Can swimming help you grow taller?

Recently, the weather has been hot and humid, with the temperature even reaching 34 degrees Celsius at one point. In such weather, swimming is undoubtedly a good way to cool off. The heads of several swimming pools told reporters that their daily reception capacity can now reach 1,200 people, an increase of more than 30% over usual times. "Fifty percent of the people who come to swim are students. I originally thought that the main purpose of bringing children to learn swimming was to cool off, but after careful inquiry, I found that this year many parents hope to make their children taller through swimming." Can swimming really help you grow taller?

Exercise can promote blood circulation, stimulate the secretion of growth hormone, enhance appetite, and improve sleep, all of which are very helpful for children's growth and development. Take swimming as an example. When swimming, the pressure in water is 50 times that in the air. Regular swimming can increase the pressure on the epiphyseal bone forming area, thereby stimulating new bone growth, which is helpful for adolescents to grow taller.

In addition, when swimming, because the person is always in a horizontal or highly horizontal state, the pressure on the leg joints is almost zero, and the person is in a quasi-weightless state. In addition, during swimming, the legs are almost constantly kicking. This series of direct factors leads to the continuous growth and development of the human skeleton, and even greatly delays the closure of the epiphyseal line, which is very helpful for growing taller. Therefore, it is best for teenagers to stick to swimming.

Breaststroke is more effective but don’t expect too much

Regarding the ideas of many parents, Li Hui, chief physician of the Endocrinology Department of Dalian Children's Hospital, introduced that swimming exercise does have a certain promoting effect on height. When the human body does stretching exercises in the water, the influence of gravity is reduced, and the ligaments can be stretched, which will lead to better growth of joints and bones. Especially the water holding and leg kicking movements of breaststroke are more conducive to exercise.

However, parents need to be reminded that 60% of a person's height is determined by genetic genes, and some countries require children to learn to swim, more so as to enable children to master a survival skill and reduce the child drowning mortality rate. Although later exercises such as swimming can help promote height, parents should not have too high expectations of them. Li Hui believes that in addition to exercise, it is more important for children to grow taller to ensure a good sleep pattern. Because the human body will secrete a large amount of growth hormone after falling asleep, and the secretion peak of growth hormone is around 9 pm. Ensuring enough sleep allows the growth hormone naturally secreted by the body to take effect, which is much more effective in helping you grow taller than swimming exercises. In addition, it is best to swim in a place with plenty of sunlight, so that you can get sun exposure to allow your body to absorb calcium and also exercise to get a good figure.

Although it can be seen from this that swimming can indeed help people grow taller, we would like to remind everyone that in addition to exercising, teenagers also need to ensure adequate sleep. This is because the growth hormone, which is closely related to human height growth, reaches its peak secretion during deep sleep at night, so be sure to go to bed before 10 o'clock to avoid affecting your growth. Exercise should be done in moderation, otherwise it will have a counterproductive effect.