Will pull ups increase height?
Pull ups will not increase height on a sustained basis. You might stretch for 1 or 2 centimetres based on individual differences and how compressed your spine is on a given day, but that is it. Strength training can stimulate growth in height, but bigger factors which determine your height overall are your genetics, access to animal protein and proper health services as an infant. Learn more in this article.
What is a pull-up?
A pull up is a bodyweight exercise in which you hang from a bar and pull yourself up to the bar only using your arms. Depending on how you perform a pull up it will target your bicep, tricep, grip strength, upper, and lower back. There are many variations of the pull-up. The two main ways to vary the movement are momentum and grip. A wider grip usually targets more of the back, giving the arms less leverage. A closer grip usually favors the biceps and triceps muscles as they can get involved more to get you to the bar. When you are using no momentum to get yourself up to the bar it is called a strict pull-up. If you use your entire body to swing up to the bar you are doing butterfly or kipping pull-ups. Kipping pull-ups are popular in the Crossfit community as you can get more pull-ups done in less time. This is an advanced movement and not for beginners.
Pull-ups are also known as chin-ups and based on whom you get advice from the execution can be different. Chin-ups tend to be more often referred to as pull-ups targeting the back and therefore have a wider grip. Classic Pull-ups are usually referred to as a variation with a closer grip favoring the bicep and tricep. Good programs usually use a variation of all the different grip, momentum, and range of motion options. Advice that claims that one or the other is better for achieving a certain goal are dimensional and you are good for seeking more advice to keep your training interesting and challenging.
All in all, pull-ups are an intermediate to advanced bodyweight exercise. Many beginners have to progress toward a single pull up with no assistance. Exercises that can help to achieve this goal are band-assisted pull-ups, pull up negatives and inverted rows using a barbell in a rack.
Equipment for pull ups
This is a list of equipment required for doing pull-ups. I recommend investing in good quality, reliable equipment so you have fun using it. There is nothing worse than faulty equipment that hinders your progress.
When you do some research you will find many variations of door frame pull up bars. The major variations are the ones that are anchored in the wall, held by the frame by your own bodyweight, and the ones that can be expanded until they sit tightly in the door. The ladder likely damage your door frame are the ones that will be anchored into the wall. Pull up bars that hold because of your own bodyweight or by letting them expand to fit the frame are accidents waiting to happen. My personal favorite is the Rogue Jammer pull up bar. It is stable, has been designed by one of the top producers in the market, and the result of many iterations of pull up bars.
If you are intending to do muscle-ups or kipping pull-ups you will need some clearance from the wall. The jammer bar will not fit the bill. You will need a pull-up bar with a steel frame for stability. The Rogue P-4 pull up bar fits the bill for this purpose.
Weighted vests and dip belts can be used to make the pull up more challenging. If you are considering one of the two I would recommend a vest over a dip belt. A vest will provide more freedom of movement at the cost of taking less load. If you want to have as much weight as possible on you to do pull-ups then get a dip belt.
Why do you want to increase your height?
There can be several reasons why you want to increase your height which can be:
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You want to enter a certain sports team or military function
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You do not feel attractive enough for the other sex
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You feel too small compared to others and get bullied
Whatever the reasons are, I encourage you to dig deeper on why you want to increase your height. I am personally 185cm tall. With this height I would probably be challenged to play center in the NBA. However there have been successful players with this height in the NBA. So if you want to make a certain team or job in the military, widen your focus and really ask yourself why you want to enter. If it is for the love of basketball that you want to enter the NBA than there are millions of other ways to express that love for the game. You can become a great coach, as the greatest players not always make for the best coaches. Instead of playing center you might change to point guard. You could even become a sports commentator on the NBA which would need no physical prowess if you know everything about any player, team and the history of the sport. There is more than one road to success. Be creative and avoid that your height limits your thinking and actions.
If it is your love life that is bothering you and you think being taller makes you more attractive to the other sex you also have other options. Of course, complying with whatever is the current image of beauty in society will make it easier to attract a love interest. However, studies also show that factors like confidence, DNA for chemical attraction and humor play a way bigger role to create meaningful longh term relationships. The inhibiting factor is most likely that you do not feel confident enough to put yourself out there because of your height. Finding the right partner is messy and can be painful. Still, your height is not what holds you back. It is the decision you made that you are somehow not good enough. Once you command confidence, all of other things like your love life will also fall in place. Strength training can create more confidence through positive feedback loops, but it won’t increase your height.
If you feel like you are too small and you are getting bullied than I do feel your pain. I was a chubby child and the bullying got that bad that my hair was pulled multiple times by other children because I was fat. Remove yourself from anyone who makes you feel bad about your appearances and seek out others who care more about what really matters. Honesty, loyalty and determination are way better predictors of life success than your height. Use the bullies to improve in these areas and lock your friends wisely.
Factors which influence your height
Some factors that will I fluency your height are:
DNA
Nutrition
Posture
Bad habits
Stress
Your Deoxyribonucleic acid or short DNA determines a lot of your potential for developing a certain body composition. There is an ongoing debate between nurture and nature and their impact on development. Where the believers in nature are of the opinion that most of your development is predetermined by your DNA and can not be changed the believers in nurture claim that your upbringing, social contacts, and habits have a bigger impact. Over the past years, more studies have been done into nurture and the pendulum is swinging more in that direction. Still, the truth is never pure and rarely simple, in the words of Oscar Wilde. So it is most likely that it is a mix of both. You might be blessed or cursed with DNA that will make it easy for you to grow tall, but there is little you can do about it.
Another big factor in height is your nutrition. Things can get very complicated in this area so I will keep it simple:
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Eat plenty
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Avoid processed foods
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Have a balanced diet
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Stay active
If you are unhappy about your height it might very well be that you are a teenager who hasn’t gone through a growth spurt yet. If that is the case I would recommend to eat plenty. Puberty is usually where you can get away with it. And even when you are older and want to grow muscle, eating is a considerable component.
Processed foods are to be avoided when you want to grow. They are often full of salt, sugar, artificial coloring and other ingredients to make them last longer or more pleasing to the eye. Eating food made from fresh ingredients will give you more control and will be more healthy. Especially if you make it part of a balanced diet. Chopping things up, cooking them, and providing for yourself and your family can also be incredibly satisfying in itself.
Apart from staying away from processed foods, a balanced diet will also help. Try to get one day of beef, fish, pork, vegetarian, and poultry in. A cheat day a week is also allowed because otherwise, you will go mad for cravings. Two groups to minimize would be alcohol and sugar. Still, have them from time to time.
Staying active will help you to grow too. There is proof that sustained exercise increases testosterone and growth hormone production. This will have a positive impact, especially if you are still waiting for a growth spurt or want to go up a weight class. Just make sure that vigorous high amounts of exercise are met with an equal mountain of food.
Posture can play a huge part in how tall you are being perceived. If you walk tall with a big chest you will command more presence than if you are slouched over and let your chest sink in. This is probably the easiest part to fix when you want to be taken more seriously and get bullied less. There are studies that show that it is more likely to be attacked in a bar or street when you have very poor posture and give the impression of being shy and a pushover.
The last point is to avoid bad habits like drugs, alcohol, high stress, or exposure to poisonous chemicals in the workplace. These factors can inhibit your growth and make you stall or even digress a little in height.
What do you need to know about height?
Most of this data has been taken from Our world in data, a website I highly recommend if you want to learn more about the world based on facts and studies. The summary is that humans stayed relatively stable around the same height for about 2000 years while in the last 200 years the average height has significantly increased with a surprising reverse in the overall trend in the most recent years. The data used is highly biased towards men of military age, as this is one of the biggest data pools accessible for this kind of analysis. Efforts are being made to rectify the imbalance in more modern years, but this will take some time. Average height for a region is also accepted as a strong indicator for wealth as factors like nutrition and access to health services directly influence your height.
Based on data ranging from 1980 to 1994 the worldwide median height for women was 164.7cm and for men 178.4cm. If you are taller than this you can consider yourself lucky. It is a lot more likely that you beat this average when you are from Germany or the Netherlands as these two countries have shown higher average height. You can use the graphic below to check where your country is positioned.
The child mortality rate of any given country is often used as a strong indicator on how well the healthcare sector in this country is organised. The lower the child mortality rate the more effective and efficient the overall health apparatus is considering coverage, quality of the service and access to the health services for the general public. When you chart The Child mortality rates of the given countries against the average height you get a significant correlation. The lower the mortality rate in a country the higher the average height, which means that good health care services can lead to taller humans.
Even though there is a recent trend towards less animal fat in your diet on ethical reasons this might not be the best idea, if you want to grow as tall as possible. The chart below shows the amount of calories taken i on average from animal fats charted against average height. This shows a high correlation between eating more animal protein per day and showing a higher average height per country.
This last graph shows where you can expect your biggest growth spurts in respect to your age and when growth usually stops. Individuals can of course always have different outcomes from the masses, but the underlying data pool is big and collected over a long period of time in different areas of the world and can therefore be safely assumed to be representative. You can see that growth is the fastest from 1 - 3 and slows a little while still being steadily on an upward trend. between 12 and 14 the curve gets another boost and then peters out around 15 to 19 years.
Biggest jumps in height?
You will grow the most in the womb. For a period of time, the cells double up in various cycles. In the last trimester of pregnancy you also put on a lot of weight after the main organs, skeleton, and nervous system are built. Never again will your body go through such massive change in such a short amount of time.
The next big jumps in height are made when you are a baby. Apart from growth your posture also has an influence on your height as your head is higher above the ground when you start crawling and walking. Here you can see that height is not only about how long your body is but also how you position it in relation to your surroundings.
The last big growth spurt most people go through is in puberty. When your hormones change and you start to grow hair in weird places you usually also add a considerable amount of centimeters to your height. This is the area where strength training might have the most impact to trigger these effects a little earlier.
What to do if you are not happy with your height?
There are several things you can do when you are not happy with your height. They will not have a huge impact unless they are drastic. Some of the options are:
Strength training
Operation
Posture
Clothes
Perspective
Strength training is one option to stimulate your body to produce growth hormones. In fact, most sports will have this effect on your body. There have been reports that vigorous exercise can bring on puberty a bit earlier, but that is only if you are doing it regularly. When you age, strength training can also help to slow down the deterioration of your body by stimulating growth. Ultimately, you will decrease in size and health over your life.
Another option to increase our height is an operation to stretch you out. You can break bones and reconstruct them longer. This is a very painful and expensive process that is very likely to leave your bones more brittle than before. It’s just not worth it to risk your health unnecessarily just to be a few centimeters taller.
Working on posture is probably the cheapest and most immediate way to get a few extra centimeters in. Holding yourself straight with your chin up makes you seem bigger and longer. Chest out, belly in will also provide a better line for your body. Your arms can then be used when you speak to make an even better impression. Start with posture if you feel like you are too small for something.
Clothes can also help to make you appear taller than you really are. Heeled shoes are an obvious option. In addition to this, you can work with clothes that create optical illusions based on their cut and pattern that make you seem taller.
The last thing is perspective. If you want to appear greater in height than You can stand beside small objects or further away from bigger objects to make them seem smaller. There are also a lot of tricks you can do with a camera and perspective.
Weight variation within a day?
A small study on 90 individuals in Ghana shows height variations within a day ranging from 1-3 cm depending on the individual. While this is a relatively small sample limited to one country, this is a trend that can be genrally seen.
Can pull ups increase height?
At best they can stretch you when you spine is compressed and help indirectly to trigger growth in puberty by releasing more hormones. This effect could also be achieved by other forms of strength training and has not directly to do with the mechanics of the pull up itself. Stronger influences in your height are your diet, health services when you are a baby and the genetics passed down from your parents. Accept that these factors will have set a certain limit to your growth in height and focus on other points in your training. You do not need to be incredibly tall to be sexy or successful. Determination and resilience are way better indicators for these traits.
