Ep.4 What Is A Bendy Wendy // You Can Fix You Podcast 

I only have minor hypermobility, so I do not have a risk of dislocation. I used to love my flexibility, but I just turned 30 and it turned into chronic pain issues, which is why I started focussing on strengthening. Slowly. So thank you for talking about it.

Thanks for talking about hypermobility. It’s much harder to find good advice for it as people assume if you have flexibility you can’t also have problems or pain.

Thanks Tom & JP! I'm hypermobile and have started to take a more preventative approach to my training thanks to these videos. It's made a world of difference in how I play with my kids and my overall mood throughout the day. May you find many wonderful shapes to take this weekend!!

Bendy Wendy here. Great episode/great series, thanks so much! Loved the first half vs second half of SMM ‘diagnosis’😅 v true! So great you are talking about hypermobility - so few people do. ❤❤❤

Oooooft yes, this hits home. I always avoided PE and sports but have done yoga for years and years! So glad that I found you guys and am now really loving getting to grips with the stuff my body actually needs to stabilise and get stronger. Ooh, another thought that popped into my head relating to this - neurodiverse people have a tendency towards over flexibility, even if they don’t score enough to be diagnosed with hypermobility, it commonly causes issues for us. This topic is super interesting and will be helpful to a lot of people

You're a breath of fresh air!

Such great podcasts, loving the relaxed interaction, and such good advice. I have the SMM programme and still can't understand how such simple movement can make my body feel so much better. I can do things d=now I never dreamed of. Thank you for changing my life! x

Wow! Thank you for this.

I have had L SI joint pain on and off for years and have been in a cycle of reinjuring it every few years. Recently it was at the bottom of a weighted deep squat. I am a long time (15 yr) yoga practitioner and I have set stretching aside while I work on strength and even in a short time the pain is beginning to resolve. Thanks for confirming that I am on the right track. You guys are fun and special hello to Jenni who I appreciate seeing.

Love you guys ❤ Take care

Argh... I'm one week into SMM and was feeling quite pleased with myself, but Tom's comment about coming up one inch from your end range and holding it.... That just highlights how desperately I need to build my stability and strength rather than relying on natural flexibility to get into positions... 😬

Well! I just learnt that l lean towards being a bendy wendy because the first half is definitely easier for me, I'm not hypermobile though! The second half shows how weak I am. It's real effort & hard but I've progressed well in the 20 sessions of SMM I've completed & it's getting easier as I strengthen up!

Thank you for this discussion! Finding it years ago might have saved me a lot of pain and dysfunction. I have Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) and am on a pretty far end of the spectrum in terms of level of instability and dysfunction. It took 22 years to get a diagnosis after I started getting daily headaches and shooting pains at 9.5 years old that were written off as “growing pains” even though they continue to this day in my mid 30’s many years after I stopped growing. I missed 13 months of high school because of complications from hip, back and spine injuries after falling in a forced split down a hill in a muddy cross country race. I also sprained both ankles and wrists 7-8 times each in high school, always in innocuous ways. The narrative that I was told by doctors and therapists was either that I had a low pain tolerance or that I was just an injury prone klutz and that it was my clumsiness, not my flexibility, that was the root cause of the issue. Fast forward a few years and I’m in college. I’ve mostly recovered from my high school injuries, but I’m struggling to exercise because while I’m a relatively fit human who can hop on a bike and ride 120 miles, I can’t look at a gym or a yoga mat or many of the active hobbies I tried without getting hurt. I loved yoga though and kept coming back to it because it was the one sport I was “good” at. Honestly, if my wrists dislocated less and hadn’t served as a limiting agent I probably would have taken my yoga teacher training. At the time I didn’t understand it, but all the injuries meant downtime and downtime meant loss of stabilizing muscle. Soon enough I am dropping out of grad school because of brain injury like symptoms due to pressure on my brain stem from my shifting spine (it would take 6 more years to get a diagnosis, but that was the mechanism). For the next 4 years I struggle and alternate between periods of disability and semi-functionality before ultimately going on full disability, due to passing out 15-20x weekly combined with craniocervical instability, a destabilized spine and a laundry list of other joints that sublux and dislocate at will while doing simple everyday things like standing up, reaching for a cutting board, or rolling over in bed. It’s not fun and it’s a really challenging place to recover from. I’m 2.5 years into intensive surgeries, procedures and therapy to try and stabilize my body again. Currently, I dislocate or sublux various joints about 100 times a month. It’s exhausting. Today I went to a provider with shooting hip and knee pain and pressure in my head. While there I find out that my right femur is partially out. That had driven my right ankle out and since my left side tried to compensate and take more weight that ankle was also out. Since my hip was partially out, my SI joints had also shifted out and my spine was all kinds of crooked trying to even out the shift in my hips. Kinetic chains really are a wild thing to experience in action. Since my lower body hurt so much, I’d been trying to use my upper body and mobility aids to compensate. Unfortunately, all that wheelchair, walker, and upper body transfer movement had torn connective tissue around my scapula and pushed both shoulders and both wrists partially out. Basically, an average Saturday in my world. This is all to say if someone really identifies with being very strongly hypermobile, can pass a Beighton score with flying colors and is often in pain please consider the possibility of a medical reason. Hypermobility can be benign and evened out with the sorts of recommendations you make here, but you can also have an underlying connective tissue disorder. If that’s the case many of the same principles apply, but you may need to take additional precautions to keep your joints safe enough to exercise in the first place. Also hypermobile party tricks are a terrible idea. Please don’t push it, because each time you do you’re messing with connective tissue and joints you’re really going to need to protect in the future. Thanks again for bringing all this up, I feel like it’s widely considered a positive to be flexible, so the caution and injury prevention/ stabilizing discussions usually don’t happen until after you’re injured. Much better to discuss it before it reaches a critical point and to any fellow EDS humans who read this far, therapy pools can be your friend if you’re too unstable like me to build stability on land at the moment. Happy stability folks! I’ve discussed more than a few of your shorts with my PT and she is actually the person who clued me into your content!

I've only just found your channel. I feel like there's a million of your videos that are relatable, but I don't know where to start because it feels overwhelming and I dont want to have to watch 20 videos daily. Do you have one or two videos that I could start with that covers the entire body, head to toe? If not, can you possibly do one?

How to address actually physical muscle loss ( road trauma)...quarter od quadriceps gone and about a third hamstrings gone! This makes it hard to get balance and strength and flexibility equal on both sides. Short hamstrings really " hamstrings" one. !

I am definitely no bendy Wendy

What is SMM?

bendy wendy stella stiffy 💚😇