03/31/2026
A must read!
Your knees aren't bending backwards because they're weak. They're bending backwards because your brain can't feel where "straight" is.
If you've got hypermobility, you've probably been told you have "low muscle tone." But then your muscles feel tight, tense, and exhausted all day. So which is it? Floppy or tight?
Both. At the same time. And it makes complete sense once you understand that muscle tone isn't just one thing. Clinically, it's described as having two main components, passive and active. But we also find it useful to talk about a third, functional concept that captures something those two alone don't quite cover.
1. Passive tone (viscoelastic). This is the natural resting tension in your muscles and connective tissue. Think of it like the tautness of an elastic band at rest. In hypermobility, this is genuinely lower. The tissue is more compliant, it stretches further before it pushes back. That's partly why your knees can drift past straight into hyperextension.
2. Active tone (neural). This is the muscle activity your nervous system generates to keep you stable. And in hypermobility, this can actually be higher than normal in certain tasks and postures. Your nervous system knows the passive structures aren't providing as much restraint as expected, so it compensates. It turns up muscle activity, co-contracting quads and hamstrings simultaneously, to create stiffness the connective tissue isn't providing. A small 2011 pilot study found people with hypermobility had significantly higher re**us femoris-semitendinosus co-contraction during quiet standing compared to controls. Just standing still. And a 2015 study found hypermobile children had 39% higher co-contraction of the lateral knee muscles during a single-leg hop landing.
3. Readiness tone (a functional concept, not a standard textbook classification). This borrows from the physiologist Nikolai Bernstein, who described tone back in 1940 as a state of "readiness" for movement. It's your ability to generate the right amount of force, in the right muscles, at the right time, and then adjust as conditions change. Can you catch yourself when you stumble? Can you grade your grip so you hold a cup without crushing it or dropping it? In hypermobility, this is often what's genuinely impaired. Not the amount of muscle you have. The coordination of how it's used. A 2017 study found that proprioceptive inaccuracy confounded the relationship between muscle strength and activity limitations in people with hEDS. Their conclusion was that controlling muscle strength on the basis of proprioceptive input may be more important than just enhancing sheer muscle strength.
Think of it like carrying a tray of drinks across a wobbly bridge. You'd stiffen your whole body. Grip harder, brace everything. Not because you're weak, but because the surface underneath you is unpredictable. That's your nervous system all day. The wobbly bridge is the joint laxity. The bracing is your muscles trying to make up for it.
That's why you can feel tight and loose at the same time. The looseness is structural. The tightness is neural. And that combination is exhausting.
It also helps explain why stretching often doesn't seem to fix the tension for a lot of people with hypermobility. If the tightness is coming from a nervous system that doesn't fully trust the joint rather than from short, stiff muscles, then stretching the muscle doesn't address the underlying cause. The brain still feels uncertain, so it tightens straight back up.
And gripping harder on a wobbly bridge doesn't make the bridge less wobbly. It just tires you out faster. The bridge is your connective tissue. That doesn't change.
But how your nervous system deals with it can. When the brain gets clearer sensory input, better proprioceptive feedback, and more practice controlling movement under varied conditions, the bridge starts to feel steadier. Not because the laxity has gone away. It hasn't. But because the nervous system has better information and better strategies for managing it.
And when the bridge feels steadier, the nervous system may not need to brace as hard. Not because you forced it to relax. Because it no longer needs to compensate as aggressively.
That's when you stop feeling exhausted from just existing. Not because anything structural changed. Because your nervous system found a better way to work with the body it has.
This is what we cover in the Hypermobility Workshop. How to sharpen the maps, build genuine readiness tone, and give your nervous system better options than just bracing harder. Starts April 12. Doors close April 5. Link in the comments.
