It is often said that gardening is really good gentle all-round body exercise.
This never felt accurate to me. I love gardening, but I always had a vague unease about the exercise claim but couldn't quite put my finger on why.
Then I realised:
My symptomatic hypermobility means that the natural way for me to garden at ground level is to fold myself into a squatting position like this:
My butt resting on heels, chest resting on thighs, and chin resting on knees. I keep my balance through hand contact with the ground. Even my shoulders can relax - relying on the support my thighs are giving to my torso. Then I use my arms and hands to garden. Everything else can relax and switch off - supported by the way I've stacked my joints.
(It is important to note that this is how my hypermobility affects me - it will not apply to everyone who is hypermobile, and some people's hypermobility may specifically prevent them from doing this!)
Essentially I can completely relax almost all my body - and just activate my arms/hands. Which explains why, when I'm struggling with physical energy and muscle strength, I can sometimes garden for longer than I expect!
When I do this, gardening isn't all-round exercise. it's arms-only exercise, and if done for long, is likely to strain some of the ligaments/muscles that I've been relaxed-hanging off for the duration. (creating, for example achey butt muscles that gives the illusion they've had a work out, but actually they've just been a bit stretched for far too long!)
Now I've realised this, I can consciously tap into this when appropriate - but also avoid it and get a better 'full body gentle exercise' where I can.
In practice this means I now have 2 gardening modes to choose from:
1. Doing well, have energy: Garden from sitting on or kneeling on the ground - this means my core, shoulders and arms are all needed. And if I kneel up, my butt and upper legs can get in on the action too. Having tried this a couple of times since, it DEFINITELY uses more muscles! (I tried using a low gardening stool, and although it was slightly better than squatting, I still kept finding myself simply folding in half and resting my torso on my thighs)
2. Slightly fragile and floppy, but needing to do something gentle-but-a-bit-active: Garden from squatting, but limit it by timer to 10 minutes at a time to reduce overstretch pain.
(don't worry, I won't be gardening when I'm in full flop mode!)
I'm used to needing to make things easier to enable me to get the most out of them without injury, but in this case, it seems that making things harder has been the way forward (with the easy route there as a tool for when necessary.)
As a side note:
I think this explains why I often found generic instructions from physiotherapists unhelpful - and why they dismissed my asking for more detail about what muscles I was supposed to be engaging as 'health anxiety'.
The truth is, I wasn't using my body in the average way to carry out a task. My body naturally finds shortcuts that involve less muscle usage - and those shortcuts may well not be possible for a non-hypermobile person. So I wasn't getting the expected benefit, but I couldn't quite articulate why.
Next time I'm in that position I'm going to try using this example of how my hypermobile body operates by default and see if it helps bridge this gap between me needing a bit of extra guidance on controlling my excessive flexibility, and a physiotherapists extensive knowledge about how average bodies work.
❤️
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