A Guide for the Hypermobile CrossFit Athlete
I recently passed 10 years of being a CrossFit athlete and Coach and during this time, I have learned so much about my body and what it can and can’t handle. As a hypermobile CrossFit athlete, I have become increasingly aware of the number of other CrossFit athletes who are also on the hypermobile end of the spectrum. Being hypermobile was not something I knew or understood when I first started CrossFit.
The challenge is most people don’t realize they are in this category, or if they do, don’t think CrossFit is for them or have been told by other healthcare professionals or trainers to stay away from CrossFit. There are also current crossfitters with hypermobile or loose joints who are unaware they are in this category.
Is CrossFIt the best exercise for hypermobility?
The mobility everyone wants…except me.
CrossFit can absolutely be a great option for those with hypermobility. But there are special considerations for the hypermobile athlete and too often individuals and coaches are not addressing the needs of this population.
These athletes usually have good range of motion and mobility which can be misleading. They are often told they have “great form” because they can get into positions that other athletes struggle with, like the front rack or overhead squats. I have been used often as a “great example” of mobility but I’d gladly give some of it away if I could feel more stable and strong in those positions.
What is not obvious to coaches, or even the athletes themselves, is that certain positions and movements could place them in a comprising position, or one they don’t yet have control and stability in. This can lead to injuries, some as serious as joint dislocations, or even stall an athlete’s progress if they are not learning how to control these positions.
Over the years, CrossFit has only helped improve my strength, stability, and awareness of my body in space - all things that are very important for hypermobile people to work on. I have made some of my own discoveries over the years (being a physical therapist has helped) because the flaws of hypermobile athletes can often get overlooked in the CrossFit space. Hopefully, this blog can help those of you with hypermobility excel in the world of CrossFit and functional fitness, and if you are a coach, help you better coach these athletes to success.
In this blog, we’ll identify why hypermobility creates issues, then explore ways to complement regular CrossFit programming to make sure being hypermobile is beneficial rather than problematic by learning how to:
Create Tension
Use Pauses, Carries, and Holds
Add Tempo and Strict Strength Work
Improve Olympic Lifts and Overhead Core Control
Harness Single-Sided Movements
Rethink Stretching and Recovery
How do I know if I’m hypermobile?
Hypermobility is a spectrum and encompasses many different types of hypermobility syndromes including, connective tissue disorders, Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder (HSD), Joint Hypermobility Syndrome (JHS), and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) to name a few.
Some of these diagnoses are more serious than others, so if you think you have hypermobility it’s always a good idea to get a formal medical evaluation to see what category you fall in. Though everyone can benefit from strength training and exercise, CrossFit and other high-intensity exercises may not be the best fit for every hypermobile human.
The Beighton score is a quick test to look at hypermobility/ligament laxity in specific joints It uses a nine-point scoring system. A score of four or more indicated generalized hypermobility of the joints. This test is not an “all or nothing” test and is often accompanied by other questions like “Have you ever dislocated a joint?”, “Do you consider yourself double-jointed?”, or “Do you get dizzy upon standing?”. Other common symptoms of hypermobility syndrome include:
joint instability and hyperextension
stretchy skin
sprains, strains, subluxations, and/or dislocations
stomach and gut issues
poor proprioception (knowing where your body is in space)
autonomic dysfunction like POTS, dizziness, or fainting
chronic pain
chronic fatigue
Women are more prone to having joint and ligamentous laxity and fluctuations due to hormones but men can also be hypermobile. Other common complaints can be sacroiliac joint (SIJ) pain, low back pain, knee and patellar issues, shoulder pain, wrist pain, neck pain or tight traps, and core weakness. It’s also very common for hypermobile people to report feeling “tight”, though this is usually the body’s response to finding stability and when further assessed, they have normal range of motion and flexibility.
Even if you are not significantly hypermobile, awareness is the first step and the information in this blog will be helpful to guide your training.
I’ve never had a problem getting “ass to grass” but can’t always stand it up!
a Mismatch Between Mobility and Strength
To excel in CrossFit, you do need to have adequate mobility to get into a wide range of movement patterns, the range of motion to perform full reps, and the strength and muscle control to move your bodyweight or a barbell both powerfully and safely. Athletes with less mobility (hypomobile) tend to get more attention from coaches because it’s often more difficult for them to get into positions. Overall, CrossFit and other functional fitness programs tend to be more focused on “gaining mobility”, stretching, mobilizing, smashing, etc. often encouraging athletes to get more mobile to improve their performance.
Hypermobile athletes have the flexibility and range of motion (usually) but often struggle with the body control and stability it takes to safely get into positions, especially if you add in heavy loads, time components, and intensity. More mobility isn’t going to help. I’m not going to get better at overhead movements by spending more time stretching my lats…
Achieving full range of motion is easy for me due to my hypermobility, and it’s often praised by coaches and other athletes. The trouble is that I can sneak into these positions without adequate strength or stability, instead over-relying on my mobility. In my early years of CrossFit, I developed hip pain from constantly bouncing out of the bottom of my squats and low back pain from losing core stability with overhead movements. (check out this blog on how to fix low back pain from overhead press)
CrossFit philosophy states that you should prioritize technique, then consistency, and finally intensity. But when you look good in positions, it's easy to skip the first two phases and add too much intensity. Eventually, the mismatch between mobility and strength becomes apparent and can lead to too much pressure on certain areas and structures, like the hip joint from bouncing during squats or the shoulder joint from crashing down on kipping pull-ups.
Most CrossFit workouts focus on going hard and fast. This can be challenging for hypermobile athletes because it’s all about getting as many reps as possible quickly, which can take the focus off muscle control – an area that this population already struggles with. If there isn’t adequate muscular support and connective tissue resilience, this can lead to acute problems like dislocations and ligament tears, as well as chronic ones like disc issues and joint inflammation due to increased shearing and compressive forces. Bearing load at extreme end ranges can only make things worse. Therefore, technique and consistency should also encompass control and stability in these positions.
Here are some ways to prevent this proactively:
Create Tension
Hypermobility disorders affect the connective tissues (tendons, ligaments, cartilage), enabling you to achieve a full range of motion without feeling enough muscle tension because everything is a little looser. So you don’t get the proprioceptive feeling of stiffness or the sensation of tightening up like most athletes do. This means the mind-muscle connection isn’t activated, which makes it hard to feel where the end-range is.
Many hypermobile people lean toward yoga because the goal is to get into positions but not always be “active” in them. People also tend to lean into the things they are good at, again why yoga can be so popular for this population. Personally, my body feels worse after yoga and intense stretching. As we discussed earlier, often some tissues can feel “tight” but that is usually our body’s way of creating tension. If all you do is stretch, that just tells the brain things are loose again and it will tighten back up to stabilize.
As a hypermobile CrossFitter, I can tell you there are ways to practice finding and creating tension in your body. You may have to work harder to “feel” and to connect your brain to the muscle you are trying to use.
The easiest way is to move while under load and pay attention to how positional variations create more stiffness. For example, in the deadlift, you can experiment with your setup position to find the right length-tension relationship, such as sitting your hips back and bending your knees more.
In the squat, I move my feet farther apart so I can feel more tension in my adductors than if I were in a narrow stance. It’s often easy to get into the bottom position of the squat when muscles are maximally lengthened but then much more difficult to stand up because there’s no tension. Many athletes rely on the stretch-shortening cycle to lengthen a muscle and then quickly shorten it. This may look like bouncing out of the bottom of a squat, which is very common in CrossFit, along with touch-and-go reps. Though not inherently bad or wrong to do, hypermobile athletes may not have muscle tension, and instead are bouncing on their joints and ligaments. Over time this can stress the knees, hips, and connective tissues.
Using external cues can be helpful to find tension like “push the floor away” during a deadlift, “spread the floor” during a squat, or “break the bar” during an overhead squat. External feedback using bands can also work like putting a band around your knees for deadlifts or squats and pushing into it using your hip muscles.
Doing drills like one-and-a-quarter squats or dead stop deadlifts can help you recognize and create tension as you approach the end range.
Use Pauses, Carries, and Holds
Though many CrossFit workouts involve using momentum, touch-and-go reps and barbell cycling it can be really helpful to add strength accessory work outside of the WOD or metcon.
Working on pauses in the mid-range of a movement is often skipped, and it’s a point where hypermobile athletes often struggle. It’s common to see them crash to the bottom of a squat or come down from a pull-up without control. Emphasizing this phase will increase strength and improve your understanding of where your body is in space. With exercises like pull-ups, squats, and overhead presses, you could pause for one to three seconds in the mid-range and at the top or bottom of the movement.
Hypermobile athletes also struggle to recruit muscles when approaching end ranges under tension so it can also be helpful to add a pause or hold at end ranges of motion. If you’re hypermobile, you might go past what people with regular mobility can, but not be able to do so in a safe, sustainable way. An extra second hold at the top of a thruster or jerk can help you feel the load, make adjustments, and work on developing stability. Similarly, a pause or hold at the bottom of a squat, while maintaining tension, can make you control the motion and not rely on using momentum to move into the next rep.
Another way for hypermobile athletes to improve stability is carries. These require you to be in motion with a load while also keeping your core engaged and certain joints stable.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Longer hold isometrics enable you to work on muscular endurance with extended pauses at certain points in an exercise. For example, you could replace regular pull-ups with a 10- to 30-second hold with your chin over the bar. Or you could be at the other end of your range by hanging actively in the bottom position. The same goes for pausing during the top or bottom of a dip.
Add Tempo and Strict Strength Work
As I shared in a previous post, slowing down the pace of exercises with tempo work can also be beneficial for hypermobile athletes. This decelerates the upward and downward portions of a lift so that you’re feeling your way through the entire range of motion instead of using your extra mobility to get into extreme positions and then finding a lack of strength.
So going back to the pull-up, you could concentrate on going slowly on the way back down, with a controlled descent emphasizing the eccentric contraction in which your muscles lengthen under tension. If needed, you could make this toe-assisted (with your feet on a box) or band-assisted to offset your body weight. As both options are fatiguing, you might only do three to five reps with rest in between.
Tempo squats are another great addition.
Another option is to add in strict strength work, in which each rep is distinct and performed without momentum. Strict press instead of push press or strict pull-ups instead of kipping. This will help eliminate weak points and wobbles and develop more confidence in every phase of a movement while removing the possibility of using your hypermobility at the expense of strength and control.
Most CrossFit classes spend time working on a skill or strength piece before the metcon. This is a great time to add tempo or strict work. For example, if touch-and-go deadlifts are prescribed, you could do dead-stop deadlifts with a 3-second negative each rep. Or add tempo to weighted lunges vs crashing down to the floor each rep. These are great things to discuss with your coach ahead of class and they can give you some other options as well.
Hypermobile CrossFit athletes might assume that not going hard and fast will be detrimental, but in fact, you will build better strength over time. Slow and steady lifts can also pack on muscle size (hypertrophy) due to increased time under tension and will also increase body position awareness. You can still push the intensity in other ways, such as on the rowing machine or Assault bike and as you build strength over time you can do more barbell cycling and faster touch-and-go reps.
Improve Olympic Lifts and Overhead Core Control
With Olympic lifts, complexes can be useful for hypermobile athletes because they involve more time under tension, allow you to add pauses, and will help you improve control at each phase of the lift.
Example:
Pause Snatch Pull (pausing an inch off the ground) + High Hang Power Snatch + Hang Snatch + OHS
While this can be done with an empty bar, it can be beneficial to add load. Hypermobile athletes tend to err on the side of lighter loads, which may be necessary at times, but load actually helps you feel the weight and makes you work harder to control your positions. Too light and you just can’t feel what you need to feel.
It’s common for hypermobile athletes to have core control issues. This can lead to them extending and arching their backs, especially during overhead movements like the snatch and split jerk. A drill such as the anti-extension banded shoulder press can help you feel and engage your core.
Harness Single-Sided Movements
In addition to working on compound bilateral movements, hypermobile athletes benefit from unilateral work too. Using a dumbbell or kettlebell to move each limb independently helps with stabilization and neuromuscular control, and you can combine these with tempo work and holds to further improve the mind-body connection.
It’s common for one limb to be stronger than the other, so doing a single-sided exercise, like a dumbbell split squat, in which you take two to three seconds to lower yourself, hover over the ground for a moment, and then push back up can help correct this. Similarly, try a dumbbell overhead press, pause at the top, and then lower it slowly.
Again, it’s easy to substitute single-limb exercises during the strength portion of class!
Rethink Stretching and Recovery
We’ve discussed that often hypermobile athletes feel “tight” or that they need to stretch. If they feel tight, it’s because their body is trying to create stability. We’ve also mentioned that stretching is also commonly prescribed to athletes to help them get into better positions. However, this population needs to spend less time stretching, and more time developing strength and stability.
So it would be better to concentrate on the kinds of controlled movements and strength work mentioned above instead. Controlled Romanian deadlifts will stretch the hamstrings and rear foot elevated split squats will stretch the hip flexors - all great options to still work on mobility AND strength at the same time.
Soft tissue mobilization with tools like a foam roller, massage gun, or lacrosse ball can be beneficial and I would recommend this over stretching. They can help you feel less tight but also create connections between the brain and the body/muscle which can help improve proprioception - you’ll have better awareness of that area.
Speaking of recovery, hypermobile athletes often need longer to bounce back. Hypermobile athletes can get more muscle soreness and also deal with greater fatigue. There’s also evidence to suggest that if you’re hypermobile, you’re more prone to hormonal issues and autonomic dysfunction which can impact recovery. I’ll discuss this more in another post but for now, you might need to take an extra rest day and adjust your intensity so you aren’t going hard in a WOD every day. Hey, that means you could do some lower-intensity strength work like tempo, pauses, and holds right?
