Hypermobility is a familiar topic at Cressey Performance, especially with baseball players, as many arrive with a natural tendency to be loose. It’s not unusual to see this in the general population as well—yoga instructors, dancers, and other very flexible people often walk through our doors. It’s a unique situation, to say the least. Is laxity bad? It can be both good and bad. For some athletes, being loose helps them do what they do and succeed; for others, it can be a major challenge. If you don’t approach it with careful planning, a coach could end up causing more harm than good.
In this guest post by former Cressey Performance intern Miguel Aragoncillo, he dives into this often overlooked and under-diagnosed phenomenon. It’s two parts, but packed with useful information. I hope you find it helpful.
My own story of hypermobility began with breakdancing in high school and college, then dealing with it while taking up powerlifting, and I still manage it today. I have congenital laxity—sometimes it helps, other times it hurts. When I worked as a personal trainer after college, I was convinced that most people’s tightness came from work demands, poor posture, and a lack of exercise. They’d typically feel tight in their hamstrings, back, and chest and would usually rely on static stretching to loosen up.
From my time breakdancing, I knew I was fairly flexible, but it wasn’t until I started reading Eric’s and Tony’s blogs that I considered a genetic predisposition might allow me to assume certain positions without hours of stretching. This idea became clearer after I completed an internship at CP in the fall/winter of 2012.
During that Massachusetts period I worked with pitchers who had laxity, talked about glenohumeral instability, and did deadlifts to techno music. That experience helped me see that there’s more to this self-flexibility than I had imagined. Hypermobility, or congenital laxity, involves joints and ligaments that are looser due to differences in collagen. I confirmed my own hypermobility with a Beighton laxity test I administered myself.
Hypermobility affects a sizable portion of the population and is documented in various groups, including people of African, Asian, and Arab origin, and in youth whose joints are still developing. As a strength coach and trainer, the focus is on managing the effects of laxity—either proactively through exercise selection or by referring athletes to appropriate medical care.
Functional joint stability comes from a mix of passive stability (ligaments and tendons) and active stability (the coordinated action of muscles around a joint). It also depends on joint geometry, the friction between cartilage surfaces, and the load on the joint from gravity and muscle forces. Of these factors, the load on the joint is especially important.
If a movement lacks stability, several factors could be at play: weakness in a stabilizer, poor bone congruence, diminished neural signaling from the brain to the joint, or proprioceptive deficits. While each case is unique, a common theme is the need for coordinated activation of both agonist and antagonist muscles to create functional joint stability.
In practice, this means choosing safe positions within exercises you already know—planks, push-ups, rows, squats, lunges, and deadlifts. For hypermobile athletes, two key points stand out: first, avoid letting a joint reach full hyperextension; second, use a partial range of motion as a beginner-friendly variation. Encouraging a safer range of motion can improve proprioceptive feedback and activate the major stabilizers of the shoulders and hips, creating a safer training environment and offering more exercise options at the same time.
Using an ankle sprain as an example, ankle inversion is common. The brain must send signals to the ankle to produce an eversion force to prevent injury. The body’s response is dynamic, and faster reactions typically offer greater protection. In some cases, the muscles that should react to prevent an injury aren’t able to respond quickly enough due to excessive inversion.
When thinking about injury prevention, the debate over braces and taping versus zero bracing comes up. Bracing and taping can provide proprioceptive feedback from the skin and may help some athletes by increasing joint sensitivity. For extremely lax athletes, braces might have theoretical benefits, but the goal should remain to improve joint position sense through static and dynamic training. Whether you favor centering the joint and activating stabilizers or using bracing for proprioceptive feedback, the end goal is the same: enhance proprioception and restore proper stabilization of major joints.
Personally, I’d prefer training in a proprioceptive-rich environment without braces and then, for daily activities, consider braces or tape as needed. After a period of training, you can retest moves and joints with a variety of stabilization assessments and adjust the plan.
For athletes with Cirque du Soleil–level flexibility, here are a few drills that focus on proprioception, especially reactive, perturbation-based exercises, and finding body reference centers.
Managing hypermobility with exercise selection involves targeted progressions. For lower-body reactive drills, progress from hurdle hops and single-leg hurdle hops to lateral bounds, focusing on keeping tension in the hip external rotators and avoiding a “knees-in” landing. These progressions suit youth athletes and advanced clients, since knee internal rotation during flexion can be more pronounced in hypermobile individuals due to knee structure.
Upper-body drills incorporate perturbations during various activities—static work like a quadruped medicine-ball perturbation or dynamic work like perturbing a side-lying windmill. These variations help reinforce stability of the humerus within the glenoid socket.
After learning this approach and attending seminars from the Postural Restoration Institute, there’s a practical set of movements designed to help hypermobile individuals move well. Coaches and therapists are actively seeking “reference centers” in the body to anchor movement for people who feel like they’re floating. These reference centers are developed through positional breathing techniques, some of which have been highlighted by Greg Robins and Eric Cressey, such as focusing on the left abdominal region, the left sit bone, the left heel, and the right arch. A logical progression is to build static or isometric strength first, then develop that strength through dynamic movements to improve proprioception in specific stabilizers, creating a protective mechanism for healthy movement in daily life and on the field.
That wraps up Part 1. Tomorrow I’ll explore more challenges for the “lax” athlete, assessment, and a unique case study.
