Rehabilitation Done
The Right Way

 You have probably started to wonder why the same old hypermobility advice doesn’t seem to yield any results. The answer is simple, they focus on the areas that either don’t matter or don’t actually apply to stabilising your joints.

Build muscle around your joints.

This ideology that if only you were to build muscle around your joints, they would somehow become stable is incredibly outdated. When you really think about it, it doesn’t even make any sense.

To build muscle tissue, you need to be able to overload the tissue with sufficient weight to break down and create new muscle tissue.

However, how are you supposed to use that amount of weight with unstable joints? You likely can’t and if you can, it’s only a matter of time until a small injury results in the loss of any results gains.

People who go this route often end up with superficial strength, strong on the outside, but lacking any fundamental stability. Akin to firing a rocket launcher from a rowing boat: there’s power there, but no real foundation.

Likewise, even with prime testosterone levels, the average male can only out on around 8 – 10 lbs of muscle tissue per year, body-wide. For biological Females, that figure is even less.

So how much muscle do you need to build?

The answer here is that it really doesn’t matter how much muscle you have. Even the most muscular-bound individual with Hypermobility can suffer from dislocations, whereas those with hypermobility lacking in muscle tissue can often be far more stable.

Far too much emphasis on hypermobile rehab has been placed on the musculoskeletal system and not on hypermobile individuals’ neurology.

Proprioceptive training

The second and probably most frustrating current treatment for those with hypermobility is that of proprioceptive training.

Proprioception is the effect, not the cause of the issues with hypermobility. And this is where almost all hypermobility rehab programmes fall flat.

Think of it like being a good driver. Being a good driver is the direct effect of several skills working together: hazard awareness, timing, motor control, depth perception, judgement, and experience.

The same is true of proprioception. It is the effect of many systems working together.

Movement is unconscious, meaning it happens automatically. Stabilising joints is largely about the prediction of forces and being able to predict what force is incoming and how to react to it automatically.

Proprioception is the effect of cortical maps, which is your brain’s way of discriminating what sensory information came from where, where your joints start and end, how much activation is already in them, how much they will need to perform joint actions, and a prediction of what they are going to do and how your brain is going to it.

Focusing solely on proprioception (the effect of cortical maps) serves only to slow down your every movement, and only helps whilst doing proprioceptive training. Once stopped, so does the effect.

You have already most likely noticed that most subluxations/dislocations happen when you’re not consciously paying attention to movement.

Such proprioceptive training, like that of standing on a wobble board, is great if we were to find ourselves always standing on a wobble board. This is akin to if I were to enter a marathon and then spend the subsequent training time learning the fiddle…. it is not going to help my running.

Lying on one’s back, and focusing on the joints, does not update your cortical maps. For a map to be updated, amongst other things it needs non-nociceptive input, load, and retrained through the movement with sufficient tactile and coding cues, and repeated again and again. 

Once this is done, Long term mapping techniques can be done, and individuals can stop focusing on their joints, and just let them be stable.

If you’re ready to learn our Framework and start rehabbing your hypermobile body in the way that its needed to create stable joints, then we are ready to teach it