A lot of people want physical growth in their life, as they start growing up. Having physical growth also includes being taller and longer with your height as per your age.

But not everyone gets along with this height issue, because of several reasons. However, if you have ever dreamt of being taller, then there would have been specific ways you would have applied to get the job done.

Out of all these, stretching exercises would have been their foremost, making it way lot easier. It is because stretches help you in your growth plates making you taller.

1. Why is Stretching Important?

Stretching has always been a warmup exercise, which everyone who is associated with physical growth or practice does. Stretching is also performed by professional athletes, who do that before their game begins.

Stretching helps you maintain muscle mass and gives your body the needed relaxation, which is necessary for your body before any physical work. Doing stretches also helps you in increasing your work efficiency, and mobility, and makes your body work smoothly.

1.1 Physical Exercise and Stretching

Performing stretches before any physical exercises also extends your muscles, and tissues, and reduces the risk of having any fatal injuries. Unknowingly stretching becomes your best mate for helping you get into a better shape.

In this modern world, everyone is busy doing jobs, where they have to just sit for hours a day. Sitting down most of the time starts blending your hamstring tight, making your muscles jammed.

Whereas stretches in between the sessions can be very helpful in getting that needed to relax time. Hence, if not for gaining inches, or increasing height, stretches can also be helpful otherwise.

2. The Science Behind a Person’s Height

A person’s height depends on various sources of growth. That source mostly gets affected by the genes, which carry the growth hormones. If you have the genes of a taller person, then simply there are higher chances that you grow taller.

Talking scientifically, the hormone that is found in the genes gradually helps in stimulating the bones and tissues and heightens them. However, not only this there are also other factors which can affect your average height.

It is found that a low body mass is the reason for not getting a proper height. Normally, when a child does not have a healthy eating habit, they are found to have low body mass.

2.1 Childhood Growth Is Essential

Nevertheless, nutritional growth becomes very crucial for your childhood growth. It is around this childhood when any child starts gaining a better height.

The normal growth of that person happens during this period mainly. Hence, apart from having good genes, it also becomes essential to have a healthy diet during childhood for better physical growth.

Another factor, which can also subtly play an essential role in determining your child’s height is the interaction point of your genetic and environmental factors. Environmental factors are known to be very important to the growth of a child, as it is the child shapes physical.

3. The Science Behind Stretching

Stretching exercises have always been a pre-exercise routine for everyone. Most people who do any physical exercise, before doing so, stretch additionally at first to relax their muscles.

It is because, before we start doing any physical activity, our muscles are always stagnant and tight. So, when we would perform any physical exercise, they would start being contracted and relaxed at the same time.

So, before doing that, it becomes necessary for the muscles to become free. In this, stretches help a lot to relax the muscles of your entire body.

4. How Your Muscles React

How easy this may sound, sometimes the physical activity of stretching is quite complicated in nature. Although it is recommended for a better posture, this pre-exercise routine can sometimes lead to injuries, if not done scientifically correct.

The stretches are largely determined by the muscle tension which gets builds gradually. This muscle tension helps in reproducing a reflex contraction, which simultaneously helps in protecting itself.

4.1 Effectiveness of Stretching

Once you start stretching and the muscles get tired with the stretches, you can start to notice things better. So, in layman’s words, stretches should be gentle and quick at the same time.

This makes the stretches more effective and also promises a better result. Adding to that, the additional breathing should be avoided, or if possible controlled, because it can relax the muscles and tissues while stretching. This can degrade the effect of the result.

5. Can You Increase Your Height?

Just like you gain muscle once you start getting into puberty, the same way goes for height. An increased height is all one needs, but one also needs to understand that height mostly grows naturally.

Most Americans start getting taller, and a significant change comes in their height starting from their 20s. This growth continues for a long till the end of puberty. Not only height but with time one starts gaining muscles also, scientifically 4 inches a year.

5.1 Scientific Reasons Behind

If we compare girls and boys, then studies find that boys experience better and sudden height growth during their teenage years. The bones properly nurture and grow making the growth look significant.

For girls, it is around the age of 16 to 17, that they mostly reach their full height potential, which makes them reach adulthood. These growth spikes can also vary with different factors included as good posture, good nutrition, and gymming like weightlifting.

Beyond this general and natural health growth of height, everyone tries to even get a better height on their own. Similarly, stretching makes you taller somehow, but that too needs to be done properly.

6. What Happens if You Don’t Stretch After a Workout?

Stretching has always been a beautiful relaxing process, for maybe your upper body or even your lower body. The stretching sometimes also includes yoga poses or even just a straight line.

So, skipping stretching after a good workout session is something you should think twice before. Here are some of the consequences that you may face if you skip stretching after a workout session.

6.1 Contraction

The process of workout mainly includes the process, where we pose our body in a certain posture that our muscles start to contract and then tighten up, simultaneously. It is because when we work out, it is our muscles we mainly work on.

So, the muscles need a certain relaxation time for the betterment of the inner core. When we breathe deeply, it also provides a lot of relaxation for our muscles.

As it is quite a difficult process for our muscles to recover quickly after a thorough workout session, stretches become so important. Performing stretches helps you relax your muscles and due to this relaxation, the muscles also start recovering to their previous position quickly.

6.2 Lactic Acid

While we work out, we all must have gone through this certain phase of getting a burning sensation after the workout session. This burning sensation also does not allow us to work out any further.

This burning sensation is nothing but, the lactic acid that works within us when we work out. It starts accumulating within us when our body starts to work out. This makes the functions after the workout sessions more difficult to have.

But, on a positive note, a good posture and a perfect stretch not only help our legs but also this injury. It also helps in making the arms feel better and reduces the risk of muscle contraction.

6.3 Imbalanced Muscles

While we are working out, we really miss out on some parts of our body, it may be legs, arms, spine, or even bones while elongating others. This improper contraction and elongation can result in irregular pain in your body.

If we let these irregular muscle pains stay in our body after the workout sessions, then there is a high chance that they can increase the risk of lower back and shoulders. Hence, they need to be worried.

So, proper stretching helps in sucking out all the muscle problems and somehow it also prevents you from having a bad muscle contraction or even muscle imbalance.

6.4 Spasms

Muscle spasms are quite normal for every other human being. Additionally, it also makes you feel worse when you are trying to have a better day after a workout session.

Hence, to maintain proper body fitness and not experience muscle spasms all over the body, stretching is something that helps the most. This mainly provides spasms in your back.

7. Can Stretches Make You Taller?

Growing a few inches more than your regular height is something that everyone wants. There are specific ways people believe that they can be taller.

If we study from a scientific point of view, then there are strict chances that stretching never makes you taller, how much you may even try. This is somehow a wrong perspective that people have planted in their minds, and this is still being continued in our society.

7.1 Workout and Stretching

While working out, you may also consult your fitness instructor who will, stretching make you taller. The answer will be a clear-cut no, but at the same time, stretching has a lot of advantages.

These advantages include elongating your muscles and simultaneously relaxing them. It also makes your muscles too flexible to work with, but how much you may stretch, has nothing to do with you being tall.

It is quite a rigid answer that, your bones mainly determine how tall you would be and if you are going to get taller or not. Hence, it is through your structure of bones, that your height is determined.

In some other ways, although stretching cannot make you taller, it can make you look taller in disguise. It is because, when we normally slouch our muscles, start contracting a lot. This is the reason we do not start looking more heightened or taller.

But when we start stretching, the muscles start expanding a due to this, we begin to look a bit taller, than what is expected. So, when we start stretching our tightened muscles start relaxing a lot, which also helps in improving our posture.

This improvement in our posture, helps us to be straighter in our spinal discs, which makes us walk taller. So, although stretching directly does not allow us to be physically taller, it starts making us feel that way, through which we start feeling less clumsy and freer.

8. Do You Lose Height in Adulthood?

It is believed that people get an increased height and start being tall once they hit their teenage years. But this is also a fact that people start losing their height once their age reaches the pinnacle.

It is a certainty that, once we start growing older, our bones start getting rustier. This rustiness makes our bones lose the height potential, which gradually makes us lose our height.

But in some exceptional cases, we can also find people more than 50 age, also have some good height. So it is about dietary, health problems and including osteoporosis.

These certain health conditions can also affect a person’s height and can decide if you are going to be this tall or not. These health interventions can also play a vital role in determining the height potential of your body.

9. Conclusion

Although stretching does not make you tall, it has also a lot of health benefits that need to be acknowledged. This needs to be kept in mind that, not only professional athletes should perform stretches but also everyone should practice this as a regular day-to-day exercise.

People who also workout should also keep stretching as a general practice and they should not skip it. It is because stretching may or may not make you taller, but it makes you more flexible, relaxes your muscles, and makes your muscles more stimulating to work.

Hence, this simple exercise of muscles becomes very important to keep your muscles strong, healthy, and flexible at the same time. This also helps in preventing your body from injuries.

Last Updated on December 26, 2023 by soubhik92@gmail.com