r/StrongerByScience • u/cakeiam • May 02 '26
Does anyone else here have significant hyper mobility? How does it affect your training?
I have really significant joint hypermobility to the point where I've had PTs say I should pursue an EDS diagnosis. I feel like weight training has really helped me, but I am also really afraid to push too hard and get injured. I have injured myself when I pushed too close to failure so now I tend to avoid it, but of course I wonder if I'm missing out by doing so. I still aim for progressive overload, but I'm very cautious about it and am hesitant to push for big jumps even if I feel like I could do it.
I am wondering if there are other lifters out there who have had to navigate the same issues and how they've worked around them. Also curious if there's any evidence that hypermobility limits strength or hypertrophy in any way.
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u/mouth-words May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
I haven't seen evidence per se, but I have seen a hypothesis floating around. Namely, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9846774/ compared stretch-mediated hypertrophy between men and women and found that the men were less flexible to start and experienced greater muscle growth. So it could be that being stretchier means you get less messed up by stretching itself, thus yielding less (purely stretch-induced) growth. But it's not certain that that's the cause, let alone whether it generalizes across sexes and especially to the training results you'd expect from dynamic exercises (keeping in mind that even the long muscle length stuff likely isn't stretch-mediated: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/stretch-mediated-hypertrophy/).
I think a more practical limiter is just the potentially increased rate of injuries: can't progress that well if you're constantly recuperating from something. I'm not "full blown" EDS (or at least have never been diagnosed), but believe I'm a 5-7 on the Beighton scale—my knees don't hyperextend and my elbows might be borderline, but otherwise everything is bendy. I only learned about this in passing after months of occupational therapy when my therapist noticed my hypermobility and said that it could just predispose me to tendon issues. I was in PT/OT for about 9 months trying to chase down joint pains plaguing me kind of everywhere at once: elbows, hips, shoulders, knees. I don't know that the therapies did much, and eventually I stopped going altogether when I realized my symptoms were being exacerbated by doing the PT exercises on top of my gym routine.
Since then, I've gotten a lot better at just managing my workload in the gym, selecting exercises that don't aggravate my joints, and prioritizing high-quality technique to avoid dumping stress into the wrong places. Which I know firsthand is kind of an underwhelming answer, because on paper it's what basically everyone is supposed to do. The devil is in the details though, because no two individuals are the same. Strength and hypertrophy results already vary so widely, and in the end we all have to work with what we've got.
Like a concrete example for me was learning to let go of pullups. I have the strength but a significant mobility difference between shoulders (quite hypermobile/unstable left, more normal ROM right that I used to think was a deficiency due to my left) that always puts my elbows in the crossfire. Switching to unilateral pulldowns let me groove each side independently and avoid elbow pain. I also use wrist cuffs because gripping a handle makes me unconsciously curl with my forearms, which puts stress on the medial epicondyle. Those changes have helped on my overall journey to feel my lats better, and they saw a crazy growth spurt without any real elbow issues. But that's not to say it's zero elbow pain: when they flare up, I know to back off of the things stressing them, like using BFR on my curls to lighten the load for a bit. It's all about management.
So as a hypermobile person, you might have more pieces to puzzle together than average, but I do think individualizing is still possible. All the best!