Basketball – The Best Exercise to Grow Taller!
A common stereotype associated with basketball players is that they’re tall – like, really, really tall. On the other hand, a common misunderstanding about that stereotype is that tall players go play basketball – when in fact, in many cases it’s the other way around – people who enjoy playing basketball eventually grow much taller than their peers who don’t. Of course, that’s not the case in every single person, but those are exceptions and not the norm.
How it helps
Basketball is, in its essence, a great sport to maintain your body in a very healthy condition. It revolves around running and jumping frantically, which makes it a fantastic cardio exercise – while throwing the ball time after time trying to hit the hoop improves your accuracy and reflexes to a great extent.
But perhaps the biggest impact basketball has on your health is in the way it affects your height – all the jumping involved in playing basketball strains your spine and knees a lot, which in turn helps you grow taller. Also, the habit that some players have to jokingly hang from the hoop for a few seconds – while they may not be realizing it, hanging like that even for short periods of time stretches your spine greatly, and is in fact one of the recommended exercises for growing taller.
Getting advanced
More experienced basketball players usually go through some complicated training routines to improve certain aspects of their game – in most cases, jump height. There are some popular exercise regimes out there that have been proven to be highly efficient in improving this, but they’re far beyond the scope of this article – though if you’re interested, do some searching for the “Air Attack” training techniques.
The important thing here though, is that any technique aimed at improving your jump ability will also stimulate your body height to some extent – it’s just that the exercises used for both purposes tend to cross over with each other quite a lot. It’s actually speculated that the main reason behind basketball players’ abnormal average height is the constant jumping they do while playing.
Varying it
Even though basketball in itself can be highly useful for growing taller, if you only need to gain height, you should really mix it up with some other sports – the reason being, if you want to gain height through basketball entirely, you’ll have to dedicate a lot of your time to it, and probably even pursue a professional career – something which is rarely an option if you’ve decided you want to grow taller later in your life.