I wish I knew this back then...

My name is Angie. I'm a Doctor of Physical Therapy. I specialize in dancers and hypermobile athletes. 

And one thing that a lot of people don't know is that there are people that specialize in hypermobile athletes.

This is something I wish I knew when I was growing up. I feel like it would have saved me many unnecessary injuries.

As a hypermobile girly myself, I have been able to put my PT brain and my “just a girl” brain together and help people just like me. 

There's a lot of tips and tricks that you can do in your workouts or in the gym or throughout your dancing that will help you build muscle so that way your body's not relying on the soft tissue to give you stability. 

An example of this is when people let their legs go all the way back. I remember in dance camp we would stand around and compare whos legs went back further.. Can you say weird flex???? 

Anyway,  this is actually called swayback legs or genu recurvatum in the physical therapy world.

Essentially, your quad isn't controlling the amount that your femur goes back. So that's also why a lot of times, dancers, gymnasts, and even soccer players,  will have chronic knee pain, multiple ACL tears,  and things like that. Because they're relying on the ligament  as their main source of stability rather than the quad.

 I had to literally train myself when I was in PT school, and I found this out. I was like, ohhhhhh, that's why my knees were always hurting. 

My dance teachers would always say,  “pull up from your knees”.. and I never understood what it meant.  What that actually means is  you're not slamming your knee back all the way, instead you're thinking  about “a band behind your knee that you're pushing your knee back into” to  activate your quad.

Little  tricks like this  help you start to build the muscle and not rely on the soft tissue. so that way you actually have the strength and endurance that you need to go 110% during a performance,  competition, game, and not be fatigued during because that's typically when people tend to get hurt.

If this just made something click for you… imagine what a full plan could do. 

Let’s build it together.