Your Body starts from your height and sex and fills in an average length for each part of the body, as a share of your height.
Men. The male shares follow the body segment table of Drillis and Contini (1966), as reproduced in David A. Winter’s Biomechanics and Motor Control of Human Movement, a standard reference in biomechanics. In it the ankle sits at 3.9% of height, the knee at 28.5%, the hip at 53.0% and the shoulder at 81.8%. The thigh, lower leg and torso are the gaps between them, and the neck and head make up the last 18.2%. Two figures are the page’s own: the inseam, and the forearm, which runs from the elbow to the middle of the grip rather than to the wrist.
Women. The female shares come from ANSUR II, the U.S. Army’s 2012 anthropometric survey (Gordon and colleagues, 2014), which measured 1,986 women. Each share is the average of every woman’s measurement divided by her own height:
- Inseam: crotch height, 48.0%.
- Thigh: hip (trochanterion) height less knee (lateral femoral epicondyle) height, 23.3%.
- Lower leg: knee height less ankle (lateral malleolus) height, 24.8%.
- Upper arm: shoulder to elbow (acromion–radiale), 19.1%.
- Forearm: elbow to wrist (radiale–stylion), 14.8%, plus the part of the hand up to the middle of the grip, measured the same way as the male figure: 19.1% in all.
- Foot length: 15.1%.
In the survey the women’s ankle sits at 3.85% of height and the shoulder at 82.0%, within 0.2% of the figures the page uses for both sexes, so the torso is what is left between them, 29.8%. The survey’s subjects are soldiers, who are younger and fitter than the population as a whole, but body proportions vary much less than weight does.
These are averages, and people vary a good deal around them. Choose Enter my own to replace them with your own measurements. Legs and torso always add up to your height, so lengthening one shortens the other.