What Does Hypermobile Posture Look Like?

Is this how you stand and/or walk?

Every which way and loose

Posture, with hypermobility, can be quite paradoxical—for example, it can be either overly stiff for protection, or overly loose with poor control, often alternating between bracing and collapsing.

Some things to watch out for:

• Standing posture: favoring one leg over both, locking your knees backwards or keeping a slight constant bend, your pelvis tucked under and/or shifted forwards.
• Walking pattern: feet turned out, glute clenching, and/or excessive leg rotation where your leg rolls in then your knee swings out as weight transfers.
• Joint behaviour: frequent hyperextension, especially in your knees, elbows, fingers, or spine, plus excessive fidgeting or moving into end-range positions even while standing still.
• Upper body signs: exaggerated hand gestures, frequent neck movement, shoulder tension, and a tendency to overextend your neck or back beyond neutral.

Confession: your writer here is currently writing this while standing on one leg, hip cocked, as she types with her very spidery fingers, and proofreading with a tilted head like a dog that thinks things might make more sense at 45°. This video is taking no prisoners today, it seems.

In the video, we also learn about unusual flexibility positions like curling our toes, sitting in extreme folded postures, “W-sitting,” or “frog-leg” positions that feel natural but may stress our joints.

Notably, the main visual clue isn’t just flexibility, but rather also instability, where our body uses compensations like muscle gripping, locking joints, or shifting alignment to create support.

For once, there’s no real call-to-action here; we cannot re-posture our way out of having hypermobility. If our body’s built this way, it’s built this way, and that’s that (per current science anyway; who knows what future developments may be discovered).

However, it can be good to recognize the signs and symptoms, such that we can better understand what’s going on.

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

What Your Hands Can Tell You About Your Health ← about some hypermobility signs that can show up in our hands

Take care!