Does Basketball Make You Taller? What the Research Says About Height

The most useful single source is a review article, "Effects of physical activity on children's growth," published by João Guilherme Bezerra Alves and Guilherme Victor Alves in the Jornal de Pediatria in 2019. Its aim was to describe the current scientific knowledge on the effects of physical exercise on the growth of children and adolescents.

The authors retrieved 1,629 records, selected 85 for full reading and analyzed 36 of them. Twenty of the 36 were themselves review articles. The abstract reports that the studies did not demonstrate that the practice of physical exercise or of certain sports, especially basketball and floor gymnastics, influenced linear growth. Linear growth is the word for growth in length or height.

The review's conclusion is that physical exercise does not appear to impair a child's linear growth. That is two statements in one. The evidence does not show that basketball makes a child taller, and it does not show that basketball makes a child shorter.

The authors say the evidence is limited. There are few studies with adequate methods, especially randomized clinical trials, and the trials that were included had small samples and a risk of bias, such as uncertain randomization and no blinding. The review also left out studies that combined exercise with other treatments and studies of children with disease.

For a reader this means the honest answer has two parts. The research does not support the idea that basketball adds inches, and the research is not strong enough to rule out a small effect nobody has measured.

Height is mostly inherited. MedlinePlus Genetics says scientists estimate that about 80 percent of an individual's height is determined by the DNA sequence variations the person inherited, and that more than 700 such gene variants have been discovered, with many more expected. Each of the variants has a small effect, and together they explain a large share of the variation among people.

The same site warns about how to read that number. Heritability, the statistical concept behind the 80 percent, describes how much of the variation in a trait within a group can be attributed to genetic variation. It applies to a population and not to an individual, and an estimate is specific to one population in one environment and can change as circumstances change. So the figure does not mean that 80 percent of one person's inches come from genes and 20 percent from something else. It means that, in a population, most of the differences in height between people go back to genetic differences.

The environment still counts. MedlinePlus says a well-nourished, healthy and active child is likely to be taller as an adult than a child with a poor diet. Being active is on that list, which is the link people have in mind when they ask the question. The sentence describes a child who is healthy and active, and it does not say that one particular sport adds height.

The reason players in the NBA are tall is selection. A league that picks its players from among everyone who plays will contain people who are already tall, because height helps in a game played at a rim 10 feet above the floor. The height of an NBA rim is fixed by the rulebook, and the court is built around it, so a taller player has a shorter distance to reach.

That means tall players are found in basketball because they were chosen for it, which is not the same as basketball making players tall. This is a reasoned explanation and not a finding of the review: a roster of tall players looks the same whether the sport selected them or grew them, and only studies that follow the same children over time can tell the two apart.

How long those selected players last is a separate matter, which the page on the average NBA career length measures from season tables.

Several ideas come up around the question, and the sources used here speak to some of them.

Jumping and stretching. The sources used here do not test jumping, hanging from a rim or stretching as ways to gain height, so this page makes no claim about them.

Stunted growth. The review found no evidence that physical exercise impairs a child's linear growth, in basketball or in the other sports it covered.

Playing more. The review does not compare amounts of play. It cannot say whether more hours would change the result.

Nutrition and health. The MedlinePlus passage on height names diet and health as factors alongside genes, which is where the evidence points for anyone who wants to give a growing child the best chance to reach the height the genes allow.

The study figures come from the abstract and text of Alves and Alves, "Effects of physical activity on children's growth", Jornal de Pediatria, 2019, volume 95, supplement 1, pages S72 to S78. The statements about genes come from MedlinePlus Genetics, in its pages on whether height is determined by genetics and on heritability. The rim height comes from the 2025-26 NBA playing rules.

The page states what the sources state and adds no height numbers of its own. A review published later could change the picture, and the page will be checked when a new review of the topic appears. More basketball pages are on the NBA hub.