Are You Too Flexible?

When it comes to flexibility, most of us need more — but a few of us actually need less.

- Erin Calderone, MS, NASM-CPT

If you ever described yourself as “double-jointed,” you might be among the über-mobile few who can naturally hyperextend your joints beyond their normal range of motion. Hypermobility such as this is genetic, and more often than not, you grow out of it. However, sometimes you don’t, and while being able to pop your shoulders out of the socket and contort into a bizarre position is a great bar trick, moving your joints past a healthy range of motion puts excess tension on already lax ligaments and loose joint capsules, and may result in chronic joint pain and instability.

Genetics aside, hypermobility also can be self-inflicted, and it is possible to stretch so aggressively that you actually physically damage and loosen your connective tissues. Forced flexibility such as ballistic stretching was once the norm in sports like gymnastics and martial arts, done in order to achieve a superhuman range of motion, but more often than not, it resulted in chronic joint issues.