Why Glute Bridges Don’t Work for Many Hypermobile People

Hypermobility presents a unique challenge in strength training and rehabilitation. Because passive joint stability is reduced, the body often develops compensatory strategies to create stability elsewhere. These strategies can allow movements to appear technically correct while underlying mechanics remain inefficient. Over time, these subtle compensations are often what contribute to chronic pain and recurrent injury in hypermobile populations.

This week I sat down with a new online client and we had a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times before.

She said something that perfectly captures the hypermobility struggle:

"I know when I'm doing glute bridges they look like they're supposed to — but they don't feel like they're supposed to. You can see the compensations that other coaches haven't been able to."

There’s a lot of truth in that.

In the hypermobility world, “good enough” isn’t good enough.

I often tell my clients that the reason I’m able to coach people out of chronic pain is because I stopped looking for what looks right and started looking for what is optimal.

When your ligaments are lax, your body becomes a master of disguise. It will find a thousand ways to cheat a movement — hanging on a joint here, flaring a rib there — all while looking perfectly fine to the untrained eye.

Over the years I’ve had to become incredibly nitpicky. My movement standards are extremely high because with hypermobile bodies, micro-adjustments are often the difference between living in pain and moving with freedom.

Hypermobile bodies love to manage load by leaning into connective tissue structures when muscles start to fatigue.

Why?

Because when you're hypermobile, connective tissues often don't provide the passive stability they’re supposed to. That means muscles are constantly working overtime to stabilize joints.

Eventually those muscles get tired, and when that happens the body will start looking for other ways to support itself — usually by hanging on ligaments or joint capsules.

This is why strength is so important for hypermobile bodies.

The stronger your muscles are, the longer they can support your joints without fatiguing.

Movement is also largely subconscious.

Your body does what it’s good at, what requires the least effort, and what you’ve trained it to do over time.

We call this survival mode.

If you had to consciously think about every muscle every time you moved, you wouldn’t have the brain space to think about anything else.

Unfortunately, for many hypermobile people this becomes the reality — because the movement patterns that feel easiest are often the ones that create long-term wear and tear.

The body is trying to save energy in the moment, but those same patterns can lead to pain over time.

Today I wanted to walk through one of the exercises where I make the most corrections with hypermobile clients: the glute bridge.

I often start people with a single-leg glute bridge because it increases the demand for stability and makes compensations easier to see.

What I’m looking for is:

• strong glute activation
• good core support
• a neutral spine and pelvis
• stable hips

Common energy leaks frequently observed include:

Shifting weight into the shoulders
Often a strategy used to reduce demand on the posterior chain and offload the hips.

Loss of neutral pelvis or spine
Typically associated with insufficient core engagement and reduced ability to maintain pelvic control under load.

Pelvic rotation or lateral shift
Often indicates inadequate stabilization from the core and hip musculature.

Lumbar hyperextension
One of the most common compensatory patterns when the glutes fail to engage effectively. Hypermobile individuals—particularly those who are highly driven or perfectionistic—often move into excessive range in an attempt to “complete” the movement.

Hip instability
Frequently the root cause of compensations further down the kinetic chain, including knee collapse and foot instability.

Most of these happen because of either lack of strength or the body trying to make the movement easier.

In hypermobile bodies the stabilizing muscles are often working hard all day already, so when we get into the gym the nervous system will try to offload that work.

But when we’re training, the goal isn’t to make the movement easier — it’s to build stability and strength.

The compensation I see most often is overextending through the low back, combined with not being able to feel the glutes.

This is usually paired with:

• rib flare
• excessive anterior pelvic tilt
• overuse of quads and hip flexors
• TFL dominance
• the low back doing far more work than it should

So the first place I start is the core.

The core is the center of every movement, and when it’s working properly a lot of other things start to clean up automatically.

When the core isn’t engaged we often see rib flare and anterior pelvic tilt.

This position lengthens the glutes (making them harder to engage) while shortening the hip flexors and low back — which causes them to take over the movement.

Exactly the opposite of what we want.

Once the core is braced, then we move into the bridge.

One thing I often adjust is heel position.

Hypermobile bodies often shorten lever lengths to create a sense of stability. But mechanically that tends to increase quad dominance.

By moving the heels slightly further away from the glutes, we can shift more of the work into the glutes and hamstrings.

Sometimes this makes it feel like you’re not reaching full hip extension.

But in many cases you actually are — your proprioception is just used to operating in a much larger range of motion.

A big part of working with hypermobile clients is resetting their sense of joint position, because what feels like neutral often isn’t.

Next we look at hip stability.

Common compensations include:

• the non-working hip dropping toward the floor
• shifting excessively toward the working leg

Both usually mean the core and glutes need to work harder.

Often when I correct someone back to neutral, they’ll say it feels like their hips are rotated — even though they aren’t.

That’s because their nervous system has normalized an asymmetrical position.

This matters because if the pelvis is rotated (often externally), it becomes much harder to properly lengthen and engage the glute. Core engagement drops off and we can start to create compression in the back of the pelvis.

Most hypermobile people don’t need more external rotation.

They usually need more access to internal rotation.

A lateral hip shift can also lead to overuse of lateral hip muscles and underuse of the inner hip muscles.

Then we move down to knees and ankles.

If the knee collapses inward or outward, that tells me we’re lacking stability at the hip.

That stability usually needs to come from the glutes and adductors, two of the most important stabilizers of the hip.

At the foot we often see:

• heels lifting
• excessive pronation
• excessive supination

All of which usually trace back to lack of stability upstream at the hip.

For hypermobile bodies, exercise is not simply about completing a movement — it is about controlling it.

Strength training becomes a process of teaching the body to rely less on passive structures and more on active muscular support. This requires attention to detail, patience, and often a higher level of coaching precision than traditional strength training approaches.

When hypermobile individuals learn to control range of motion, maintain joint alignment, and build strength through stable positions, the result is not only improved performance but often a significant reduction in pain.