These days I write so many articles that it is hard even for me to keep up with the articles that I write but I had found an article on the boards that showed that one of the techniques and methods I had mentioned maybe yesterday has actually been implemented in surgery to heal and regrow a patient’s leg bone.

The Post where I had originally talked about this particular method and new technique named appropriately “An Alternative To Limb Lengthening Surgery” is located HERE. The article on the actual technique implementation can be found from Sky News so click HERE .

I think this is an appropriate question to ask my regular readers. I know who you are out there. There really is only 3 of you, maybe 4 but I still wanted to ask and get some feedback from you guys. Some of you come and check this site like 10 times a day, which is cool by me. Any traffic and eyeballs who are interested in what I have to say and write is nice. If this turns into an obsession of yours, it might a good idea to take a break from this site. I do try to write 3-4 blog posts a day, sometimes even up to 7 articles, but sometimes I don’t have enough energy or motivation to do much.

 – What is your reason to seek height increase?  –

Do you feel that you are not as good as other people who might be taller than you? Or is your own self image of yourself keeping you from having the type of romantic success or attracting the romantic prospects that you desire? Maybe you think your lack of height is keeping you from getting a promotion or raise. Do people joke or tease you about your height?

As for myself, I had written about my story in a previous post which you can find HERE. I have had a history of insecurity over my self image, whether it was from my intelligence or my height. It is really frustrating when I have a cousin who has both a Ph. D and a M. D from Stanford and Harvard. He may be slightly shorter than me but his number of academic achievements really do intimidate me who only has an undergraduate degree from a relatively unknown state school. How am I supposed to compare myself to that kind of person? Anyway, my story is long and complex. I am a rather screwed up person.

From the boards, I found another article that showed that the medical technology is definitely coming along where one day we will have the power to regrow our cartilage and bones, and maybe even our joints. While this might not be able to help us reinitiate natural body growth by opening up the growth plates back from the technology, we can definitely use this technology in collaboration with the limb lenghtening surgery to make the bone increasing go faster and heal quicker.

For other uses, the stem cells can be eventually ejected into our cavities where our old joints were and regrow completely new ones. Definitely the stuff of science fiction right now, and maybe in 20 years, the stuff of just science.

The full article was found from HERE.

Patients ‘could grow new joints’

Thursday, 29 July 2010

I was watching the NBA draft a few months ago where Anthony Davis was draft #1 by the New Orleans Hornets. Before that fateful night which will be one of the pivotal moments in his life, he had accumulated man awards and honors. From the Wikipedia article about him found HERE, I quote the list of accomplishments and accolades.

“”He was a 2012 NCAA Unanimous First team All-American and was the 2011–12 NCAA Division I men’s basketball season blocks leader. He established Southeastern Conference single-season blocked shots and NCAA Division I freshman blocked shots records. He has also earned the national Freshman, Defensive Player and Big Man awards. In addition, he has been named the 2012 National Player of the Year by various organizations, earning the Oscar Robertson Trophy, the Adolph Rupp Trophy, the Associated Press Player of the Year, Naismith Award, Sporting News Player of the Year and John R. Wooden Award. He was the Southeastern Conference’s player, freshman and defensive player of the year. He helped lead Kentucky to a undefeated 2011–12 Southeastern Conference men’s basketball season and was the NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player when Kentucky won the 2012 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament. “”

Of course we learn very quickly form the commentators that Anthony Davis was not always this type of basketball phenom who standard at 6′ 10″ with a wingspan of 7′ 4″. What is really the true defining act that changed his life was during the summer between his Sophomore and Junior year in high school when Anthony went through a 8 inch growth spurt!

Before that Anthony Davis was a relatively unknown 6′ 2″ point guard who was trying to get playing minutes on the court in a relatively unknown south part of Chicago where there was little basketball talent or opportunities. The moment after David shot up, his playing and new found size caught the eye of the scouts in college and the professional league. In 1 years time, he had become the #1 prospect by many scouts.

So you might ask, is the whole point of this pos to show that if I grow 8 inches in a year, I will become instantly successful, at least in basketball? No, my main point is that in terms of reaching success, it seems that it is better to go through a late growth spurt and be a late bloomer than to go through that growth spurt early. This main point is related to my last post which talks about the fact that people of short stature usually seem to be more driven and ambitious than their taller counterparts.

If given the chance to let their physical body grow in size to as much as their ambition, they would catapult themselves into the stratosphere of success, since both their mental and physical attributes are both so immense. All that was holding them back was their physical size.

The examples in terms of basketball players are enormous.

1. Michael Jordan – Was a 5′ 11″ as a sophomore in high school. He was cut from the varsity team only because of his lack of height and he had stated many times that it was one fo the most defining moments in his life. Grew 5 inches during the summer to 6′ 4″ and was then allowed on to his varsity basketball team. Final height is 6′ 5-6’6″. No one in Jordan’s family is over 6 foot tall. Has a brother who is only 5′ 7″. The rest is history.

2. Lebron James – He grew from 6′ 1″ to 6′ 8″ in two years. His father and mother are supposed to be only 5′ 7″ and 5′ 5″. HIs growth progression showed that he was “only” 6′ 1″ foot until later in his development

3. David Robinson – He was 5′ 9″ as a junior in high school! By his senior year he had grown to 6′ 7″ and after leaving the naval academy he had grown to 7′ 1″.

4. Scottie Pippen – He entered college at the age of 19 at 6′ 1″ at Central Michigan completely unknown. Cam out of college at height 6′ 8″ and recognized as a star.

5. Dennis Rodman – Apparently he was 5′ 6″ in his high school. After high school he worked as a janitor at around height 5′ 9″ and then grew to be 6′ 7″ in one year when he was 20 . That is over 1 feet of growth in one year.

6. Manu Ginobili – He grew 10 inches in 2 years from 5′ 8″ to 6′ 6″ late in his development.

7. Dwight Howard – “I went from 5’8” to 6’3” to 6’9” in one year” at the age of 15-16 – Quote.

8. Tim Duncan –  had a massive late growth spurt when he was 17 from 6’3″ to 6’11”

9. Lamar Odom – Was 6’2 as a highschool point guard. Out of nowhere he hit a huge growth spurt to 6’9.

On a related note, I had discovered this article on Rivals.com where the poster had read an article written by a doctor who claimed that people who went threw their growth spurts later in life became better at hand-eye coordination and retained their athleticism. You can find the discussion HERE. What appears to happen is that being shorter and having a lower center of gravity means a better control of one’s body. One’s coordination and body agility increases. However, for most people who increase in height their body does not gain the coordination that shorter people so that skill is never fully developed. For guys who had stayed rather short early on, their body had learned how to move so when their growth spurt happened, they were well prepared.

In life, timing is account for much of success since being too early for something or being roo late for something means the right oportunity can mean losing our biggest opportunity forever.

Throughout my own life, I have noticed a weak correlation to people who are genetically supposed to be short or average height and their personal ambition. Most people would call this type of phenomena the Napoleon Complex but that was actually proved to be false. A new research reveals that in fact it is the tall men that are more likely to start an aggression in conflict situations. However, we are not talking about agression, but personality and personal ambition.

What I am talking about is that for many of the people I know from my childhood who was of particular short stature, their work ethic and driven personalities were always very visible. The perfect example is a childhood aquaintance I knew starting from my middle school days. He was always trying to take the highest level of classes, adding to his course load, and skipping meals to fulfill more professional obligations. There was at least one time when he fainted from working so hard and that freaked out his parents. The last time I saw him was when I was maybe 18 coming just ready to leave for college myself and he and I went to the local YMCA to play basketball. I noted that he was one of the shortest asian guys I have seen in a long time, maybe around 5’1″ -5’2″. When I was playing basketball ,I would do it for maybe 10 minutes and then give up and relax since I had not done basketball in so long. However, He kept on trying to play and would try over and over again to make just one basketball shot. His determination and will to achieve his goal was tremendous and my own father make a mark that I should emulate this guys focus and determination.

After he went to school at Cornell for Electrical Engineering, he spent the Summers working at two jobs, while trying at the same time trying to leave the Engineering world behind. He was always claiming that he wanted to get a job in Wall Street, work for some investment firm and become a junior analyst, and eventually an investment banker who would make $5 million a year. After college, after over a year of trying, he did finally find employment in Wall Street working for a firm but the Economic Recession of 2009 and onward made him loose his job, but he never stopped trying to achieve as much wealth and success as possible.

While this is just one case, I do often see some slight correlation. While it is true from the numbers that taller men are more likely to be promoted and earn more than their shorter counter parts, I would argue that the shorter men are more likely to be driven and ambitious than men who are taller. Whether the shorter of the men can succeed and overcome all of life’s bias agains them and choose the taller of the men, I am still not sure.

I do know that my own father is of short stature and that my mother’s parents intiially disproved of him because they were afraid their grandchildren would come out short, which is not true. My own father was able to compensate, and then overcompensate for his lack of height and size by being an amazing boyfriend, then husband, and finally father. His calm demeanor means that he is almost always the one who keeps the peace in the house, keeping everyone under control. We could state that if my father was not able to have such an amazing personality and capable personality, my mother would have left him for someone who was better (aka taller). I know for a fact that many of my past girlfriends who dumped or left me went on to someone who they thought was better than me, so in their mind, they were moving “up” in progress, down down. His achievements include getting a Ph. D from an ivy league school, working for a fortune 100 company, becoming a top executive, and starting at least 2 success companies of his own, and supporting his entire family of 5 alone on his salary and budget on his own while retiring only 20 years after he started working at the tender age of 34.

I guess I am making a big generalization from these two cases in saying that there is some great enduring qaulities in being short. Maybe it is because f being short that these people had to develop and strengthen other aspects of themselves to succeed in life, but that still does not take away from all of their success and personal achievements in life.

Recently I was sick and I had written an article which talked about how you can become smarter with taking Provigil or Piracetam. I had linked a few interviews that Dave Asprey had done with CNN and ABC which talked about his use of these mind enhancement drugs. Asprey runs a very popular blog on the internet called The Bulletproof Executive which teaches his readers how to hack their own bodies so make the body operate in its optimum. The blog talks a lot about nutrition, exercise, and tricks to improve our brain function.

I thought it would be appropriate to ask him about his own ideas on height, and whether height was possible as well as other ways to hack our body to perform at its best. I had gone and had emailed him with the idea of interviewing him. Well, after he had said yes now he won’t reply back to my emails so I guess I can only do the best thing. I listened through his podcasts and read through his blogs and found one podcast he did with Bill Anderews who is famous for looking for a way to reverse aging by slowing down the reate at which the telomeres at the end of our chromosomes can shorten. After the interview with Andrew on the podcast, a Q&A session took place a someone came on to ask how he could increase in size. And this is the thought of Asprey on what is currently possible.

The Podcast is Podcast #10, called “The man who would stop time”. The Link is found HERE. It is about an hour in length. I took the section of the conversation from the PDF format which you can download by clicking HERE.

The next question is from Bill. “I’m wondering if you have any insights into how an adult such
as myself, age 35, could do some biohacking to trigger body growth. I’m 5’4″ and am fascinated
by biohacking in general. I’ve been eating Brazil nuts and taking vitamin D3 to boost
testosterone. I haven’t done blood tests, but anecdotal results seem to indicate that I’m making
progress. Anyway, if I could trigger body growth, I just think that would be pretty kickass.
Thanks in advance for anything you’re got.”
Dave Asprey: Well there’s sort of two answers about body growth. I’m hoping you mean
muscle growth not height but you mentioned you’re 5’4” and you want more height. There’s
always the surgery to increase your shin bones which is incredibly destructive and you shouldn’t
do that. That’s barbaric to be honest, but I’ve seen some evidence that people can increase the
when you wake up in the morning, if you take you height, you can be about an inch taller than
you are at the end of the day just from compression in your spine. So training yourself to stand
up straighter and to have better collagen to form in your body which can take several months, I
think you might find some significant benefits there.
The best way I know to improve collagen is you need to be exercising and things like that but
you also should try the collagen stuff we have on the website. It’s hydrolyzed type 2 predigested
collagen so it absorbs into the body and it’s designed to improve joints and basically those things
between your vertebrae are joints.

The other thing, if you’re talking about muscle growth or you just want muscles to support your
spine, taking a whey protein concentrate with very high levels of IGG is a good idea. I’ve been
working for years on finding one that doesn’t cause stomach upset and one that has unusual
muscle building capabilities and I finally got the formula down where I want it and we’re
actually going to be launching something called Upgraded Whey some time on our sister site
upgradedself.com.

Armi, do you have any other thoughts on getting taller?

Armi Legge: Not really. Unfortunately that’s more genetic, the kind of 5 percent that are pretty
much set in stone. There are obviously things you could do that could hurt that like staying
stressed all the time, lack of sleep when you’re young, so I don’t have many great ideas in terms
of increasing your height once you stop growing

Me: Well, I would say that someone like Asprey here is a very knowledgeable guy and what he says agrees with a lot of what I believe. There is indeed some ways to increase our height by at least 1 inch which Asprey concurs with. However, he is aware of the current limited number of options for people who want to grow taller naturally. He states in a reply email to me that “A height hack that did more than spinal disk stretching would be epic!”

You can reach Asprey on his blog at The Bulletproof Executive or his email at

Dave Asprey| VP Cloud Security – Virtualization & Cloud Technology Evangelist

twitter.com/daveasprey  – Email: dave_asprey@trendmicro.com