Health guide
Does an Inversion Table Make You Taller? What the Tape Measure Shows
Does an inversion table make you taller? It is a fair question, because the idea sounds plausible: hang upside down, let gravity pull your spine apart, stand up longer. The tape measure tells a smaller story. We did not test this on people. What follows comes from the stature studies that measured it with precision instruments, from NASA’s observations of astronauts, and from what Teeter, the biggest inversion table maker, says about height on its own blog.
Does an Inversion Table Make You Taller? The Measured Answer
There is exactly one controlled measurement of what inversion does to stature that we could find, and it answers the question directly.
In 1990, a team of British researchers published a small experiment in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Eight men aged 20 to 31 did a hard drop-jumping workout, then either stood for 20 minutes or spent 20 minutes in gravity inversion. Their height was measured with a stadiometer accurate to 0.05 mm.
Inversion added 5.18 mm of stature, against 0.76 mm for standing, a difference the authors found statistically significant (Boocock, 1990). So the answer is technically yes: in the short term, you measure taller after inverting than you would after standing.
The same study kept measuring after the session. Forty minutes of standing after inversion took back 4.07 mm of the gain. By the 30-minute mark, there was no longer a significant difference between the men who had inverted and those who had simply stood. The authors’ conclusion was plain: the effects of an inversion treatment “are short-lasting” (Boocock, 1990).
The researchers also explain why height moves in the first place. Stature changes are used as an index of spinal loading because they reflect changes in the height of the intervertebral discs (Boocock, 1990). Your discs lose a little height under load and regain it when the load comes off. Inversion takes the load off quickly, so the discs recover faster. Then you stand up, gravity loads them again, and the height goes back.
Keep the limits in view. Eight young men is a tiny sample, they inverted after an unusual high-impact workout, and the study measured height, not back pain, posture or anything you would feel.
Can an Inversion Table Make You Taller Permanently?
No study we read shows a lasting gain. The only inversion measurement above faded within the hour (Boocock, 1990), and the next section shows that your height rises and falls on its own every day. A few millimeters that disappear while you stand in the kitchen are not a change in your height. They are a change in the state of your discs.
Teeter, a leading table maker, says the same thing in softer words: “just 30 days of inversion cannot reverse a lifetime of compression” (Teeter, 2015). Nothing in the studies supports a promise of inches.
Do Inversion Tables Make You Taller if You’re Still Growing?
A teenager’s growth plates may still be open, so the bone-length argument below applies less to them. That does not make a table a growth tool. We could not verify any study that tested inversion in children or teens, and the growth plate review we cite gives no ages for when plates close (Agirdil, 2020). If you are under 18, or buying for someone who is, ask a pediatrician before using any inversion equipment, and do not use one to try to add height.
Does Hanging Upside Down Make You Taller?
Tables, gravity boots and inversion chairs all hang you head down, but the measurement above was done with gravity inversion, and we could not verify a stature study for the other setups. Our page on the benefits of hanging upside down covers what studies measured, and did not, for each of them. Either way, expect minutes, not a lasting change.
Why Your Height Changes Every Day
The reason an inversion table can add a few millimeters is that you lose more than that every single day without noticing.
Your Discs Shrink While You Are Upright
In a 1985 study in the journal Spine, researchers measured eight young adults to the nearest millimeter over the day. Their stature varied by an average of 19.3 mm, about 1.1% of their height (Tyrrell, 1985). That is roughly three-quarters of an inch between getting up and going to bed.
The same team found that loads made it worse: heavier weights held on the shoulders sped up the shrinkage, and repeated lifting shrank people more than holding an equivalent weight still (Tyrrell, 1985).
Most of It Goes in the First Hour
The loss is not spread evenly. In that study, 54% of the day’s height loss happened in the first hour after getting out of bed, and about 70% came back during the first half of the night (Tyrrell, 1985).
They also tested ways to recover after exercise. Resting in Fowler’s position (lying on your back with the upper body and knees raised) brought height back faster than recovering on your feet (Tyrrell, 1985). In other words, simply lying down in a supported position already does part of what people hope an inversion table will do.
Back Pain Does Not Change the Amount
A 2011 study in Clinical Biomechanics measured 16 young adults 24 times over 24 hours, half of them with chronic low-back pain. The swing from shortest to tallest was 17.9 mm in the back pain group and 17.6 mm in the controls, no meaningful difference (Healey, 2011). Having back pain did not mean losing more height over the day.
What Can and Can’t Change Your Height
Height has two parts that behave very differently: the length of your bones, which is fixed once you finish growing, and the stack of discs and curves in your spine, which shifts a little every day.
Growth Plates Set Your Adult Height
Bones grow in length at the growth plate, a layer of cartilage near the ends of the long bones. A review published in EFORT Open Reviews in 2020 describes the end of that process: once the cartilage cells there have died, “the longitudinal growth of the bone ceases and the growth plate closes” (Agirdil, 2020).
No amount of hanging reopens a closed growth plate. An inversion table pulls on your spine, not your leg bones, and it does that for minutes at a time.
Astronauts Show the Upper Limit of Unloading
If anything could make an adult taller by taking weight off the spine, it would be months in space with no gravity at all. NASA reports that crew members “grow up to three percent taller” during long missions aboard the International Space Station, and that they “return to their normal height when back on Earth” (NASA).
That is the ceiling of what unloading the spine can do: a few percent, in zero gravity, after months, and none of it kept once gravity is back. A few minutes on a table at an angle sits far below that.
The Height You Lose With Age
There is one real, lasting change in height for adults, and it goes the wrong way. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging followed 2,084 men and women for years. Height loss started at about age 30 and sped up with age: from 30 to 70 it averaged about 3 cm for men and 5 cm for women, and by 80 it reached about 5 cm and 8 cm (Sorkin, 1999).
The study did not test any way to prevent that loss, and it did not separate the causes. So while inversion makers often link their tables to “fighting” age-related height loss, there is no trial showing an inversion table slows it.
What Teeter Says About Height
Teeter, the largest inversion table maker, has written about height on its blog. It is worth reading what it claims and how strong the claims are.
The 30-Day Tape Measure Test
In a post titled “Tale of the Tape,” Teeter says that if you invert every day during your first 30 days with the table, “you may notice a change in your stature,” and it invites owners to record their height and waist measurement before starting and again after 30 days of daily use (Teeter, 2015).
The same post also says daily height loss can reach “1/2″ to 3/4″,” which fits the roughly 19 mm the 1985 study measured, though Teeter does not cite a source for its figure.
The 60-Degree Claim
The post attributes to a study by Nachemson the claim that lying down relieved only 75% of the pressure in a lumbar disc, and that all pressure was relieved only “while inverting at a 60-degree angle” (Teeter, 2015). The blog does not name the paper, so we cannot tell you which study it means or what exactly was measured. Treat it as Teeter’s description, not as a verified result.
How to Read These Claims
None of this is dishonest marketing, but none of it is a measured height gain either. A before-and-after tape measure at home is easy to fool: the time of day alone can move your height by close to an inch, as the studies above show. If your morning measurement after 30 days is taller than an evening measurement on day one, you have measured your discs’ daily cycle, not the table.
If You Want to Measure It Yourself
If you are curious what inversion does to your own height, you can check it honestly in an afternoon.
Measure at the Same Time of Day
Pick one time, ideally mid-afternoon when the morning loss has already happened, and always measure then. Stand against the same wall, barefoot, heels and back touching it, eyes level, with a flat book on your head marking the spot.
Measure Right After, Then an Hour Later
Measure just before your session, right after it, and again an hour later. Based on the 1990 study, expect a few millimeters at most right after, and most of it gone by the third measurement (Boocock, 1990). A home tape measure is not precise to the millimeter, so small differences may not show at all.
Keep the Session Short
Don’t extend your time upside down to chase a bigger number. Teeter’s own guidance is to start with one to two minutes and build up gradually, and it says there is no predetermined time limit, which is not the same as no risk (Teeter, 2014). Our guide on how to use an inversion table covers angles, timing and getting back up safely.
Should You Buy an Inversion Table to Get Taller?
No. If height is the only reason, an inversion table is the wrong purchase: the gain is a few millimeters, it fades within the hour, and lying down does part of the same job for free.
The Better Reasons to Buy One
People buy inversion tables to relieve back pain, and even there the evidence is mixed. A Cochrane review published in 2013 pooled 32 trials of traction for low-back pain and found it had little or no impact on pain or function, though it was not specific to inversion (Wegner, 2013). Smaller inversion studies are more encouraging, and our page on inversion table benefits sets out what they found. If you want a table for your back, our guide to the best inversion tables compares the options by need.
The Risks Still Apply
Being upside down is not neutral for your body, whatever your reason for doing it. In a small trial, two minutes of inversion raised both systolic and diastolic blood pressure in healthy young women (Haskvitz, 1986). Full inversion for a few minutes roughly doubled the pressure inside the eye in a 1984 study (Weinreb, 1984).
Teeter itself tells people with high blood pressure, glaucoma, heart disease and several other conditions not to invert without a doctor’s approval (Teeter). Our page on who should not use an inversion table goes through the full list.
If You Are Already Tall
The more practical height question is the opposite one: whether a table fits you. Every Teeter and Innova table we checked tops out at 6’6” of user height. Our page on the best inversion tables for big and tall people explains the limits, and if you want the decompression without the table, our guide to how to decompress your spine covers the other ways to take load off your discs.
Your questions, answered
Frequently Asked Questions
Does an inversion table increase height?
Only for a short while. In a small 1990 study, 20 minutes of inversion after a workout added about 5 millimeters of stature, roughly a fifth of an inch, and most of it was gone after 40 minutes of standing. The gain comes from your spinal discs taking up fluid again, not from your bones growing, so it does not last.
How long does it take to see results from an inversion table?
For height, any change appears within a single session and fades within the hour, so there is nothing to build up over weeks. For back pain, no trial has set a timeline. Teeter suggests owners measure before and after 30 days of daily use, but that is a marketing suggestion, not a tested result.
Can you grow taller after 20?
Not in bone length, for most people. Bones lengthen at their growth plates, and once the cartilage cells there die off, the plate closes and lengthwise growth stops. After that, the only changes in measured height come from the discs and posture: a few millimeters up overnight or after unloading, and a slow loss from about age 30.
Is it possible to add 2 inches to your height?
Not with an inversion table. Two inches is about 50 millimeters, roughly ten times the gain one study measured after 20 minutes of inversion, and that gain faded within an hour. Even astronauts living for months without gravity grow only up to three percent, and NASA says they return to their normal height back on Earth.
12 sources used for this guide
Each linked to the original. Citations in the text jump here.
View sources
Boocock MG, Garbutt G, Linge K, Reilly T, Troup JD. Changes in stature following drop jumping and post-exercise gravity inversion. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 1990;22(3):385-390.
Tyrrell AR, Reilly T, Troup JD. Circadian variation in stature and the effects of spinal loading. Spine 1985;10(2):161-164.
Healey EL, Burden AM, McEwan IM, Fowler NE. Diurnal variation in stature: do those with chronic low-back pain differ from asymptomatic controls?. Clinical Biomechanics 2011;26(4):363-367.
Agirdil Y. The growth plate: a physiologic overview. EFORT Open Reviews 2020;5(8):498-507.
NASA. Spinal Ultrasound Investigation. nasa.gov image article, International Space Station research.
Sorkin JD, Muller DC, Andres R. Longitudinal change in height of men and women: implications for interpretation of the body mass index. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. American Journal of Epidemiology 1999;150(9):969-977.
Teeter. Tale of the Tape: The Long-Term Benefits of Inversion. teeter.com blog, 2015.
Teeter. FAQ: Invert How Long And How Often?. teeter.com blog, 2014 (updated 2025).
Wegner I, Widyahening IS, van Tulder MW et al. Traction for low-back pain with or without sciatica. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2013, CD003010.
Haskvitz EM, Hanten WP. Blood pressure response to inversion traction. Physical Therapy 1986;66(9):1361-1364.
Weinreb RN, Cook J, Friberg TR. Effect of inverted body position on intraocular pressure. American Journal of Ophthalmology 1984;98(6):784-787.
Teeter. Are there health issues that would prevent me from inverting?. teeter.com, Support Center (the same list appears in the owner's manual).