few days ago a person from Canada found the website and contacted me to tell me that he had obtained the machine, device, or product which Antoine from the Body Remodeling Center to use on himself. He goes by the name of Hamid. I have chosen not to reveal his last name. In the few emails we have exchanged back and forth, I was excited and asked whether he could take a few pictures of the device so I can take a look at it and also upload the pictures to a post I will write up. Well this post is to show what the device looks like.

Background

From looking at threads on the forum on MakeMeTaller.org and the website HeightQuest.com it seems that this Body Remodeling Center who’s spokesman is someone named Antoine has been around since the middle of the 2000s.

The people from the website MakeMeTaller.org has completely rejected this guy’s claims and ideas completely outright without giving the device a real long good look. For them, limb lengthening surgery is the one and only way. And maybe they are right, I still have not finished my research yet. A few people on the forum have tried contacting Antoine but they are either having trouble getting to him or he has not been responding back. I am not sure. The administrators bashed this guy enough after over 10 pages of thread posts to end it with Antoine never replying anymore to their accusations. It is a shame that they can’t be more open minded.

As for HeightQuest.com, Tyler writes on his blog post about it guessing that is a sort of bone vibrator. The actual effect is that the device causes a spiral force on the bone and cause some type of stretching force.

As he states in the post “Body Remodeling Review“…

“Antoine’s traction device may cause spiral forces on the bone and may place a stretching force on the cortical bone in that manner.  Sky mentions that Antoine uses a 10 lbs traction device, which although Sky may have mentioned might have been insufficient for longitudinal stretching with severe spiral forces may be sufficient.  Although it’s hard to tell without actually seeing the device in action.”

The post is short but Tyler did not like the fact that Antoine is not being more transparent in revealing more about the machine and whether it acts similarly to an ultrasonic device. It would seem however that the old website for the website BodyRemodeling.Org was taken down, maybe for financial reasons.

My Interpretation

I think when a guy comes on the boards and want to talk to the members and sell his product he probably has at least some credibility in what he says, even if they are a scammer. I wanted to see what it it that he had.

For, example, in a recent few posts I had shown that the Japanese Non-Invasive Height Increasing Machine the Ginza Kojima device was real and was credible. I had shown in the post “The Actual Patent For The Ginza Kojima Non-Invasive Limb Lengthening Height Increase Device Found, With Pictures!” that the device was real, and in the next post “A Technical Review Of The Non-Invasive Limb Lengthening Ginza Kojima Device Patent (Big Breakthrough!)” I had meticulously dissected the patent and read every part of it.

My conclusion was that the device had a maybe a 65-70% chance of actually increasing an adult person’s height by at least 1 cm. It used certain physics principles which were valid, the most unique one was the fact that the subject was spun around on a elevated table which resulted in centripetal force being created thus causing the ends of their body to slowly pull away, ie. elongate. However the height increase achieved is most likely temporary since the person’s body is only being “remodeled”. There is indeed a section of the Ginza Kojima website which suggest that the method is not really non-invasive but does require surgery. They say it explicitly on the main website.

As for the Body Remodeling Center, I had only briefly looked at the center and the claims made by Antoine in old posts like “Grow Taller Using Body Remodeling Centers, Or Not” and “Review Of Antoine El Hajj And Bone Remodeling Clinic 2008-2009, From EasyHeight.Com And MakeMeTaller.Com“. If you go back through those old posts you can see that back then what I did most of the time as just copy and paste other people’s information and not really give my personal interpretation or analysis on the devices or ideas. I was still at the beginning stages of learning the stuff.

Analysis

So is this machine/device that was promoted years ago feasible? Many people have noted that antoine never used the device on himself and he was listed at 5′ 7″ and 32 years old around the 2007 time. It is logically strange that this man would sell this product but would never try it on himself. So again there is two main parts,

This will be my last post about this device and proposed method and I will move on to research on other things.

I had said before that was two main parts….

1. Bone vibrating machine – pictured in the middle
2. Traction devices – what we see in the 1st and last picture.

The dial on the machine in the middle picture with the handle suggest that it is a sort of machine that emits ultrasound like what you find with nurses who use the thing on pregnant women’s stomach to see the fetus. However after checking on google on what ultrasound machines usually look like I am not really sure what that device really is in the middle.

The straps are then the traction devices. They look similar to the one picture I had in the 2nd post. Four white thick cylinders hang on the plastic straps. Each of the cylinders probably has a 10 lb (or 5 lb) weight inside so each of the four parts has a load of either 20 or 40 lbs. You can see that two of the straps is wider than the other 2 so this means that 2 of the “traction devices” are supposed to go on the thigh/upper leg part and the smaller, less wide straps go on the shin/lower leg area. The instructions from the old Body Remodeling Center’s website suggested that you needed to sleep with the 4 straps on the leg.

I guess the idea was then to let gravity to cause the extra weight of the leg to stretch the leg bones out, if they ever do. The sleeping is for extra time. The idea was that the weights when pulled down would stretch the legs out. Reasonable for common sense but for a serious height increase researcher we realize that is not reasonable.

The claim by Antoine was 4-6 cms of increase and that he offer private therapy on using the devices for $10,000-15,000. Sky had promoted this guy and it resulted in him getting more customers. From Sky’s opinion, he has concluded that Antoine’s credibility was lacking and the theoretical parts behind the technique was off.

The machine would make sense if Antoine thought that the device could emit ultrasound or some type of high intensity vibrational shockwaves. If the waves are strong enough, you can maybe demineralize the bones, remove the hard inorganic material, the calcium derived hydroxyapatite, and possibly make the hard long bones weaker in tensile load strength to make the bones weaker to pull and elongate.

So the two part proposed technique was.

1. You use the machine to weaken the bone. This is similar to my proposed idea on finding the resonance frequency of the bone and induce microfractures.
2. You then put on a strap that holds the top part while getting the weights attached to pull down the bone. You sleep on it so the effect is extended for many hours.

From my research I had learned that the long bones due to their hollow design make them really hard, as much as stainless steel. Adding a small 40 lbs of extra weight to each section of a leg will not be enough to cause the amount of tensile distraction needed to ever pull the leg bones longer. The idea on adding the machine is reasonable for a person who is not very involved in the science but I have never found evidence of any ultrasonic or wave inducing machine which can indeed de-mineralize or make the bones weaker.

So the pictures are below, provided by Hamid from Canada…

I have heard a lot about the story (or maybe even legend) about the fact that the actor Kevin Costner was very short when he was in High School but would eventually shoot up in height during those high school years.

I was watching the Youtube video entitled “Inside The Actor’s Studio – Kevin Costner” and James Lipton in his interview of Kevin Costner around the 4:33 minute mark asks Costner point blank “How tall were you when you went into high school?” and Costner would answer with “I was 5′ 2”. He would recount the story of him going to his mother and asking her “Am I going to grow?” and she would reply with “I swear you are going to grow honey” that he would indeed grow taller so he felt better.

Lipton would go on to ask Costner about which college/university he went to and Costner would reply with “Cal State Fullerton” where the tuition was just $99 and majored in Marketing & Finance. I guess the college fees back then was much cheaper.

So how tall is Kevin Costner today? From the well known website CelebHeights.com profile for Kevin Costner they list him at 6′ 1″ (1.85 m) with other people saying he might be closer to 6′ 0″.

Whatever he is listed at now we can see that to go from 5′ 2″ to over 6 feet is a major transformation.

Let’s see the growth progression and see whether it was abnormal. Most people in the US start High School around 14-15. Most boys end puberty around 19-20. So Costner had on average 5 years for growth left. If he did reach 6′ 1″ then he got 11 inches, which is very big. Only the story of Dennis Rodman’s transformation would be more dramatic.

I have found from my research that there is usually 1 year in a person’s life, around the first year of the onset of puberty where a person would gain 4-5 inches in just say 3-4 months, usually during one’s sleep in the summer time.

A 10-11 inch transformation is around 2-3 times greater than average. If the growth was linear and constant, that would be around 2 inches of increase a year, which is at the rate which can only be seen in children before puberty.

So what could be the biological mechanism to cause Costner to gain such a big growth spurt?

I would guess that what happened to his body was that it was experiencing a phenomena known as catch-up growth, where the growth plates sensecense was slowed down for some reason for a longer time than most people. If the senesence slows down, that also slows down the rate of long bone longitudinal growth in the years before the onset of puberty. However this also means that the chondrocytes in the reserve zone of the growth plates are not used up. Something causes the trigger to get the chondrocytes to finally start to stack and hypertrophize at the rate they were supposed to. He still have cartilage and chondrocytes left and in a shorter time frame his body pushed him to the level ie height which he was always supposed to reach. In my best guess, Coster was always supposed to reach 6′ 1″ in height, it was just that his chondrocytes maybe never got the right amount of stimulation to start the proliferation and hypertrophy stages. Eventually the resting zone would run out of chondrocytes and the creeping of the vascularization would cause the lower to reach the top with the process of calcification. So my educated guess is that Costner’s body was experiencing the phenomena of catch-up growth. This might also explain some of the growth we see in other people, but most males which have a freakish rate of growth later in their development years.

The lingering question we should be asking ourselves are, “Could More Stories About Rapid Dramatic Growth Spurts In One’s Late Teen Years Be True?”