Yoga is supposed to be an inward practice where people have the opportunity to move and bend in different ways while paying attention to how they are breathing, and the different sensations they are feeling in their bodies.  A few challenges arise when you place thirty people in a room and ask them all to hold the same position for a period of time.  First, the newcomers to the group will, by default, look around at what everyone else is doing to try and figure out where they fit in, then try their best to keep up.  Second, all thirty of the people in the room will fall somewhere on a spectrum of hyper-hypomobility, a genetically predetermined level of stretchiness in all the soft tissues of their bodies.  We all have a certain amount of a protein called elastin in our muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia that directly effects the general elasticity of every joint in our bodies; it is not the only determinant of flexibility, but it plays a significant role in how people hold themselves.

Very bendy people typically have a lot of elastin and fall somewhere towards the hypermobile end of the spectrum, while globally stiff, tight people likely have less elastin and land more towards the hypomobile side.  There are pros and cons to being on either end, but the average people in the middle of the spectrum seem to have the least functional problems with their bodies.  You would think that being more flexible is more beneficial, but the more loosely your body is held together, the more challenging and complex of a task it is to move it in a coordinated manner.  Our lives require us to move around, lift, push and carry heavy objects at times, or simply sit or stand in one spot for minutes to hours; hypermobile people may be able to fold themselves in half for a downward dog, but have real trouble stacking up their bodies well for day-to-day tasks.

As a physiotherapist, hypermobility is one of the first things that I feel for when I start moving people around because it helps me understand how much time I am likely going to have to spend teaching them how to move and hold themselves more efficiently.  Some people’s joints feel like a bowl full of jelly with seemingly nothing restricting their movement, while others feel like they are full of cement, and you wonder how they are even able to move around.  Loose-jointed people tend to be happier when they are moving around and tend to contort themselves into funny twisted positions if you ask them to sit still for any length of time because it is hard to stack up their skeletons to hold themselves up against gravity. 

Gravity is an unrelenting force pulling us all downward, so we develop our own strategies of subconscious muscle recruitment to hold us vertical during functional tasks.  Hypomobile people don’t have a lot of joint mobility to play with, so their posture and movement patterns become fairly predictable, whereas hypermobile people are faced with a paradox of choice because their joints are held together like a bag of jelly.  Loosey-goosey people tend to develop bracing strategies to hold themselves up, in order to simplify the task of stabilizing hundreds of joints simultaneously just to stand, sit and walk around.  You will see dancers and gymnasts develop sway backs and compressed hips as a means of standing still because it is easier to create some stability by fully extending their spines and locking down their bendy hips.  Unfortunately, these subconscious bracing patterns create a lot of tugging, pulling and compression in people’s bodies over time that eventually lead to the experience of pain. 

Our bodies are comprised of a series of muscular tug-of-wars that all work together to coordinate our postures and our movement patterns.  Very commonly people will develop bracing strategies that create muscle imbalances in their tug-of-wars due to things like hypermobility, emotional stress, learned behaviour or physical trauma.  These muscle imbalances tend to lead to insidious tensions, pains and joint dysfunctions in people’s bodies that eventually bring them in for physiotherapy.  I spend most of my days trying to help people regulate the tone in their muscular system because it is where most people experience their discomfort, and it provides the most feedback to their brains as to where they are in space. 

Both of my books go into more detail on the role hypermobility plays in the experience of being you. Click Here to learn more