Explanation
When you see the data age in years would have values like 50, 60r 70 90 years etc. And while calculating distance from centroid maximum possible value can be 90-0 and its square will be 8100.
While using heights in meter can be 2-0.5(1.5) meters and its square will be 2.25 only. So you can see age has more effect than height. Hence bringing the height on same level you can convert it into centimeters. Can bring data upto 200 centimeters and then it be more effective like square of 200 maximum.
However there is another approach is to divide the each value with its standard deviation, which will not have impact of the units e.g. age/sd of the age, which results in value without unit. This can also help in reducing the effect of units.