​There seems to be a spectrum of hypermobility. At one end are people who are particularly flexible in one direction- something always stretches markedly better than the rest of them. This is the kind of thing that is often noticed in a yoga or pilates class, and it’s something that I’ve seen a lot over the years teaching reformer pilates.

At the other end of the spectrum is a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, or EDS. This is a fairly serious condition where your connective tissue, which is what holds you together, is weakened. This can cause all sorts of problems, and EDS is not the main focus of today’s episode, although what I’m going to talk about can help. 
 
For me, my hypermobility meant that I was actually very weak, muscularly. I’ll never forget, in my first reformer pilates instructor training over 15 years ago, our master trainer was excellent at encouraging us to adjust the resistance on our reformers during training because it was so exhausting over several days! 

So I was doing an upper body exercise on the absolute lightest spring our machines have, and she called the rest of the class over and asked me to continue. First she pointed out the little bitty spring that I was using, and then the obvious muscle strain happening around my shoulder joints (I was wearing a tank top so you could see everything). It was a lesson to not simply assume springloads for people, to actually observe them and make changes based on their form and effort. Because even though I was there to be an instructor, so I presumably should have been able to do everything at what’s considered a ‘normal springload’, my shoulders couldn’t handle it. So making that assumption for me would have been dangerous for my shoulders.

For me, the whole experience showed me that while, for example, my shoulders could come out of their sockets on demand, I could also use the muscles around my joints to help hold them together if I had some more muscles around my joints! ​

Hypermobility is seen from the outside as being extra flexible, but really it’s not about the muscles- it’s about the connective tissue (CT) being extra stretchy and/or weak. This is a problem because CT doesn’t heal well. When you look at an anatomy picture you’ll see the muscles in red, and you’ll also see white stuff which is the connective tissue. The best image for this is a picture of the back muscles, there’s a triangle of CT over the low back. It’s there to support your low back.

The CT is white both on pictures and in person because it doesn’t get much blood flow. Therefore, it’s slow to heal and easy to re-damage. One of the types of CT are tendons, ligaments are another CT type, so when you do things like sprain an ankle you’re more likely to re-injure that ankle because it’s really hard to fully heal that.

The other thing about hypermobility is that while you’re stretchy and loosey-goosey at your joints, SOMETHING has to hold you together! A lot of times, that something is the CT line that runs from the front of your pelvis up the front of your body to your neck and throat. 

This line can get really tense. A lot of hypermobile people have really strong pelvic floors, because that contraction of th epelvic floor muscles has always been part of keeping themselves vertical. It’s not necessarily supposed to be, but that’s how we’ve compensated. There's also sometimes intense tension in the jaw and front of the neck, which can be actual TMJ, or can share some of its symptoms.

Personally, I have a depression, like a channel or an upside down ridge, between the 2 halves of my sternum, the breastbone, and now I think that was caused by this CT tension up the midline of my body while still having extra flexibility- that extra mobility- around my ribcage as a child. ​

OK, but here’s why this matters. You might not have known you were hypermobile, or you thought you were but outside of party tricks like when I can dislocate my shoulders on demand you didn’t care much about it. 

But it does matter, because over time your movement patterns are affecting things like your joints, and how your bones get built, and even things like how your digestion and immune systems can function, because they are’ really made of a lot of CT. 

So there’s 2 main things you can do for yourself if you are hypermobile- you can strengthen around your joints, and you can align your movement patterns so the demands of moving through your day are evenly and safely distributed along those joints.

When I say “strengthen around your joints” I mean something specific. Most of the time, when people say “strength training” they’re talking about the big muscle groups- biceps, quads and hamstrings, calves- those sorts of muscles that stick out from your skin and are aesthetically desirable and don’t have much to do with actually stabilizing your joints- they’re more ‘power’ muscles. They’re important, but they’re not the stabilizing muscles that I’m talking about.

Your smaller muscles are the ones that are more responsible for your actual joint stability, and being small there’s 2 things that help them the most:

1. Moving slowly, because the faster you go the more the power muscles are going to take over and,
2. Moving often, because since they’re smaller, they tend to ebb away very easily

These are both good, because that makes it very easy to make strengthening your joints part of your normal day! This takes consistency though.

The second thing you can do takes awareness as well as consistency. Learning properly aligned movement patterns, ways to sit and stand and walk and hold yourself- takes some practice, but really what you’re doing is resetting your habits. These aligned patterns actually feel very comfortable and stable, so it’s not hard to learn them and to practice them and for them to become your new habits. 

But that is a different way to move than the usual “exercise” we’ve all experienced.

All this to say that if you recognize hypermobility in yourself, there’s 2 ways I can help you. For one thing, you can keep following me. You’ll learn little bits, from these podcasts and from my freebies like the challenges that I run, and also from the First Steps mini courses I offer, and you can slowly incorporate into your life. Or you can directly work with me. I do take 1:1 clients, and right now as this episode is published the doors are open for my Foot to Forehead Fix, a small group version of my private coaching. Check out PaulasHerbals.com to learn more and to get started!

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Today I'm going to teach you how to breathe with your rib cage. Here's what we're going to do:

• All I want you to do is sit up nice and tall, or stand up nice and tall, if you're standing, and just take a few breaths
•  Arms are at your sides
•  Just breathe, in whatever is a normal position for you

• Now, place one of your hands on your chest, on your breastbone, and take some more breaths. Do you feel that chest rising and falling? Do you feel it, lifting up do you feel your upper back rounding, arching forward to help that chest lift?

• ​Now what I want you to do is take both hands,
  • or you can use something like a belt, a yoga strap or even an ace bandage
• Hands, or some type of strap, around your rib cage
• Now if you've got your hands around your rib cage,
  • you might have your thumbs in back,
  • or you might flip your hands around so your thumbs are in front, and your other eight fingers are around the back of your rib cage

It really doesn't matter which you use in order to feel this, but what I want you to feel is that the shoulders are not all shrugged up into your ears. Whatever position your hands are at, the shoulders are down.
 
And if they're not comfortable, if the shoulders can't be down, then grab yourself a belt, or maybe the belt off your robe, or that Ace bandage or yoga strap or something, and wrap that around your rib cage instead.
 
If you've got a strap around your ribs, I want you to hold it snug against your ribs but not overly tight, not restrictive.

• And now I want you to try to take a breath, or three or four
• And can you feel movement, with your hands or under that strap, of expansion in the ribs​

Now, the ribs go all the way around. So you might feel the V that is in front of your rib cage, where it comes to a point right up against your breastbone. You might feel that V, expanding and contracting.

• You might feel the ribs on the sides of your torso, moving
• You might or might not feel ribs at your back, engaging expanding

So this first set of breaths is all about finding out what's moving: chest, belly and ribcage. Now, if you've got a strap, put it aside for a second.

• ​And all I want you to do is stretch your arms up, way overhead, and take a nice big yawn
• Stretching arms, stretching fingers, big breath in, and just let it all out at once in a great, big Whoosh. Let all your air out.

And now, notice where your rib cage is. It's down. It's relaxed. The side effect, the after effect, of good yawn is to relax your ribs.
 
We tend to walk around with the rib cage thrust out forward, I talked about that in last week's episode about that “boobs out belly in” position.
 
A yawn is one of the simplest ways to relax your rib cage back down into alignment, so that your ears, your shoulders, your ribs, and your hips are all stacked on top of each other, instead of that rib cage being thrust forward, of that line.
 
So if you need to you on a couple of times, take a couple of big breaths and just let them out, and the ribs drop and the shoulders drop.

• ​And now, take your strap or take your hands back around your rib cage, and take that inhale/exhale again
  • And now that the ribs are not reaching forward, can you get more movement, 360 degrees all the way around your rib cage?
  • At the V of your ribs, in the sides of your ribs, sort of under your armpits and down towards the waist.
  • And also, behind you, where those ribs bones wrap around and join at the spine.

Everywhere bones come together, are joints. Not all of the joints in our bodies hinge. So the joint of your fingers move back and forth. The joints of your ribs at your spine don't, but they are still connected there with cartilage, which has some flexibility.
 
So, when those ribs come back down and stop straining forward, the rib cage gets some flexibility, right there at your spine, which can feel really yummy, but it also might feel really weird in the beginning.
 
So don't go too strong into this. We're not trying to force anything. We're just trying to take nice even breaths, feeling the rib cage, expand.
 
This is a thoracic breath.

​It's going to help take pressure out of your pelvic floor. It's going to help you take a nice deep breath, which leads into all the things you want breath work for: stress, anxiety, mindfulness, lifestyle.
 
If you speak if you play an instrument, if you sing, if you have any manual hobbies, like gardening, like even exercising, being able to take a full breath, super helpful, I promise!
 
This is going to be the breath that we are trying to create, this thoracic breathing, this movement in your rib cage, in the breathing challenge, it's going to start next week.
 
So look out for that on my website, get on my email list if you're not so that you can join the challenge.
 
It is free. It's just a five day challenge teeny tiny steps, couple of minutes every day to just watch a video and listen to me and then practice when you can.
 
It's not going to be a gigantic investment of your time, but it is going to require some concentration and little practices throughout the day, so that at the end of the week, you are breathing better.
 
All of this is going to be super helpful, super important, and it should feel really good. I hope to see you in the challenge!

Sign Up Here
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​Most shallow breaths come from lifting your chest instead of breathing with the whole rest of your body. You've probably heard that before, about shallow breathing. But another way that you can trigger this is by driving when you're upset. A lot of people, myself included, have the tendency to push off of the steering wheel into your seat.
 
I think it has something to do with when you're frustrated there's not much physical that you can do about it that is socially acceptable. But when you're driving and you're upset, you can push, you can engage all of those muscles, without it being at all socially unacceptable. And that can feel satisfying!
 
But the pressure of your arms, pushing your upper back into the seat of your car, can have the exact same effect on those spinal nerves that go into the lungs, get too tense, and tell the brain, “I can't breathe”, and you can actually induce anxiety or even a panic attack while you're driving. Point is, please relax your grip and take a deep breath!

Right now, aesthetically, our culture thinks having a flat stomach, having a sucked in stomach, is appropriate.

Functionally, that's not appropriate.

​Functionally your belly needs to move in and out, it needs to have enough space in it as a container to hold all of your internal organs, to allow for things like digestion and elimination- the size of which then is going to fluctuate throughout the day.
 
And your belly is a supplement to your breathing, so it does need to move out and in. And most people that practice belly breathing, the first couple of times they try it (like for example a yoga class if you're sitting up and you try to belly breathe) people find they actually have to push their bellies out in order to expand that, because we have spent our lifetimes sucking in. When you suck in you're creating pressure, you're squeezing the balloon that is your abdominal cavity, and that pressure has to go somewhere- up or down.
 
Once we start breathing with your rib cage, once we let the ribs expand and contract the way that they're supposed to, we can take a lot of pressure off of the belly-

• On the one hand, because now the belly is not solely responsible for taking a deep breath.
• And on the other hand because in order to breathe with the ribs, we can't walk around with the chest thrown out. We need to actually relax the ribs a little bit, which also does feel really good, I'll tell you what!

 
And in relaxing the ribs and moving through the breath through the rib cage itself, we take pressure and work out of the belly.
 
So, breathing well becomes a structural, a postural kind of thing that requires less tension, less concentration, less exertion than what we've taught ourselves to do over the course of our lifetimes.
 
That “boobs out belly in” position is hard to maintain, and it's hard on our bodies! Coming back into all of that alignment so that the ribs can actually move- it’s a relaxed place, it's kind of nice to hang out there.
 
So next week I’m going to teach you how to take a thoracic breath, how to feel your ribcage actually move when you breathe. And we’re going to play around with that in our next episode.

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But if you do anything like sing, or do a podcast, or any kind of public speaking, or presenting on a stage or in front of the zoom screen, if you play a musical instrument, if you have a manual hobby, like gardening or anything that requires some exertion a little bit more than knitting (both gardening and knitting, our hobbies of mine, I'm not knocking that!) but the manual exertion type hobbies- the breath is going to be something that is very important for your stamina, for your endurance, for your longevity in those as well.
 
So next week we’re going to get into a little bit more about how to breathe better. For today, I want you to just think about where does your breathing actually happen.

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​Resources:
Make Peace With Stress
Expanding Resilience
Herbs and Stress
A Holistic Perspective on Stress
 Exercise Your Systems: Vagus Nerve