Do you struggle to touch your toes when you bend down? Or can you simply lift one leg up high like a gymnast? Physiotherapist Sammy Margo, explains to The Hippocratic Post the kind of exercises you should be doing and the differences with the flexible person and the not so flexible one.
If you’re in the category of people that can touch their toes with ease or make walking seem so graceful, then you’ll be regarded as a bendy.
What is a bendy supposed to mean? It means you are part of that population of people who have really flexible joints and can mould in a chair in such a way others might find difficult to pull off. This is because bendies have less type III collagen in joint ligaments and capsules. This tremendously helps the joint movements and causes you not to experience difficulty or pain.
The characteristics of a bendy vary from being able to bend your legs for a while without any feeling of discomfort to swinging your warms with great ease especially with walking. Other traits include,they’re more sensitive to panic attacks, are very competitive in nature, and are usually their own worse critique.
How is your Health Affected as a Bendy?‘Bendiness’ is usually genetically inherited from your parents (or somewhere in your bloodline). Symptoms range from back aches to muscles aches. A classic case of a bendy is if they have to look behind them, they don’t have to turn their whole body around, they just have to simply turn their neck (which cannot be said for stiffies). They also require 40 per cent more muscle tone to sit upright compared to someone who is ‘stiff’and can hang on his or her ligaments for support.
What about Stiffies?
Stiffies are the total opposite of the bendies. They’re the ones you’re likely to see in a football field.rather than a yoga class, they struggle to bend down to touch their toes and are not even thinking of attempting the Lotus position. They’re more accustomed to weigth-bearing exercises but find exercises that require a lot of muscles movements (like the bendy is naturally inclined to) challenging.
These people are known to be less mobile because they have shorter muscle fibres and tendons,restricting their range of movement. Some traits of stiffies are, they’re better in lifting heavy objects,they walk in a stiff manner and can all but touch their feet.
There are exercises that fit both groups. Like reducing the pain as in bendies and optimising mobility as in stiffies.
Stiffies have got to mobilise and stretch more, like doing yoga and its sort. Whereas, bendies who tend to be more easily prone to muscle pains need to strengthen and stabilise more by doing more heavy hitting kind of exercises because they are more prone to muscle pains. Bendies build less muscles around the joints than stiffies which they need for more stability.If you are a bendy, you need to work on building strength on your muscles and joints. Like doing exercises that involve more strengthening and less stretching. The dendy need to slow down on exercise like yoga, which is their comfort zone and concentrate on exercises that will help them build muscles.
In fact, Sammy Margo makes this clear: “Bendy, hypermobile people tend to do yoga because it comes easily to them. But in my opinion they should avoid it and do weight-bearing exercises like jogging instead. In fact, I’ve treated countless numbers of bendies who have done serious injuries to their knees doing yoga positions that involve deep bending and lunging. And it’s actually stiffies who should be doing yoga, but they tend to avoid it because they are ‘not very good’. Instead, they opt for Pilates.They really should be doing more stretching-based exercises. “So between the two, which one is more supreme? Again Sammy Margo comes in to explain this to us in her own experience: As an employer, I encourage my hypermobile physios to develop a wide range of skills and consider less manual types of work such teaching pilates and acupuncture to ‘save their hands.For my career choice and a musculoskeletal physiotherapist I’d certainly rather be a stiffy, which I am, than a bendy – because my bendy colleagues have had to retire earlier.
Conclusion:
In a nut shell, bendies are the total opposites of stiffies and vice versa. So stiffies need to invest more in natural bendy-like exercises while bendies need to go for the the stiffy ones What we can learn here is that, just as humans are different in so many ways, so is the way our bones and and muscles are designed. So stop trying to compare your physical capabilities to the next guy’s.
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