The abs workout is very popular among people. But some say, this might make you shorter. So, it has been questioned if ab workouts can actually make you shorter. The quick answer is that there isn’t any direct link between the ab workouts and your height. The long answer about the relation between muscle growth and height is a bit more complicated. There are many factors that determine your growth potential and your muscles simply aren’t the most important one. The factors that have the biggest impact on your height are genetics and nutrition. However, there is a connection with ab muscles and posture. If you follow a proper ab workout routine, it will significantly improve your posture which indirectly affects your height.
Posture
And so, taking posture into consideration, you can still grow taller even if you do these ab workouts regularly. If you really want to make your muscles grow taller, you should perform abs workout without losing your posture. Here are some of the guidelines to help you avoid losing your posture when doing ab workouts:Â
- Don’t slouch your back
- Keep your knees straight
- Don’t lower your torso past 90 degrees
Pushing yourself with your hands or feet is fine as long as you have a proper form with the right technique. As long as you have those three guidelines, you will not lose your posture. In this case, when doing ab workouts with added push ups or sit ups. Fuller body posture has been proven to increase height as well as improve muscle performance and bone density. That makes it a must if you want to build muscles and grow taller effectively.
Health
As a matter for fact, when we talk about exercise, the first thing that comes to our mind is that it can help us lose weight. And that it can also help us achieve our goals to have a stronger body. In fact, exercising is good for our health because to live a healthy life, we need to maintain a good body composition. And to do this, we need to exercise at least three times a week. Unfortunately, there are also many wrong types of workouts that can worsen our health and subject us to more health risks such as poor posture, knee injury and back pain.
Abs Benefits
Therefore, Abs workout is the key to having a well built body. Exercising on this part of the body will help improve your posture and keep your spine flexible. It is responsible for strengthening back muscles that help to keep the centered position of the body. It also helps to strengthen your core, which results to less back pain. Consequently, this workout not only helps you explode with muscles but also helps improve your posture. And hence, a strong core gives you more stability, more power, better balance, and ward off injuries.
However, if you are into intense workouts, then you should know that it may lead to deformity of your muscles. The intense workouts, especially those related to abs can affect the stature of your height. As a result you might appear shorter. Indeed, the muscles of the abs appear when you do crunches and other workouts. These muscles engage when you bend your torso to one direction or the other. It is true that there are some people who are happy to develop their abs muscles by doing abs workout. There are others who are happy to run fast, and there are those who would like to make their abs muscles visible.
Moderation
However, if you do abs workout for extremely too long, you will become shorter by an inch. The reason for this is that the abs muscles can shrink or expand your entire spine. This can cause back pain and eventually result in abnormal growth of the spine. Although most people think that doing an abdominal workout can help them build up their abs, the truth is that the abs muscles also known as rectus abdominis act like a flexor of the spine. It pulls the rib cage down and compresses the spine.
Conclusion
So to sum it up, Does an ab workout make you shorter? The answer is yes. There are two reasons an ab workout can make you shorter. That is either your spine (posture) or your height. A bad posture can cause a lot of health problems , including back pain and short height. So, a bad posture workout makes you shorter. You can do some ab workouts that will help to mobilize your spine and then some strengthening exercises to fix the problem.
And as far as height ab workout goes, whether you realize it or not, our body grows in different ways when we are children and when we grow up. So, having a weak abdominal muscles since childhood, causes your spine to move forward and your back to also become slouched. Quite similar to a forward head posture. A condition that makes you appear a bit shorter since the head seems to lean forward. In this case, the key lies in knowing how to work out those abs so as not to diminish your height.