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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 17 Jun 2014:
There is no magic involved! (Sadly, I wouldn’t mind being a bit taller!!)
Growing happens mostly starting from your bones. That what decides in the end how tall you’ll be, and the relative size of the different parts of your body (like why I don’t have a minuscule head and gigantic hands!). When you are small, they have plates on them called ‘growth plates’. Those plates basically make the bones grow in length (but no much in width) by adding material to it. Then in the mid teens, those plates close, and so you stop growing!
Once the bones start growing the rest, like muscle, just follow. Muscle actually grow through following bones and through exercise.
One question that I think is still unanswered is the details of how does everything work well together, in a synchronized way… I think it’s a fairly complicated questions!
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Dave Jones answered on 17 Jun 2014:
It does seem pretty magic, but it’s just biology!
While you are young, you’re body releases hormones which are like chemical messages, and those chemical messages tell your body to grow! So, the body gets all the energy and nutrients that you take in as food, and uses it to keep building muscles and bones, making you bigger and bigger. Until you reach the age where your body decides that it has grown enough and stops releasing those hormones.
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Greig Cowan answered on 23 Jun 2014:
Growing is just a natural process that occurs as we grow older until after adolesence. Cells in our body multiply so that our organs get larger. Correspondingly, our bones and muscles must also get bigger so that they can support our bodies. It’s really amazing that this can all happen at the same time, I don’t think people really know how it all gets coordinated and synchronised. One interesting point is that our inner ear (the cochlea) is fully formed at birth and does not get any larger!
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