6 Reasons Hypermobile People Have Pain with Exercise
One major limiting factor for strength training, especially for my hypermobile clients, is pain when doing the exercises. Now when we are talking about pain with strength training, I would categorize two different types of pain:
Pain During the Exercise - As you are going through the exercise, a joint or muscle around the area that you are exercising is giving you a pain signal. This is your body’s way of communicating that it is not loving the way you are doing that movement.
Pain After Exercising - This type of pain has to do with overloading the tissue. The exercise load is greater than the capacity of the muscle and surrounding tissues. Sometimes this is due to too high of a load. Other times the body has a lower capacity for various reasons.
Overall nobody wants to have pain before or after exercising so let’s go through how to reduce both.
Eliminate Pain During Exercise:
Form - I am REALLY picky when it comes to form with exercises. But it’s for good reason! I find that a lot of pain during an exercise comes from how the exercise is performed. Our bodies are masters at compensating in order to find the “easiest” way to do an exercise. Often times by making micro-adjustments to your posture we can eliminate that pain. The most common form adjustments I make are maintaining a neutral spine, keeping the shoulder blade back and down, hinging through the hip and sitting back more through a squat, and bending the back knee more in a lunge so that the front knee doesn’t go past the toe.
Core - Every exercise is a core exercise! Every exercise is an opportunity to practice stabilizing the spine and pelvis. The reason I recommend this is because I often find pain during exercise when the body doesn’t feel stable enough. So the brain will cause spasms in some other muscle to ensure stability. However, if we are intentional with using the core and the breath to stabilize, it allows the muscle that is supposed to be working during the exercise to do its own job.
Activation - Our brains send signals along nerves to tell us which muscles to use for a given movement. Commonly used muscles have a highway nerve that is easy for the brain to use. Other less commonly used muscles have a backroad nerve. You can still use it but it is harder to find. So sometimes if your form is right, and you are using your core but you still have pain, you may need to help the brain find the right muscle to do the work. One trick you can use is to put your hand on the muscle you are trying to work. This sensory information tells the brain, “Hey, this is what we are trying to use here.” If you still can’t feel the muscle and have pain, I recommend making in for an appointment for us to work through it together.
Eliminate Pain After Exercise:
Adjust the load - If you are having pain after exercise, then you likely need to adjust the load. Yes, maybe you used to lift this amount of weight but a lot may have changed since then. Your capacity today isn’t what it was then. So we want to meet our body where it is currently. Ways to adjust the load include decreasing the weight, decreasing the tension in the band, decreasing the number of reps, decreasing the number of sets, and changing the posture to allow more support.
Recognize Your Current Capacity - Your body’s capacity is made up of lots of different factors. Things that change your body’s capacity are sleep, nutrition, movement, infections, dysautonomia, and mast cell activation syndrome. Being able to wake up and say “Wow my body is feeling pretty run down. My capacity is low,” is huge! This allows you to adjust the load of the exercise to meet yourself where you are today.
Changing Your Capacity - When you look over the factors that affect your capacity, you will notice that some of them are modifiable. Sleep, nutrition, moving the body, nervous system regulation exercises, and talking to your doctor about medications. By taking slow progressive steps to improve your capacity you will be able to increase the load quicker without the pain.
As you can see, having pain with exercise is not a simple one-and-done thing. There is an art to the science since every body is different. And the person who knows your body best is you. However, you can use a team of professionals to help you figure out what that pain is trying to tell you. If you need help navigating pain with exercising then join my email list to hear about how I can help you.