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There are NBA players 7 feet (2.15m) tall who appear relatively slim and yet weigh 300 pounds (136kg) and more.

Is there a "rule of thumb" for estimating how much a man of greater height would weigh? I'm sure there isn't much empirical evidence about someone 8' tall, and even less of people taller yet, but what would be a "good guess" regarding the weight of a man 9'6" (3m) tall? That is, someone who was not skinny as the proverbial rail nor as corpulent as a Sumo wrestler (IOW, a "good average").

I'm sure it's not just a certain amount of weight per inch, because the taller a person is, the wider they would also tend to be, so any rule of thumb would probably be a graduated scale (the taller the person, the greater the weight gain per inch).

I'm guessing a 9'6" man would be at the very least 500 pounds (227kg), quite possibly 600 (273kg) or more.

Am I right?

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  • Welcome to Biology.SE. This is a science website, you might want to use SI units.
    – Remi.b
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 17:06
  • SI units? What does that stand for?
    – B. Clay Shannon-B. Crow Raven
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 17:08
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    Google it... It means use meters and kilograms instead of pounds, feet and inches.
    – Remi.b
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 17:08
  • Have you tried to google your question? If you google height weight, you'll probably find an answer right away.
    – Remi.b
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 17:10
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    Note that muscle is maybe 15-20% heavier than fat, so it shouldn't be too surprising that professional athletes "appear relatively slim and yet weigh" more than you'd expect for a non-athlete.
    – Stef
    Commented Jan 30 at 13:53

1 Answer 1

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Consider this ideal weight calculator for example. For a 25 yo male with a height of 9'6'' (289 cm), the optimal weight should be around 342 - 462 pounds (155kg - 210kg).

By the way, the tallest man ever was only 8'11'' (272cm) tall (see here).

You might want to read about BMI

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    +1 but: The square-cube problem applied to the human body basically states that if you enlarge the human, the cross section of its muscles and bones would increase by the square of the scaling factor while its mass would increase by the cube of the scaling factor. In order to stem this weight (and for the whole circulatory and respiratory functions not to fail entirely), the body would have to change significantly. So the answer is correct, if we ignore the fact that you can’t just scale a human to ~3m as it would really mess up proportions.
    – Narusan
    Commented May 31, 2018 at 23:07
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    All of the calculators at that site are wrong: BMI is quadratic, and the other four are linear. Curve-fitting to actual human measurements suggests that the actual exponent is around 2.5 -- humans change shape as they get taller, so the cubic scaling factor suggested by theory is also wrong.
    – Mark
    Commented Jan 30 at 0:31

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