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5 Specific Tips to Help Your Hypermobile Students
Hypermobility refers to the ability to move joints beyond the “average” range of motion. It is a generalized term that represents several overlapping and interconnected medical diagnosis centering around disorders of connective tissue.
Hypermobility can also be trained such as in gymnasts, dancers, yogis, and pole dancers and not be related to any medical diagnosis. Many pole moves require extreme levels of mobility so inherent or trained hypermobility is very common in our industry.
Hypermobility is common outside of our industry too, and according to the Hypermobility Syndrome Association, impacts between 10-30% of people worldwide with more people assigned female at birth and children of all genders impacted than those assigned male at birth.
For some people, hypermobility has no other apparent symptoms other than being able to extend the joint beyond the “average” range of motion, while others can have a wide range of sometimes debilitating symptoms. One of the most common symptoms and most relevant to movement teachers, is poor proprioception or understand where the body is in space.
Your Role as a Movement Teacher
Knowing that the science continues to evolve and that everyone is different, here are some things you can do to support your hypermobile students and yourself in a movement context if suspect you have hypermobility, focusing on improving proprioception.
Remember, as a teacher without a medical license, you cannot “diagnose” anyone, it is outside your scope of practice. What you can do is be a keen observer of your students and identify if a joint is moving outside of a “standard” range of motion.
What you may notice in your students or in your own body is that some joints have more range of motion than normal while other have much less range of motion or hypomobility. This is common as the body adapts to find stability. Most people living in hypermobile bodies have no idea that their body is not “normal” so it is important to differentiate what is “biomechanical standard” or “biomechanical neutral” can be different from someone’s “inherent normal” and not unintentionally label people in way that can negatively impact them. Some people may go their whole lives without any pain from their hypermobility or realizing they extend their joints more than they “should.”
Things you can start to do now:
- Supporting your students or your own body by understanding the biomechanical neutral alignment for posture and for specific moves will help improve proprioception.
- Understanding the muscles that are used for specific moves will also help improve proprioception.
- Using your muscles or encouraging your students to use their muscles to stabilize joints rather than “sitting” in their joints will also help.
The more you improve your mind-body connection the more you can decrease pain, improve mobility, and achieve your movement goals!
Specific Tips You Can Use in Class
So how do you do that, exactly? Here are some specific tips that have helped me, and my hypermobile students decrease pain and improve mobility to achieve movement goals.
Specific Tips:
- Find the muscle that is supposed to be “working” and touch it. Our brain processes sensory information before motor or movement information. In a lunge, that might be poking or rubbing the butt of your back leg to get it to squeeze.
- Use blocks, bolsters, walls, poles, bands, and other external tools to improve alignment on the floor before going into the air.
- Find your end range of motion and then go back a little until you feel muscles working. A muscle that is relatively “firm” is engaged or “turned on.”
- Go the opposite way first. If you are working toward shoulder external rotation, internally rotate first and then externally rotate.
- Find the muscle that needs to work and squeeze as hard as possible, then slowly let the muscle out as you increase range of motion like you were slowly pulling a rubber band.
- BONUS! Investigate other brain-based practices such as vision drills, improving the vestibular system, and intentional breathing practices before you start any movement.
Above all, make sure you are well-resourced in whatever ways that resonate with you! That might mean you need more rest days, more sleep, a specific kind of diet, or other external things like a calming scent or appropriate music to make you feel more internally supported before training or practicing.
Colleen Jolly is an entrepreneur and a pole dance enthusiast. She has been poling for 15 years, is the CEO of PoleCon and the Executive Director of the IPIA. She teaches pole, lyra, floorwork, and mobility online and in-person in the DC metro area. She has been active in leadership roles in several international businesses over the past two decades and is also an award-winning pole dancer, artist, writer, and speaker. She is certified in several movement modalities and wrote the book "Mobility for Pole" to help pole dancers move better.
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