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?”

After thinking over this issue for a long time, I have decided that I will take on the challenge of actually trying to increase my height. I sort of realized that it makes no sense for me to do all the research but not try to apply the knowledge I have learned towards changing my body.

The way I see it is that I can just do all the reading and theorizing, or try to do some exercising, stretching, and possibly use PEMF or mechanical loading technology to see what happens.

At this point, I have no insane expectations. I would expect that I would regain maybe 1-2 cms of lost height (and lost health) that has happened from living a relatively sedentary lifestyle in the last 2 years from focusing so much on my businesses and relationships. Beyond that I am NOT going to be trying to kill myself to add another centimeter.

Whatever gains in terms of health or height I do get I will be happy and grateful for. 

Currently I am around 200 lbs (maybe 210 lbs or more) and I have told my gf that I would loss some weight along with her to get a stronger, more fit body and live a more active, healthier life. I guess it probably wouldn’t hurt to see if the exercising will help increase my height too. So this message is to give myself the external accountability.

So I am going to try to achieve multiple goals from starting a realistic exercise program.

• Loose weight
• Gain muscle mass
• Increase fitness
• Increase height 

Note: I would like to cite this paper “Does External Accountability Affect Student Outcomes? A Cross-State Analysis” from Stanford to show that by putting some form of external accountability into place, I am more likely to follow through on my promises and claims. I will also be more consistent and persistence in my effort for some type of success.

I am currently almost 28.5 years old male and I haven’t grown any taller in maybe 8-9 years. It is very clear, without the need for an X-ray from any endocrinologist or orthopaedic physician that my growth plates have been gone for a long time.

Current height (a reasonable guess from past measurements made years ago):

• 182.8 cms in the morning right after waking up.
• 181.0 cms at night right before going to sleep

Issue: I have no good mirror that can go over my head to see myself to know whether I am getting any real progress. I will need to buy a really big mirror for that.

Current Date: March 2rd, 2013

My plan:

I guess I’ll start the first 3-4 months with the usual stuff like…

• Stretching
• Yoga
• Back Bridging
• Look into meeting a chiropractor to see if my spine/vertebrate needs to be readjusted.
• Geting Massages
• I will also start performing the Lateral Synovial Joint Loading Method along with my proposed Chisel & Hammer Correction.
• Looking into seeing whether I can get ESW, Ultrasonic, or PEMF device.

For supplements I am not sure what I will want to take. I guess I will start with these supplements first since I am promoting them….

• Hyaluronic Acid – not sure at this time
• Glucosamine Sulfate – 1000 mg daily
• Astragalus – not sure at this time
• Melatonin – 3 mg daily (this will also help me since I have some sleeping difficulty)

All the measurements and links I will put on the sidebar, so you can easily see any height changes of the progression. The first one will be entitled “March 3, 2013:”

I will be doing the exercises and techniques as consistently as I possibly can. I will at the end of every month write a small post detailing any height changes that I notice. This means that on April 1st, May 1st ,June 1st, etc. or the start of each month I will have something up. I will not put a fake of joke post up on April 1st, even though it is April Fool’s Day.

These posts will be sort of my way of replacing the old Natural Height Growth Website Monthly Traffic Reports I used to write about, written from August to January. After thinking it over, the traffic report posts are going to end and be replaced by height progression reports. That is what most people would be interested in anyway.

Oath I Am Taking:

Since I have personally decided to join in and putting my own body back into the endeavor, I felt that I need to swear on a oath to promise to always tell the readers, the listener to the podcast, and the visitors to the website the absolute truth of my height gains or losses. I will never try to exaggerate the truth of any measurements I have done.

I would like to state out loud the Hippocratic Oath that newly minted physicians are supposed to say. I know, I am not a physician or medical professional but there are few oaths that I can reference from which have a strong historical relevance to what we are doing. From the website of the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, I will copy and paste the entire Hippocratic Oath and always swear to act morally and honestly about my progress in this journey.

Hippocratic Oath

I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asclepius, and Hygieia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath and this contract:

To hold him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to be a partner in life with him, and to fulfill his needs when required; to look upon his offspring as equals to my own siblings, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract; and that by the set rules, lectures, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the law of medicine, but to no others.

I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.

I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.

In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.

Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.

Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.

So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all men for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate.

Translated by Michael North, National Library of Medicine, 2002.

This post is where I look into the growth of human height in smaller time intervals. We will go deeper into the progression of height increase during shorter time scales like during a 3 months cycle. I am hoping to see whether there are certain times when growth is fastest and when we figure out what these specific time intervals are, we can try to maximize and increase those time intervals for higher final height.

Study #1: Micro and macro perspectives in auxology: findings and considerations upon the variability of short term and individual growth and the stability of population derived parameters.

Abstract

The present paper links the two most contrasting aspects of auxology, and addresses the apparent discrepancy between the variability and pulsatility of short term individual growth, and the stability of population derived parameters. When body stature is measured at monthly intervals, an irregular incremental pattern becomes obvious, with a number of large scale components such as series of prepubertal and pubertal growth spurts, seasonal influences on height gain, and influences of the psychosocial and economic background. When measurement intervals decrease, the patterns of stature increment appear even more irregular, and a number of short scale components become apparent, that are distinct from measurement error. Observations are presented that suggest growth being a pulsatile, a periodic, a saltatory, respectively a chaotic event as suggested by some recent studies in animals and in human newborns. Accurate measurements of the lower leg at intervals of 24 hours support the idea of short term growth being characterized by chaotic series of ‘mini growth spurts’ that occur at intervals of approximately 4-9 days. The amplitude of mini growth spurts ranges between 2 and some 10 mm, and also growth velocity of each spurt varies considerably so that one spurt needs between less than one and up to several days for completion. The very opposite of the variability of individual growth was found in populations. A meta-analysis of 40 male and 51 female European and US American growth studies revealed an almost uniform general pattern of average stature increment during the last 100 years. An additional analysis of stature variation of very large Japanese and Czechoslovakian growth surveys, with all together more than 23000000 measurements, and more than 500000 German preschool and school measurements, suggested similar uniformity in the standard deviation of stature.

Study #2: The analysis of short-term growth.

Abstract

The analysis of short-term growth needs repetitive measurements of body stature or of segments of the body. When body stature is measured at monthly intervals, an irregular incremental pattern becomes obvious with a number of large-scale components such as series of prepubertal and pubertal growth spurts, seasonal influences on height gain, and influences of the psychosocial and economic background. When measurement intervals decrease, incremental patterns appear even more irregular, and a number of short-scale components become apparent that are distinct from measurement error. The review summarizes the analysis of short-term growth, and presents the current findings supporting different views on how growth progresses at short term. In particular, observations are presented that suggest growth being a pulsatile, a periodic, a saltatory, and a chaotic event. Some recent animal studies and studies in human newborns are added in detail as they illustrate short-term growth on the basis of accurate 24-hour measurements of the lower leg. The latter investigations support the idea of short-term growth being characterized by chaotic series of’mini growth spurts’ that occur at intervals of approximately 4-5 days, not only in human neonates, but also in rats. The amplitude of mini growth spurts ranges between 2 and some 10 mm, and growth velocity of each spurt also varies considerably so that one spurt needs between less than 1 and up to several days for completion.

Study #3: Periodical changes of short term growth velocity (‘mini growth spurts’) in human growth.

Abstract

Evidence has accumulated that predictions of annual or half-annual growth rates are of limited validity when derived from extrapolations of short term growth rates. In order to investigate whether the poor predictive qualities of short sections of individual growth curves are caused by non-linearity of human growth, we have studied 73 healthy children, aged 2.9 to 15.9 years, with standard deviation scores for body height ranging between -3.3 and +3.0. The children were measured between 18 and 106 times once or twice per week throughout periods of 180 to 306 days by knemometry, a novel and noninvasive technique of accurate lower leg length measurement. Non-linearity of growth was found in about 70% of those children who could be measured more than 35 times. 45 children provided evidence for a characteristic up-and-down pattern of lower leg growth velocity consisting of sharp growth spurts (‘mini growth spurts’) alternating with periods of decreased growth velocity every 30 to 55 days. This pattern seemed to appear spontaneously, though in some cases we found a marked coincidence between periods of growth arrest and intermittent infectious illness.

Study #4: Knemometry, a new tool for the investigation of growth. A review.

Abstract

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of human growth have revealed almost every detail of the typical human growth pattern. Yet, the description of this pattern is still limited to the traditional vocabulary of “growth rates”, i.e. height or length differences divided by certain time intervals such as months or years. Almost no information is yet available on finer details of this pattern. This review concerns the existing experimental and clinical data collected by a novel and non-invasive technique of accurate lower leg length measurement named “knemometry” that has been used for the study of short-term growth. This technique estimates the distance between heel and knee of the sitting child with an accuracy (technical error) of 0.09-0.16 mm. Several authors have presented evidence that lower leg growth is non-linear. There is not only a marked day-to-day variation of the lower leg length which far exceeds the error of the measurement itself, but there is also a characteristic up-and-down pattern of lower leg growth consisting of sharp growth spurts (“mini-growth-spurts”) alternating with periods of decreased growth velocity every 30-55 days in 45 out of 73 healthy children. This pattern can be visualized by the calculation of “mean daily lower leg growth velocities”, an approach that gives information on the kinetic properties of the growth process. In spite of much initial criticism, knemometry has opened a fascinating new dimension of the physiology of human growth and provided finer details of growth than hitherto obtainable by conventional techniques of growth measurement.

Analysis & Interpretation:

The first study starts off by noting that when researchers actually tried to measure the growth rate in terms of height difference for intervals of short time duration, like around each month, the growth chart is irregular. There seem to be sections of time where growth is large, and others where there is no growth at all. When the time interval is shorten further down to maybe each week, the growth increments become even more irregular. As the researchers suggest, growth is like …being a pulsatile, a periodic, a saltatory, respectively a chaotic event as suggested by some recent studies in animals and in human newborn.” It seems that there are these “mini-growth spurts” which occur in 4-9 days intervals. The incremental nature is chaotic and range from 2-10 mm in longitudinal growth. The velocity of growth also is extremely varied from the range of less than 1 day to several days to get reach the amount of bone length difference.

When a meta-analysis is done of large groups of subjects, it appears that even though for the short term growth, everything is irregular, the overall growth progression is actually uniform.

It seems that study #2 just repeats the abstract and results of the 1st study. It is again noted that the mini-growth spurts are actually around 4-5 days long and the rate or velocity of growth can be very varied as well. The way the measurement of growth velocity is done is by measuring the lower leg bone. What is interesting to note about the 2nd study is that the growth irregularity found in humans are exhibited by lab rats as well. Maybe this means that the growth pattern for short terms is the same for most animals.

The 3rd study places more evidence towards the idea that whatever one might measure in terms of growth rate for the short term can not really be used to calculate the growth rate for the long term. The researchers were trying to…”…to investigate whether the poor predictive qualities of short sections of individual growth curves are caused by non-linearity of human growth,…” 73 healthy children had their lower leg measured using the technique known as knemometry in a varied time frame (180-360 days) and at varied frequencies (18-100 times a day). In the children measured more than 35 times, around 70% of them showed nonlinear growth increments. Around 45 of the children showed an up and down pattern of high growth velocity aka mini-growth spurt followed by around 30-55 days of no or minimal increase. What is interesting to note is that the researchers observed that a lot of the decreased growth time intervals coincided with infectious illness times.

The 4th study was a review of the data found from clinical using something known as Knemometry. It is a novel and non-invasive technique of accurate lower leg length measurement that has been used for the study of short-term growth. This technique estimates the distance between heel and knee of the sitting child with an accuracy (technical error) of 0.09-0.16 mm. The researchers note of the same study that…

“There is not only a marked day-to-day variation of the lower leg length which far exceeds the error of the measurement itself, but there is also a characteristic up-and-down pattern of lower leg growth consisting of sharp growth spurts (“mini-growth-spurts”) alternating with periods of decreased growth velocity”

The last study I have put in the post just shows that the technique of measuring the lower leg bone called knemometry is now being looked at in the field of auxology has been very effect in showing that human growth in short time periods is very irregular

I had talked about the idea of extending the time range for breastfeeding for optimal child nutrition in the post “What If Breastfeeding Human Milk Is Extended Or Synthesized To Increase Height?“. I had theorized back then that it might be smarter for babies to end up bigger to increase the time for breastfeeding We already know that for the young baby with mostly multipotent stem cells the best type of nutrition is from the mother’s milk. However there seems to be people who are disagreeing over the natural breastfeeding vs. synthetic formula. This post will extend the idea of breastfeeding vs. formula to show that there are possible even more benefits.

Breastfeeding as been shown to be superior towards babies getting taller, but not fatter, and that means that the breastfeed child will probably have less change of development health problems later in life due to being overweight.

I think this study has shown with convincing evidence that there may not be any ethnicity or even groups of people who have any type of genetic propensity towards high stature.

Sure there will always be small pockets of people or certain families which have genes which make them taller than the rest of a ethnic group or “tribe” but this study suggest that through at least the act of the normal breastfeeding instead of giving our babies formula, we can standardized the growth progression (height increase) charts for all of the countries in the world.

From the website KellyMom.com, the article states…

“The problem is that many doctors are not familiar with the normal weight gain patterns of breastfed babies, and rely too much upon older growth charts that are based upon the growth of artificially fed babies. In 2006, the World Health Organization released revised growth charts that are representative of healthy breastfed babies throughout the world. Until doctors are familiar with them,…”

This shows that the data from the old medical & health organizations were using information from synthetically fed babies. The charts are off because babies fed with formula grow in weight much faster.

The writer makes an excellent point with….

“Healthy breastfed infants tend to grow more rapidly than their formula-fed peers in the first 2-3 months of life and less rapidly from 3 to 12 months. All growth charts available before 2006 (which are still used by many health care providers in the US) included data from infants who were not exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months (includes formula-fed infants and those starting solids before the recommended 6 months). Because many doctors are not aware of this difference in growth, they see the baby dropping in percentiles on the growth chart and often come to the faulty conclusion that the baby is not growing adequately. At this point they often recommend that the mother (unnecessarily) supplement with formula or solids, and sometimes recommend that they stop breastfeeding altogether.”

Later in the article the writers notes that the old charts that are used was from studies done from 1929-1975 of babies from ages 0-2 whose mother started feeding them solid foods by age 4 months or earlier and the data was for mothers who fed their babies milk and formula as a combination. The revised growth charts was for mothers who fed their babies solid food after 6 months as now recommended and predominantly feeds the baby breast milk.

From the website BabyCenter.com…

Some first asks the question “Is it true that breastfed babies grow more slowly than formula-fed babies?”

Babies who are breastfed for the first year of life seem to grow more rapidly in the first three or four months and then more slowly for the rest of the year. At age 1, breastfed babies weigh less, on average, than formula-fed babies.

Experts aren’t sure why this is so, but they do know that it’s absolutely normal and nothing to be concerned about. In fact, some research suggests that babies who grow too quickly may have higher cholesterol levels, higher blood pressure, and increased risk of obesity and diabetes later in life.

In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a brand-new set of growth charts based on 8,500 babies who were breastfed. The mothers participating in the study planned to breastfeed exclusively or predominately for the first four to six months and to continue breastfeeding for at least 12 months.

Before 2006, the growth charts that tracked babies’ length and weight gain – created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1977 and updated in 2000 – were based on babies who were fed formula or a combination of formula and breast milk.

Implications For Height Increase

The growth of a human individual is the most critical in their earliest years. I had shown from other posts that during the first year of life, a child can grow as much as 12 inches longer. After that, around the age 2-4 they average around 4-5 inches a year. Since the goal of our website is to try to optimize the growth pattern to reach the highest final height possible, it is important to consider whether it might be smarter to go with breastfeeding the baby exclusively for upwards of even 1 year so that the baby can keep their metabolism lower to not overstimulate the growth system. The studies do show that the breastfed baby in comparing length/height with the baby fed with formula was about the same. The formula fed baby was bigger only in terms of weight.

What we know from our research is that growth is overstimulated too early in life, that causes earlier puberty resulting in earlier growth plate closure and decreased final height. Since the benefits of breast feed babies are that they weigh less while still keeping the same rate of height growth, I strongly suggest that the baby should move towards breastmilk diet much longer than most physicians would recommend. 4 years of medical school learning with a couple of years of residency at pediatric hospital clinics is not enough to overide the natural tendencies of the billions of years of evolution which is dictated by Mother Nature’s wisdom.

[New growth references of the World Health Organization based on breast fed infants].

This study I found from PubMed seems to give a strong connection to a few ideas I’ve been thinking about for the last few months over why premature puberty is occurring which would almost always lead to shorter final adult height.

Is early puberty triggered by catch-up growth following undernutrition?

Something that I have been thinking about recently is the idea of maybe doing something to the bones that make up the overal human height that does not involve the usual long bones, the femur and tibia.

Can we do something to the vertebrate and the intervertebral discs which would be able to make the torso longer? What about the skull?

One irregular bone which we have not really looked at has been the back, heel bone in the human feet which makes the very bottom of the human body. This is the calcaneus.

In terms of bone deformation, the Calcaneus would probably be a very hard, touch bone to remodel, if we can do it at all. This one bone is supposed to be able to supposed 100-200 lbs of human flesh on top of it for around 75-80 years which is the average life expectancy of humans today.

Since humans still are walking at lot, the bottom end of the calcaneus is being hit over and over again everyday. It has around 200 lbs of flesh pushing it against the hard surface ground. If we are to apply the old remodeling principle of Wolff’s Law, the bottom end of the calcaneus would get thicker over time. But it doesn’t, or at least not a level which we can notice a big measurable difference.

So I am proposing the idea that maybe we should try to get a clamp and place a lateral load on both sides of the calcaneus of the heel area to see whether it would cause the bone on the side to remodel, and as a result also remodel the bottom of the calcaneus to gain a few millimeters of bone thickening.

The concept of LSJL is to use clamps to laterally load the bulging epiphysis in the synovial joints of our limbs. If there are mesenchyme that will differentiate into chondrocytes and be able to push the long bone’s hard cortical bone in such a way to stimulate longitudinal growth, would the same work for an irregular bone? I note that most bones have cavities at the center similar to the intermedullary cavity of the tibia and femur. In this cavity is the marrow or intercellular fluid which would have some progenitor mesenchyme which comprise of the red stem cells and the yellow adiposed-derived mesenchymal pluripotent stem cells.

If there is enough progenitor cells in the cavity filled matrix in the hard, strong calcaneus, putting intermittent, strong lateral loads on the calceneus might result in a similar effect to the LSJL basic principles. Will it however produce the same types of growth factors to simulate chondrogenesis and then proliferation? I am not sure.