Yoga for chronic pain and hypermobility, what the evidence actually shows

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Adam Foster

Director at The Fibro Guy

Adam Foster is the founder of The Fibro Guy and one of the leading voices in hypermobility, EDS, and chronic pain rehabilitation. A former Reconnaissance Soldier, he developed chronic pain after an IED blast in Afghanistan and built his approach from the ground up when the medical system had no answers. Since 2009 he has worked with thousands of people across eight countries, drawing on pain neuroscience, motor learning, and sensorimotor rehabilitation. He co-authored "No Pain, No Pain" with trauma psychologist Dr Mairi Harper, directed the documentary "Invisible Monster," and has been featured in Forbes, BBC Radio 4, ITV News, LiveScience, and The Telegraph.

Latest posts by Adam Foster (see all)

• Hypermobile hip exercises we use, and why clamshells aren’t one of them - 17 October 2026
• Is Fibromyalgia a Disability in the UK, and Can You Claim PIP? - 14 October 2026
• Fibromyalgia and Central Sensitisation, What Is It in Plain English? - 8 October 2026

It’s not uncommon for those with hypermobility or fibromyalgia to be told, at some point or other, to give yoga a go. By a physio, by a friend, by a well meaning relative, and last but not least by the internet, which worked out months ago that you’d been up at 2am googling why your joints hurt. Gentle yoga, restorative yoga, yin, the hot stuff, all of it gets recommended for pain, stiff achy joints, dodgy sleep, low mood, and even the fatigue that comes bundled in with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, hypermobility spectrum disorder and fibromyalgia.

With so many of us being pointed at a yoga mat, you would expect to find proper information on whether it actually helps a joint that already bends too far on its own. What you mostly find is the same studio talk repeated across the internet. Breathe deeply, lengthen the spine, find your flow. And underneath a fair bit of it sits marketing that has wandered a long way past what the studies actually found.

So this piece is for anyone with hypermobility or chronic pain who is weighing yoga up and wants the evidence rather than the atmosphere. It goes deep, because yoga and hypermobility is a genuinely complicated mix. We start with where yoga came from, which is a good deal more recent and a good deal more borrowed than most people realise, then what the trials actually show and how thin some of that evidence turns out to be once you lean on it, then how the whole thing stacks up next to tai chi and Pilates, before the part most of you came here for, which is what any of it means for a hypermobile body.

None of it is me telling you to bin your yoga, mind. If you love it and it keeps you moving, that counts for a lot, and I’ll say so more than once before the end. So, if you’re ready to take a proper, honest look at yoga for hypermobility, no incense required, let’s go.

Where yoga actually came from

The yoga you picture, with the leggings and the downward dog and an hour of flowing postures, is a fairly recent thing, and that surprises a lot of people when they first hear it. Yoga as a tradition is genuinely ancient. It began on the Indian subcontinent, and the word itself comes from the Sanskrit root “yuj”, meaning to yoke or unite. But for most of its history the physical postures were a minor part of the whole, almost a footnote tucked behind the rest of the practice.

Go back to the premodern texts and what you find is a practice built around breath control, drawing the senses inward, concentration and meditation ^[2]. Posture, asana, was there, but it mostly meant a steady, comfortable seat you could hold while you did the real work, which was inside your head rather than in your hamstrings. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, conventionally dated to roughly the early centuries CE, describe asana in barely a line or two, as a stable seat for meditation, and that’s about it. No sun salutations, no warrior poses, none of the stuff a modern class is built around.

The posture heavy, health and fitness version of yoga that spread around the world largely took shape in the twentieth century. It absorbed a surprising amount from European physical culture, from gymnastics, and from the early women’s exercise movements of the day, and it was shaped in part by Indian nationalism’s wish to project strength and health to the world. A lot of what feels timeless and eastern in a modern studio has fingerprints from early 1900s European gym culture all over it ^[1].

That point gets overstated, though, so a word of care here. It’s tempting to say modern yoga postures were invented in the twentieth century and made up out of nothing, and that’s too strong. Many seated, supine, arm balancing and inverted postures have older Indian precedents in regional texts well before colonial contact. The more accurate version is that modern postural yoga is a selective, reframed subset of a much older and broader tradition, given a heavy twentieth century makeover rather than conjured out of thin air. That’s a distinction worth bothering with if you care about getting it right ^[1][3].

The lineage is worth knowing, because it explains why the class down your road looks the way it does. T. Krishnamacharya taught in Mysore in the early to mid twentieth century and gets called the father of modern yoga, which is handy shorthand and not much more than that. His students are the names you’ll recognise. B.K.S. Iyengar, all precision and props and being told off about the angle of your back foot. K. Pattabhi Jois, with the fast sweaty Ashtanga stuff. And then the heated room styles people lump together as Bikram, which come off a different branch again. So when you walk into a studio and it’s either dead slow with a block under everything or relentless and dripping, that isn’t some unbroken thousand year recipe, it’s the personality of a handful of twentieth century teachers who taught very differently from one another ^[1].

This matters when you’re the one in pain, because it changes how you’re allowed to think about yoga. It isn’t sacred medicine handed down intact from the ancients, untouchable and above questioning. It’s a movement practice, and people built it, rebuilt it, borrowed bits and dropped bits, much the way most good things happen. Which means we get to ask it the same blunt question we’d ask of any other exercise. Does it work, for whom, and how much.

What the research says about yoga in general

The proposed explanations for what yoga does to a body keep landing on the same handful. Turning down the body’s stress response, which is the HPA axis that drives cortisol. Lowering cortisol itself. And nudging up the calm, rest and digest side of the nervous system, including heart rate variability, which is a marker of that calmer state.

It sounds convincing on the surface, and the snag is that those are proposed mechanisms rather than nailed down ones. So the fair version reads something like this. Yoga blends movement, breath and a bit of attention in a way that plausibly tips you towards a calmer gear. It’s a reasonable story, but not a settled fact, and anyone who tells you, hand on heart, that yoga “resets your nervous system” is running a fair way past what the data can back ^[8].

Back pain, yoga’s strongest hand

Yoga has a flagship condition, and it’s ongoing low back pain, which is where its evidence base sits at its strongest. Pooled across trials of yoga for chronic non specific low back pain, there were small to moderate gains in back related function and pain against not exercising, and little or no difference against other forms of exercise, with the certainty rated low to moderate. A newer and well run trial then put a twelve week virtual yoga programme against a wait list, and it came out ahead on both pain intensity and function, with the gains still holding at six months and no serious harms reported ^[5][9].

Read those two together and the real headline is duller than the marketing but more useful. For long term low back pain, yoga works about as well as other exercise and better than doing nothing at all. What it really amounts to is exercise in a format some people enjoy and stick with, and the sticking with it is half the point.

Mood, the heart, and where it gets weaker

Beyond the back the picture thins. For depression, pooled trials point to a moderate short term drop in symptoms against usual care, which is worth something, but they carry real methodological weaknesses and yoga sits best as an add on rather than a standalone treatment. Helpful alongside other things, short term, modest certainty, and not a replacement for proper mental health care ^[6].

On the heart the claims thin further still. The most on offer from the evidence for yoga in heart disease was a weak recommendation for it as an optional extra in conditions like coronary heart disease and heart failure, with very low to low certainty and no proven effect on whether people actually live longer. That last bit gets dropped in the marketing version, which is a shame, because yoga has not been shown to reduce deaths from heart disease, and any claim that strong deserves to be treated with suspicion ^[7].

Pull all of this up to the big picture and the field lands where it usually does. Across a wide range of chronic conditions, yoga tends to help, while the certainty of the underlying evidence is frequently low ^[4]. So that’s the honest one line summary of yoga as general exercise. Probably helpful, often pleasant, rarely harmful in gentle forms, propped up by an evidence base that’s broad but not deep, and a fair distance from the marketing version of itself.

How much, and is it safe?

People always want a dose. I get the question almost every week, normally phrased something like “how many classes do I need to do, like minimum”, and the honest answer is that it depends heavily on the condition. The trials that showed benefit for back pain tended to run around eight to twelve weeks of regular practice, which is a reasonable rule of thumb. I’d be wary of anyone quoting a precise minimum dose, though, because the trials don’t support that level of precision ^[5][9].

Safety is where the general yoga story starts bleeding into the hypermobility story. Surveyed nationally, most yoga related adverse effects turn out to be musculoskeletal and minor, which is reassuring on the face of it. Pulled muscles, sore joints, the odd tweak. But acute injuries do happen, they happen more with intense practice and in people who already have something going on in a joint, and that’s the bridge to the part of this post that matters most here ^[10].

Yoga versus tai chi versus Pilates

This is the question that lands in our inbox most weeks. Yoga, tai chi, or Pilates, which one’s best? People want a winner, and honestly, I can’t give them one. All three are exercise, and exercise in general already helps long term low back pain at moderate certainty, so before you even reach the branding on the studio door you’re choosing between three flavours of a thing that broadly works ^[17].

The head to head data are thin. There isn’t a decent trial that puts yoga, tai chi and Pilates in the same room against each other, so if someone tells you their style beat the other two, they’re guessing. What each one has is its own evidence and, more usefully, its own emphasis. Let’s take them in turn.

Tai chi

Tai chi is the slow one. Chinese in origin, all flowing, weight shifting, deliberate movement. The stuff you’ve seen old fellas doing in a park at dawn, and probably underestimated. It looks gentle, it’s deceptively good for you, and in the conditions our readers care about, it quietly out evidences both of the others.

Fibromyalgia first. A twelve week tai chi programme produced a meaningful improvement against an education and stretching control, with the gains still there six months on. A separate trial then did the comparison everyone should do more often, and put tai chi against aerobic exercise head to head. Tai chi came out ahead on overall fibromyalgia impact, with the longer programmes beating the shorter ones. That’s tai chi against aerobic exercise, not against yoga, so don’t read it as yoga losing. But it’s a real comparison against an active rival, which is rarer in this literature than it should be ^[11][12].

This next bit matters for anyone working with hypermobile bodies. Tai chi has decent evidence for balance and for proprioception, which is your sense of where your joints are without looking. Pooled data show it cuts falls in older adults, both how likely you are to fall and how often, and the more people practised the better it got. I’d not oversell that one, because there’s a publication bias flag on the fall numbers, so it’s “reduces falls”, not “bulletproofs you against gravity”. But the signal is there ^[13], and it has also been shown to sharpen lower limb proprioception in older adults ^[14].

That matters for you because a poor sense of joint position is one of the defining things we see in those with hypermobility. The signal about where the joint is arrives less precise, so you overshoot. A practice that quietly trains joint position sense is, on paper at least, aimed at exactly the right target.

Pilates

Pilates is the control one. A twentieth century system built by Joseph Pilates, more or less obsessed with the core and the trunk holding everything steady while the limbs do the moving. It’s a system I personally have a lot of time for, once you take the gimmicky end out of it.

For low back pain, the pooled evidence lands at low to moderate certainty that Pilates beats doing very little, with medium sized effects, and no convincing evidence that it beats other exercise ^[15][16]. It’s the same shape as the yoga story. Better than nothing, no special edge over exercise in general.

So why might I nudge a hypermobile reader towards it over a bog standard yoga class? Not because it’s magic. Because of the emphasis. Pilates trains control through a stable trunk instead of chasing how far you can reach, and a loose joint gets on far better with control than with more range. We took the evidence for Pilates in hypermobility and fibromyalgia apart properly in its own piece.

Where they overlap, and where they differ

The overlap first. All three are gentle to moderate movement. All three beat doing nothing. None of them has convincingly beaten plain old exercise. And all three can help people feel better and move a bit better. So far, so much of a muchness.

The difference is the emphasis, and the emphasis is the whole story once your joints are the problem. Tai chi and Pilates are built around controlled movement and stability. Mainstream yoga, more often than not, is built around range and flexibility, around sinking deeper into the shape. For most bodies that distinction barely matters. For a hypermobile one it’s the entire ballgame, and it sets up everything in the next two sections.

How the evidence has changed over time

A few decades ago yoga trials barely existed. Now there are hundreds. Somebody went and counted them, tallying 312 yoga trials and charting the field swell from almost nothing into a large, scattered literature across many conditions and countries. More trials, you’d hope, means more answers. But volume and quality aren’t the same thing, and that gap is the single biggest problem sitting under the whole yoga evidence base. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll spot it in every “yoga fixed my X” headline going ^[18].

It shows up first as the control group problem, or the “sham yoga” problem if you want the nickname. Looked at properly, a large share of the comparison groups in yoga trials turn out to be a wait list or “usual care”, which is against doing nothing much, in plain terms. One group gets a pleasant, supervised class in a nice room, with other people, and an hour of someone paying attention. The other group waits at home. The first lot do better, of course they do. The trouble is you can’t then separate the yoga itself from the attention, the expectation, the getting out of the house, and the lift of moving your body in company ^[19].

The deeper snag runs further still. You can’t blind anyone to whether they’re doing yoga. With a pill, you slip one group a dummy and nobody’s the wiser. But there’s no placebo downward dog, and you know perfectly well you’re doing yoga. So a true placebo is basically impossible. The sensible workaround is comparing yoga against an equally engaging active activity instead of against nothing, and that gets used far less than it should. When trials do use a proper active comparator, the benefit tends to shrink. A lot of yoga’s apparent benefit is measured against doing nothing, and “better than nothing” is a far lower bar than “better than the alternatives” ^[19].

Two broader trends stand out. The field keeps consolidating into big reviews of reviews that land, again and again, on the same verdict. Probably helpful, certainty low. The trials have multiplied faster than they’ve improved.

The harms reporting is also slowly growing up. Older trials hardly mentioned adverse events at all. One pooled look at mind and body therapies for fibromyalgia flagged that its included studies reported no adverse events, which almost certainly means nobody was counting properly rather than that yoga is risk free. The national survey of what actually goes wrong gives a far more honest picture. So the trajectory is more trials, better syntheses, stubbornly low certainty, and a harms picture that’s slowly stopping pretending nothing ever happens ^[4][22][10].

Yoga and fibromyalgia

Now the specifics. If you’ve got fibromyalgia and you’ve ever googled yoga, you’ve almost certainly tripped over one particular study without realising it had a name. The “Yoga of Awareness” trial. That’s the one everyone cites.

Gentle, multimodal stuff. Soft poses, meditation, breathing, a bit of coping instruction, group discussion, all of it run over eight weeks, with the comparison group parked on a wait list. The yoga group improved more on pain, fatigue, mood, pain catastrophising and acceptance. On the FIQR pain item, pain dropped about a quarter. Daily diary fatigue dropped roughly a quarter. On the FIQ depression subscale, scores improved by roughly 40%. A follow up said the gains held up partly a few months later, and that the wait list group got similar improvements once they finally did the programme too. On the face of it, a win ^[20][21].

The catch is a big one, though, because this trial is far thinner than its fame lets on. It was small and preliminary. Fifty three people, all women, at one centre, and the comparison was a wait list, which is the exact “against doing nothing” weakness we just spent a whole section picking apart. So those headline percentages are against sitting on a waiting list rather than against another active treatment. The benefits also faded a bit over the follow up, and people dropping out partway through is a well known headache across yoga and fibromyalgia trials generally. None of that makes it rubbish. It makes it a promising small trial against a weak comparator, which is a very different thing from the slam dunk it usually gets sold as ^[19][20][21].

The bigger reviews are more cautious. Pooled across mind and body therapies in fibromyalgia, there was low quality evidence of helpful effects on physical functioning, pain and mood against usual care, and the movement therapies bucket, which is the one yoga lives in, came out at very low certainty. A more recent look puts it in sharper perspective, and honestly, it stings a bit if you’re a yoga fan. Across all the mind body approaches, tai chi and qi gong had the most consistent benefits for fatigue, function and mood. Only two yoga studies even made the cut. Two. So within mind body approaches to fibromyalgia, yoga’s specific evidence base is smaller and weaker than tai chi’s ^[22][23].

The official guidance lands in the same place. The European recommendations for managing fibromyalgia gave a strong recommendation to one thing only, which was exercise. Mind body approaches, yoga among them, got weaker, conditional recommendations. The clearest signal in fibromyalgia is “move your body”. The particular wrapper you put around the movement matters less than the fact that you’re doing it at all ^[24].

So what’s the practical read for someone with fibromyalgia? The yoga that’s actually been tested is gentle and multimodal, not vigorous and not hot. The courses in the trials ran around eight weeks. The effect is real but modest, the certainty is low, and tai chi currently has the stronger mind body evidence in this condition. If you genuinely enjoy gentle yoga and it helps you keep moving and sleeping a bit better, it’s a sensible part of the mix. Just don’t expect it to be the thing that cures fibromyalgia, because nothing in the literature supports that ^{[20][21][23][24]}.

One more honest note. Pain in fibromyalgia is driven heavily by a sensitised nervous system rather than by tissue damage you can stretch out, and we lay that mechanism out in full in what causes chronic pain in fibromyalgia and hypermobility. It’s part of why gentle, calming, regular movement can take the edge off, and part of why no single posture is going to be the fix. How much you do matters at least as much as what you do.

Yoga and hypermobility

This is the section people actually came for, and it’s the thinnest of the lot. There’s essentially no good quality trial of yoga specifically in hypermobility, hEDS, or hypermobility spectrum disorder, none worth hanging a recommendation on, and it isn’t just yoga either, because the broader hypermobility exercise literature is itself limited.

Pooled across therapeutic exercise for joint hypermobility syndrome, people do improve with exercise, but there’s no convincing evidence for any specific type, nor even clear proof that exercise beats a control. The picture for physiotherapy in hEDS is much the same, limited and heterogeneous. So anyone who tells you “yoga is proven to help EDS”, or “yoga is proven to harm EDS”, is overselling a literature that isn’t there yet. We have to reason from the next best thing, which is mechanism and the closest related evidence ^[28][30].

First, the diagnostic ground, briefly. Hypermobile EDS and hypermobility spectrum disorders are clinical diagnoses with no single confirmatory test. They’re defined within the 2017 international EDS classification and described clinically in the literature that followed. Generalised joint hypermobility is commonly screened with the Beighton score, which is a nine point scale. The earlier Brighton criteria for benign joint hypermobility syndrome were largely superseded by that 2017 framework. Two features keep coming up clinically. A poorer sense of where the joints are, and a tendency to move joints into extreme end ranges. Together, those two explain the whole concern ^[25][26][27].

The actual mechanism of concern

The worry with yoga and hypermobility isn’t “yoga is bad”. It’s far more specific than that. A deep yoga posture asks you to reach the full expression of a shape, to get deeper, to sink further into the stretch. For most bodies, a muscle reaches its limit and that’s the natural stop. For a hypermobile body the joint just keeps travelling, well past where the muscle can govern it, until you arrive at the end of the joint’s range. At end range the load stops being carried by muscle and starts being carried by the passive structures, which are the ligaments and the joint capsule.

Ligaments connect bone to bone and restrain motion. They don’t contract, and they don’t generate force the way muscle does. So when you repeatedly sink a hypermobile joint into its end range with little muscular control, you’re effectively hanging on the ligaments. You get into the posture, it might even look impressive from the outside, but you’re achieving the shape by sacrificing stability rather than by building it. For a joint that’s already loose, and already short on the feedback that would warn it, that’s the wrong lesson to keep teaching ^[27][29].

This is exactly why the physiotherapy rationale for managing hypermobility emphasises muscle strengthening, proprioceptive and motor control training, and joint protection, rather than chasing more range. The Ehlers-Danlos Society’s own physiotherapy guidance points the same way. Strengthen the stabilising muscles, train control, and be cautious about repeated or excessive stretching and high impact activity when strength and joint control aren’t yet up to it. That’s organisational guidance rather than a trial, so the scientific weight properly rests on the mechanism and the management literature. But it’s notable that the people who specialise in this are not, on the whole, sending those with hypermobility off to chase deeper stretches ^[27][29]. It’s the approach our guide to exercise and rehabilitation for hypermobility sets out in full.

The motor learning problem nobody mentions

There’s a second issue with yoga for a hypermobile body, and it’s less obvious than the end range one. It’s about how a nervous system actually learns a movement in the first place.

Control isn’t something you own, it’s something you build, and the building has rules. The most useful one is that the nervous system doesn’t file away a copy of each movement, it works out a rule for solving a movement problem, and it builds a better rule from varied practice than from the same thing done the same way. Do the identical movement, at the identical speed, on the identical surface, every session, and you teach it one very narrow answer. Change the speed, the load, the surface and the order, and you teach it something that still holds up when real life serves you something slightly different. Mixing different tasks through a session produces better retention than neat, blocked repetition, even though it feels messier while you’re in it. We go through all of that properly in our piece on motor learning for hypermobility.

Hold a yoga class up against that and you can see where it helps and where it doesn’t. A class does give you repeated practice at holding positions with attention, which is not nothing, and some teachers vary the sequence week to week. But a lot of yoga runs the other way. The same poses, in the same order, at the same tempo, on the same mat, in the same room. Ashtanga is a fixed series by design. That’s neat, blocked practice, and it’s the format that feels most like progress while transferring least. The bit a loose joint actually needs, which is control under changing conditions, at varied speeds, in positions you haven’t rehearsed, is the bit a set sequence is worst at delivering.

None of that makes yoga useless. It makes it one input rather than a programme. If your joints let you down on uneven ground, on stairs, when you’re tired, or when you turn round too quickly, what helps is practice that looks like those conditions, not a smoother sun salutation.

Strengthen it, don’t just stretch it

The strongest direct evidence we’ve got comes from the shoulder. In around a hundred people with hypermobility spectrum disorder or hEDS and long standing shoulder symptoms, sixteen weeks of heavy, high load strengthening was set against light, low load exercise. The high load strengthening produced the bigger improvement in shoulder function, while being both feasible and safe. That’s the “load it, don’t just mobilise it” headline, and it lines up neatly with the whole strengthen over stretch argument ^[31].

Now the honest hedge. At one year, the gap between the groups had closed, with both groups improved and essentially converged by twelve months. So the defensible claim is that high load strengthening is feasible, safe and better in the short term, rather than permanently superior forever. Both approaches helped over the long run ^[32].

What it reinforces is the broader, more reliable point. Active strengthening and control beat passive range work as a target. Stretching a loose joint into more range was never the goal. Teaching the muscles to own the range you already have, is ^{[28][29][31][32]}. We take the stretching truth for hypermobility apart on its own elsewhere.

The hot yoga question

Then there’s hot yoga, and this one deserves its own warning. Hot or Bikram style yoga is practised in a heated room, commonly somewhere around 40 to 42 degrees. Set against the same yoga at room temperature, yoga at 40 degrees produced a greater acute increase in hip range of motion, and the write up flags that pushing acute range of motion in heat raises mechanical concerns, particularly for people whose joints already move further than the norm.

For a hypermobile joint, that’s a problem. Heat lets the joint move even further with even less protective resistance, and that’s the wrong incentive for a body whose joints already travel too far too easily ^[33].

The hedge matters here too. That was a small, short term measurement in healthy people, not a hypermobility outcome study, so the right words are “mechanistically concerning” rather than “proven to cause harm”. Nobody has put a room full of hypermobile people through a year of Bikram and counted the injuries. But you don’t always need that trial to make a sensible call. When the mechanism, the management literature and the specialist guidance all point the same way, deliberately adding heat to push a loose joint deeper into range is a gamble with very little upside for this group ^[33].

So where does that leave yoga for those with hypermobility?

Roughly here. Yoga has not been properly tested in hypermobility, so nobody can honestly promise you it helps, and nobody can honestly promise you it harms either. What we can say with reasonable confidence is that the mechanism and the related evidence both favour building strength and control over chasing range.

That doesn’t put yoga off the table. It means the version that makes sense for a hypermobile body is close to the opposite of what most classes celebrate. Less reaching for the deepest expression of a pose, more holding a stable, controlled, muscularly active position well inside your end range. Vary what you do rather than running the same sequence forever. Skip the party trick postures that show off how far you can bend, because for you that isn’t a strength, it’s the risk. And give hot yoga a wide berth ^{[27][28][29][30][31][32][33]}.

The thing to take away is the same thing we say about almost everything. When it comes to hypermobility, the goal is a joint that’s controlled and strong through its range, rather than a joint that can be pushed past it. Whatever movement practice gets you there is a good one. A class that keeps daring you to go deeper, possibly not.

The bottom line

So, where does all of this leave you and your yoga mat? Yoga is a genuinely useful movement practice with a long and interesting history, a real but modest evidence base, and far less magic than the marketing claims.

For back pain, it holds up about as well as other exercise ^[5][9]. For fibromyalgia, it may help a bit, though tai chi currently has the stronger hand ^[23][24]. For hypermobility, we’re reasoning from mechanism, because the direct evidence barely exists, and that mechanism points firmly towards building strength and control rather than reaching for the deepest stretch ^[27][29][31].

If you love your yoga, none of this is a reason to stop. It’s a reason to do it with your eyes open. Choose stability over party tricks, vary what you practise, skip the heated room if your joints are loose, and remember that the best thing you can do for a hypermobile joint is teach the muscles around it to do their job. Do that, and yoga can absolutely have a place.

We’re always in your corner, and if you want a hand putting the strength and control side of this into practice, that’s exactly what we do in the studios.

The Fibro Guy

References

[1] Singleton, M. (2010) Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195395341.

[2] Mallinson, J. and Singleton, M. (2017) Roots of Yoga. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 9780241253045.

[3] Birch, J. and Hargreaves, J. (2023) Premodern Yogasanas and Modern Postural Yoga Practice: Distinct Regional Collections of Asanas on the Eve of Colonialism. Journal of Yoga Studies, 4, pp. 31-82. doi: 10.34000/joys.2023.v4.01