Once, when traveling in China, I chanced upon a local infomercial featuring a product that pulled your head and feet in opposite directions, stretching the skeletal muscles and facilitating better posture.
Reflecting on it today, I kind of wished I’d called the number :-x
Does anything like that exist in the US?
How can a question with such a title get so few views 
I’d think it would have a greater effect* on your skeleton than on your muscles. Muscles are already more elastic and flexible than bones/joints.
*and not necessarily a good one.
I suppose it depends on the body, but my muscles are not at all long enough, even when fully stretched, to let all the bones hit their longest alignment. This would be the thing i’d try to correct and which would allow me to have the best posture.
Btw, what kind of effect do you imagine such an exercise to have on the skeleton? And why would it be a bad one?
Well, it’d probably just cost you a lot of money and hurt.
China is full of millions of quack medical devices to help you look better, lose weight, become more virile, etc. I wouldn’t put much faith in any of them.
See also “gravity boots”.
China is also full of millions of people with great posture. So I wouldn’t be so dismissive… Stretching isn’t a “quack” medical practice. It’s just we are very unappreciative of it in the West.
OTOH, passive stretching via a rack probably wouldn’t be a great way of doing it. If you’re looking for some basic stretching guidance, check out a couple books by Kit Laughlin.
I remember seeing that a while back. Yeah, looks very interesting. My concern is it doesn’t specifically pull on the head, so will have less effect in stretching out the neck and shoulders, but it should still be pretty good.
Has anyone used these? Are the Boots too intense? (Ie, maybe start with an Inversion Table first.)
Ok, cool. Thing is thought that it’s very difficult to really hit the right spots (vs the spots that are just easy to hit) when stretching free-form. It’s like trying to build muscle mass when you only have a wall. Having dedicated machines would be very helpful. I had a whole idea about making a line of these and putting them into gyms.
Are you saying that you’re incapable of fully straightening your arms and legs, for example?
I don’t think I’d want anything pulling up on my head. My shoulders maybe, or my upstretched arms . . . but anything involving the head and neck seems risky.
I recently had a really painful and stiff neck (medical term: “a crick in my neck”) that lasted several days. I went to the pain clinic that has been helping with my lower back pain, and they used a decompression machine. I laid flat on my back, a collar was attached to my neck, hooked to a strap which went to the device that gradually pulled my neck up for a time, released it, and repeated the cycle for about 20 minutes. Then some manipulation of the head. Two treatments and the "crick’ was gone and felt better.
Don’t try this at home. 
At my first Tai Chi class (so far I have attended 3, so I make no claims to knowledge of Tai Chi), the teacher did a demonstration where he tightly gripped my right hand and forearm, and pulled them apart with the effect that my wrist lengthened by what appeared to be several inches. It was quite astonishing to watch.
The point was to illustrate the concept of “opening up the joints”, which he regards as beneficial.
A machine which could “open up the joints” of your entire body would seem a logical extension (heh, see what I did there!)
No, it’s the neck I can’t straighten out, and also various parts of the chest, torso, pelvis etc. Or I can perhaps straighten out one part while compressing the others, etc. This especially why I want an exercise that affects all part simultaneously.
I don’t think I’m alone in this, btw. Lots of people have insufficiently long muscles and don’t realize it. It simply manifests as a lumpy-looking body. Almost everyone thinks that the ticket to a better-looking body is losing weight, but if you stretch out your body and have good posture the fat will either smooth out or you will look like you have attractive ‘curves’ rather than… lumpiness. I’m telling you, stretching is way underrated.
Yeah, that sounds cool. I especially like how the stretch wasn’t static. If I ever get around to inventing my line of stretching machines, I’ll make sure that there’s motion. Btw, I bet that machine cost over $20,000, which is sad (from a healthcare debate pov).
However, I don’t like what the name “decompression” is alluding to. It’s a somewhat-quacky chiropractic theory that the vertebrae themselves need to be pulled apart. I’m not going to outright call it nonsense, but the main thing that needs to be stretched are muscles.
You are right, there is a trend now among many chiropractors to use a huge, complex “decompression” machine for lower back pain. They charge huge fees for a series of treatments, often costing a couple of thousand bucks. Researching this, it seems unlikely they do much good, but who knows?
The machine the pain clinic to which I referred (several MDs, nurse-practioner, and a chiropractor) is well known hereabouts, and they do all sorts of treatments. The machine used on my neck was far smaller than the behemoths the chiropractors seem to favor, but it was computer-controlled, so it could exert different pressures, different times, etc. It took 20 minutes with 9 stretches and releases. Whether it just stretched the muscles or actually decompressed the vertebrae, I don’t know, but it really did help.
Ya pays your money, ya takes ya choice.
Yes, sort of, if you’re creative. I use one of those Total Gyms to do that. You’ve seen the infomercial with Chuck Norris. It’s a bench that slides back and forth and you use your body weight and the height of the bench as resistance.
I set it at the lowest height and strap my legs to the vertical bar. I then lay on the sliding bench and grab the other end and push so I’m tugging on my back. 5 minutes a day for a week makes a big difference it I get things out of whack.
You can find total gyms cheap because they are hard to fold up and take up room when they are unfolded.