#1 Hypermobility Affects 20% of the Population
To put that into perspective, only 10% of the world is left handed! Hypermobility CAN be cool – you’ve got party tricks to show your friends about how you can touch your thumb to your wrist, or you may be the unofficial winner of the ‘most flexible in yoga class’ award.
However, though hypermobility may SEEM cool, it can have some health effects that need to be mitigated such as fatigue, being prone to sprains and strains, and joint instability.
#2 Focus on Active vs Passive Exercise
Work on mobility and strength through proper weightlifting and functional fitness, not just flexibility. Don’t set your hypermobile body for failure – yoga, Barre, and Pilates classes are NOT your friend if you are hypermobile (especially if you are competitive). Think of utilizing active range of motion (ROM) positions and having a personal trainer for strength exercises will help you stay within the “good” range of motion without over extending. Why use an experienced trainer? Most hypermobile people won’t even realize when they are compensating for their movements by extension of their joints, instead of through their muscles.
#3 Hypermobility Can Physiologically Cause Anxiety
Imagine, you wake up in the morning, stretch, get out of bed, and go to brush your teeth. Instead of a nice, rigid plastic toothpaste tube, your toothpaste came in an uninflated balloon. This would make brushing your teeth a bit harder, right? Maybe you would even write an email to the company with the heading WTF…
Anytime you wanted to brush your teeth, you would try and squeeze the toothpaste out the end of the balloon, but since the balloon is so stretchy, the walls of the balloon would expand outwards, as well as forward.
Now think of this analogy as a metaphor for your circulation system as a hypermobile person – your blood vessels are super stretchy, causing your blood to pool, stretching against the sides of the super stretchy vessel walls, causing less, well, flow.
Your body reacts, trying to get the blood flowing again – so we give ourselves a healthy dose of adrenaline to get the blood moving!
This is how you could be just walking to work, getting up from a meeting, or making dinner and all of a sudden your hands are super shaky and your heart is racing and you feel that sense of impending doom (helloooo anxiety). There are other factors that you can find in the amazing book, ‘Too Flexible to Feel Good’ by Celeste Pereira and Bridges Adell if you are interested in learning more! (click here to get a copy through Thriftbooks). Luckily, there is a way to mitigate the hypermobility in your circulation system – knowledge is key!
**Side Note: All new clients of Untamed Fitness receive a copy of this book as well as BodyMind by Ken Dychwalt. Both books have changed my life! Sign up for a Free 30-minute Fitness Consult here 🙂
#4 People with Hypermobility Usually have Gut Issues like Acid Reflux, Constipation, Bloating, Cramps, and Nausea
It’s a pretty new concept that hypermobility and gut health are related, which is why doctors usually will fix the symptoms by prescribing medications, instead of tracing back to the root of the problem.
Hypermobility doesn’t just effect your joints – it effects all of the stretchy parts of the body like your ligaments and tendons that are supposed to support your joints, as well as your intestinal wall.. this can even apply to the blood circulation system, since the walls of your veins and arteries are too flexible, leaving blood to pool in different areas and causing symptoms like the feeling of getting up too fast. Hypermobile people are also more prone to hernias. Hernias- where the intestine pushes out through the abdominal wall… Can you say ouch?? Just think – our intestines, and organs inside of us are held in place by a bunch of ligaments and a giant organ called the Mesentery. These are flexible, these are stretchy… meaning they are also the victim of hypermobility! If these sag or stretch too far, they won’t hold the intestines properly and everything from blood flow to proper nutrition absorption will be effected.
#5 Functional Fitness Exercises has Been Shown to Improve Hypermobility Symptoms, Avoid Injuries, and Decrease Anxiety and Depression Common in Hypermobile People
I’m going to leave you off with this one last thing – our brains, hypermobile or not, are super effing powerful! If you are reading this and thinking, “OMG I’m hypermobile, something is wrong with me – I’m sick!” Then guess what? Your brain will make you sick and not let you see past your limitations. It has been proven in multiple tests across hundreds of years that our brains create our own reality! Our brains create our own chaos.
Here’s an easy experiment – go on a run. Every minute, increase your speed until you are sprinting as hard as possible.
Do you feel like your heart is about to explode? Maybe, you start thinking “Oh no, this isn’t good! My heart is beating too fast, I feel like I’m going to die”. Your brain “hears” that thought and creates the hormones and chemicals involved to create that reality of “oh shit, we’re about to die”.
Let’s take that same run, but this time with a fitness tracker.
Same experiment, but have your fitness tracker set to the run mode. You go faster, and faster, and faster. You get to the point where you think your heart is going to beat itself OUT of your chest! You look down at your fitness tracker, and realize that your heart is only at 130 BPM (average resting heart rate is between 60-100 BPM) …. how is this possible?!
This tells you two things- one, that you are in really good cardiovascular shape! Congrats!
And two – that your brain was able to mitigate the panic of “OMG, I’m about to die” by having data points that proved that wasn’t true.
By having the fitness tracker on, you were able to stop the flood of adrenaline and cortisol to your body, slow your heart rate down and continue on your workout.
Pretty neat, huh? (Read more about Gut health and hypermobility here).
In order to explain how hypermobility can be mitigated through functional fitness, I’m going to have to explain the way our body is put together muscularly and in specific the 4 myofascial slings.
A myofascial sling spans your body like a seat belt, focusing on the density of fascia from the torso to your arms and legs. These run in various depths from your shoulder to your hip on both the front and back sides of your body.
Fun fact: The four myofascial sling names are Anterior Oblique Sling, Posterior Oblique Sling, Lateral Sling, and Deep Longitudinal Sling. (not important for the topic, but now you know!)
These myofascial slings bridged the gap for me from working on foot strength and athletic strength into functional movement – all four of these myofascial slings run through the feet! If there is an imbalance in any of the four slings, I was able to start with observing the foot movement of a client and literally trace my way up a person to find what sling was out of whack, what muscle wasn’t pulling it’s weight, and which ones were too tight. From there, I was able to take them through a functional fitness program addressing the muscle sling imbalance, therefore correcting any associated pains or ailments connected to it! Just based on the knowledge of these muscle slings and basic push/pull/press/squat movements, I have helped dozens of people find relief .
Stay with me here…
Functional fitness, or functional movement, MEANS the program focuses on moves designed to use your entire myofascial sling together as one unit, instead of focusing on just one muscle group (i.e. chest, legs, back, core, etc…)
Great examples of functional fitness exercises are kettlebell swings, single leg deadlifts, uneven squats… the list goes on. The goal for functional fitness is to find and FIX weak muscles instead of exacerbating problems through heavy lifting. Basically – AVOID INJURIES YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU WERE SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR!
So how do you integrate this into a weekly program?
The easiest way is let me do it for you ! Untamed Fitness prides itself on our educated personal trainers with results from our functional fitness program in as little as two weeks!
Two weeks? YES SERIOUSLY! why does it happen so fast? I think of it like this… once you know why your shoulder is hurting, your back is hurting, your foot is hurting… you give yourself mini PT sessions throughout the day, even without me telling you what to do!
Let’s say for example, you come in to Untamed Fitness with back pain. I run my assessments and notice that you seem to be weight bearing on your left side more than your right. I show you simple fixes on how to correct it, THEN give you homework- any time you feel your lower back pain, i want you to notice if you are shifted to your left side (which you probably are) THEN I want you to shift completely weightbearing to your right side and just NOTICE how long you can stay in that position before things start firing off.
Usually it’s like “I could only stay on my right side for 20 sec before my calf started burning!”
or
“My shoulders started aching from just shifting my weight, what is going on?! Amandaa I’m falling apart!!”. (Note: you are not falling apart, this is normal)
These shifts are key to your skeletal structure realigning to a more neutral and pain-free posture!
If you would like more information on how to get started on a functional fitness program, schedule a No Sweat Intro Here to find out how I can help!
Thanks for joining me – bye!
