1. The Hang
With this you can easily gain 1-1.5 inches and its the simplest of them all to do. You simply need to hang your body down from a height. Whether you hold onto a pull up bar, goal posts, a tree, bus shelter – anything at all. You just need to hang for a few minutes at a time. This gives the discs in your spine time to decompress. It’s also great for re-aligning a bad posture as your body is being stretched into its natural shape. This is using gravity to get taller rather than letting it make you shorter.
2. Indian Push Up
This goes by many names including the Hindu push up and yoga push up. As you can probably guess it comes from an Indian yogic movement where you push your self in an arc so rather than going straight up and down you go from back to front too.
3. Twist
The objective with this exercise is to twist the spine and this is a movement people will often find quite difficult initially as the spine has grown very inflexible with time. The lower spine especially suffers from compression due to our seated position most of the time.
Stand in a doorway facing the frame of the door. Plant your feet firmly into the ground and using the frame as a leaver push your body around as much as it will go. Its important to push your head too and stretch your entire spine from bottom to top. Do this in both directions to ensure balance.
4. Shoulder Lift
Lying on your front with your face in the floor (don’t twist your neck to the side!). You’ll feel your shoulders and arms pull the the floor due to gravity. If you lift your shoulders and arms entirely off the floor for a count of 10 then let them fall. Repeat this movement 5 times every morning and evening you’ll gain an inch after 3-4 weeks. This works by working a muscle that is often very weak in the majority of people. The muscle in the centre of the spine becomes slack due to sitting at office desks all day and hunching over things. When it gets weak it lets your body sag and you lose height.
5. Sleep
The final exercise is a bit of a cheat as there’s far more the getting tall through exercises than just this little selection but I wanted to finish with one of my favourites. Sleep is fantastic at increasing height but you need to get enough of it to truly benefit. You’ve probably heard that during sleep you get taller as your pine decompresses. It’s true but if you don’t get enough sleep then your mood and lack of proper spinal recovery will cause you to hunch, ruin your posture, compress your internal organs and crush your chances of getting taller. Getting at least 7 but preferably 8 hours of sleep per night are essential to get that height you want.
