Exercise throughout the teen years and in puberty to improve your height modestly. Do jumping exercises frequently, such as skipping, dancing and even hanging. Be active. Get out and about and work your muscles for at least 30 minutes each day.
- Join a gym. Joining a gym will help give you access to a lot of great exercising and muscle-building machines. It will also keep you motivated to work out.
- Join a sports team. People who join sports teams can use their natural competitiveness to burn extra calories and hopefully get their bodies taller. The great thing about team sports is that half the time, you don’t even realize that you’re exercising.
- If nothing else, walk around. If you can’t find the time to do anything else, get up and walk around. Walk to the grocery store. Walk to the library. Walk to school.
Get adequate sleep each night. Sleeping is the time when your body grows, so having plenty of sleep is equivalent to giving your body more time for growth. Get between 9 and 11 hours of sleep per night if you’re a preteen or still younger than 20.
- The human growth hormone (HGH) is produced naturally in our bodies, especially during deep or slow wave sleep. Getting good, sound sleep will encourage the production of HGH, which is created in the pituitary gland.
Try not to stunt your growth. There might not be a lot you can do to increase your height, but you can take several steps to make sure your natural height isn’t shortened by environmental influences. Drugs and alcohol are both thought to contribute to stunted growth if they’re ingested while you’re young, and malnutrition can keep you from reaching your full height, as well.
Understand that most of your height will be determined by genetics of your family. Height is a polygenic trait, meaning that it’s influenced by several different genes. Having two short parents doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be short, just as two tall parents won’t make you a towering giant. However, if most of the people on both sides of your family are short, odds are that you’ll be short, too. Don’t be discouraged, though. The truth is that you can’t know how tall you’ll be until you reach full physical adulthood in your mid twenties.
- Calculate your projected height. Working in inches or centimeters, you can try to predict your height based on the height of your parents.
- Add up your mom and dad’s heights (in inches or cm).
- Add 5 inches (13 cm) if you are a boy; subtract 5 inches (13 cm) if you are a girl.
- Divide by 2.
- The answer is your predicted height, give or take 4 inches (10 cm). Note that this isn’t an absolute calculation, but it should be pretty close.
Facts
- On the other hand, being shorter may spell a higher risk of heart disease, according to a study in European Heart Journal. Researchers found that the shortest adults (under 5 feet 3 inches) had a higher risk of having and dying from cardiovascular disease than taller people.
- Most growth hormone is released during sleep.
- In the 18th and 19th centuries, America was home to the tallest people in the world, but today that honor goes to the Netherlands. Today, Dutch men and women average 6 feet and 5 feet 6.5 inches, respectively. U.S. men average 5 feet 9 inches and women average nearly 5 feet 4 inches tall.
- Just like your weight fluctuates throughout the day, your height can too. You’re tallest when you wake up and you may be as much as one centimeter shorter by the day’s end.
