If nutritional intake is insufficient during youth development, the body prioritizes vital functions and diverts the key nutrients away from bone elongation growth. The same body of research suggests that malnutrition, which can include being either underweight or obese as a child, can decrease your ultimate height as an adult ( 4, 5).
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Proper nutrition during childhood and adolescence fills in the final determining factor.Īdequate nutrition ensures that you reach your full genetic potential, but you cannot exceed your genetic maximum, which is predetermined at birth. The overwhelming body of research on height shows that genetics plays a 60–95% determining role in maximum adult height ( 3). Improving bone density is beneficial for your health, strength, and longevity, but it does not influence your overall height. Note that it’s still possible to increase bone width and density via a proper exercise and nutrition program.
Toward the end of adolescence and early adulthood, the growth plates harden, and further growth in the length of bones ceases.
The greatest increases in height occur primarily during infancy and again during the pubertal growth spurt. This process occurs throughout childhood and adolescence.īone elongation occurs at the epiphyseal growth plates, which are cartilaginous structures located on the ends of many different bones in children.
Growth in height is driven by bones growing in length. Independent of athletic activity’s lack of effect on height, maximum height and the factors that affect it have been very well studied. Is it possible to increase your height through methods other than basketball? There’s no evidence that basketball or any physical activity has a positive effect on maximum height. If you expand your search to studies that have looked at these athletic skills, there’s still a lack of evidence supporting height gains from training programs incorporating exercises in these categories.Īlthough scientific discoveries can always change the potential evidence supporting the causes and effects of various exercise programs, no evidence supports basketball or any other physical activity intervention as a means to increase height. You can further assess the potential effect of basketball and height by breaking down the sport’s athletic movements and looking for research on whether these activities have the potential to increase height.īasketball as a sport relies heavily on the following movements, all of which have been well studied for their effects on human physiology: The point is that basketball is not an understudied sport, so it’s fairly safe to assume that any research on basketball and height would be well published and publicized. It observed improvements in lean body mass, jump height, grip strength, and other athletic performance ( 1).Īdditional research on adults found that recreational basketball improved various health metrics, such as blood pressure and body fat percentages, after several months of play ( 2).Īlthough these specific studies were not specifically meant to assess changes in height, any theoretical height increases would have been noted, as this data was collected from participants. The sport of basketball has been around for a while, and plenty of research has analyzed its effects on physical parameters.įor example, a recent study looked at the effects of 10 weeks of basketball training on youth anthropometric and physiological characteristics. No scientific evidence supports the idea basketball increases your height, and this lack of evidence is not due to a lack of research.