Welcome fellow bendy friend.
We are Adell and Celest, hypermobile yoga teachers that used to feel crappy most of the time… that was until we discovered we are hypermobile. This is when everything started to shift.
As our understanding of this spectrum disorder grew, we started to realise that with the proper attention, our bodies were hyper-aware super-bodies that were doing their best to signal to us that modern life was the issue, not our bodies, as doctors had lead us believe.
WE feel superhuman
With this new information we changed our approach, we varied our training, walked barefoot on uneven surfaces, pooped in a squat and focused on strengthening our stability. These and other simple changes started to calm our anxiety, ease our gut issues and we stopped getting injured. It might sound like a cliché, but these changes HELPED US FEEL LIKE SUPERHUMANS! .
SAY hello to celest!
When I was little I was desperate to be picked for the hockey team, but my little legs were always heartbreakingly last in line for every sporting event under the sun. Speed and agility weren’t to be found in my repertoire, until I found dancing as a hobbie. Finally had a movement outlet that didn’t care how tall I was and loved the fact that I was bendy AF.
However, as a child and young adult I struggled with a constant barrage of pain; from the obvious injuries, to random unexplained aches. My gut issues were severe, often leaving me shooting to the loo in the middle of a grocery shop. And my heart raced with anxiety, more often than not.
During my Physiotherapy degree I learned about hypermobility but still didn’t make the connection in my own body. It wasn’t until yoga ushered me off to the physiotherapist clinic with debilitating injuries. There the physio officially diagnosed the condition and started to teach me safe adaptations to my yoga practice.
When I became a yoga teacher many students would tell me about their injuries and I realised that, just like dance, extreme flexibility is often glorified in yoga, but never sustainable. Desperate to see change in the yoga world I teamed up with super babe, Adell Bridges and we created Hypermobile Yogis.
We were scared that our endeavour would be met with lots of criticism from yoga purists, but for some reason we forged on ahead and it was then that the pools of messages started flooding in. People from all over the world wrote to us saying they finally had answers for their symptoms and that our simple strategies were helping alleviate their symptoms.
We sincerely hope that as you will join our bendy family and feel lasting change for good in your body. And that as you journey through our content, you will feel inspired, empowered and supported.
HAve you met Adell YET?
I used to think it was normal to live in pain. Scratch that; I counted my bamshankled knees and janky shoulder as battle scars of my athleticism. “No pain no gain” was my mantra that I took with me from my gymnastics background and into my yoga practice.
Yoga became simultaneously a competition arena for how deep I could pretzel myself, and where I learned to experience my body in a new way; I learned to listen. Granted, I ignored what I heard from my body, (whimpering with pain and begging me to hold back).
Instead I kept on striving to keep the “you’re so good at yoga” comments rolling in, while I also ignored a growing list of Annoying But Not Life Threatening issues creeping into my daily life, from unexplained bouts of crippling fatigue to weird digestion problems that my friends didn’t seem to have to deal with, and which doctors dismissed.
At my yoga teacher training I was luckily infected with Anatomy Geekitis, and became the world’s top Googler for every type of movement imaginable. One day a google search for something I can’t remember now—probably “how to get an oversplit” or “stretches for deeper backbends”—led me down the rabbit hole of joint hypermobility. As I read through the symptoms I felt I was going through a checklist of issues that I thought were just normal life.
I wish I could say I suddenly understood straight away everything I needed to do differently in my life and in my yoga practice to alleviate all my symptoms, but a mixture of ignorance of biomechanics, with an attachment to my current way of doing things, meant I still had a long journey ahead of me. Suffice to say that I’m still on that journey.
With time, reluctance to alter my yoga practice turned to enthusiasm as I experienced how SUPERHUMAN I felt to combine my hyper flexibility and hyper sensitivity with strength and stability.
