Joint Instability: 7 Signs You Might Not Expect

Can you identify joint instability just by looking at someone? You’d be surprised. Most people would think that the rhythmic gymnast with her head resting on the back of her thigh in an oversplit has unstable joints. But the connection between extreme flexibility and joint instability isn’t straightforward. The unstable joints are perhaps more likely to be found in the guy in the back of your yoga class who can’t touch his toes but hyper-extends through his knees like a baby deer.

Building on last week’s post about the importance of building end range of motion strength, let’s unpack the complexities of joint instability. This post is designed to help you better assess your own joint health to design a healthier, more effective flexibility training plan.

The paradox of joint instability and tight muscles

There are approximately 360 joints in the human body. They come in a wide variety including hinge, ball-and-socket, pivot, saddle, and gliding joints, each allowing for a different kind of movement. Joints are given structure by cartilage, ligaments (connective tissue attaching bone to bone, tendons (connective tissue attaching muscle to bone), and the activity of the muscles themselves.

In a healthy joint the solid structures (cartilage and connective tissue) provide a stable structure that restricts it to the intended range. The muscles are balanced, working together to facilitate smooth, controlled movement. Muscles are able to contract and relax in a graceful choreography.

If only it always worked this way.

Unfortunately sometimes good joints go bad. It could be an injury, over use, under use, crappy posture, weird repetitive movement, genetics, a cursed monkey paw, or over stretching. Whatever the instigating circumstance, sometimes the structures that govern joint function don’t work as intended. When this happens the body senses that the joint can no longer be fully trusted and protective measures kick in.

As with many of the overzealous ways that our bodies try to keep us safe, sometimes these protective measure can themselves turn into “problems.” It is very tempting to attack the protective measure without realizing that it is in fact a symptom of joint instability. This can result in ongoing cycles of frustration, so learning to identify joint instability could save you a lot of time, money, and misery!

7 Common Signs of Joint Laxity

We think of joint laxity looking like extreme flexibility. Certainly if your elbows and knees extend beyond 180 degrees, your shoulders dislocate on command, and you can put your leg behind your head as a party trick, you probably have some degree of hypermobility and are at high risk of having unstable joints. However there are plenty of hypermobile or extremely flexible people who take very good care of their joints and are both super bendy and stable. Flexibility alone is not a good indicator of joint issues.

Here are some more reliable indicators. Please keep in mind that all of these indicators could have other potential underlying causes and if you are experiencing these symptoms I recommend seeing a doctor to rule out other potential medical issues.

1. Deep Joint Paint

If you suffer from pain deep in the joints themselves, that can be an indicator of joint instability. Other medical issues can cause joint pain as well—arthritis, allergies, hormone fluctuations, etc—but joint instability is definitely a culprit worth putting in the line up. This is especially true if it is a reoccurring, stabby pain that could come from wear and tear on the labrum (the smooth lining of a joint) or tendons.

2. Reoccurring Minor Injuries

If you feel find most of the time, but every time you have to walk downhill your knee swells up and hurts, that could be joint instability. Sometimes the wobblyness is subtle enough that normal, daily activities wont set it off but certain activities that put strain on specific joint functions will highlight the lack of support and cause symptoms over and over again in the same area.

3. Poor Proprioception

Proprioception is your body’s ability to feel where it is in space. It is a neurological function where the sensory neurons in the muscles and joints send reliable information back to your brain so that your brain can keep a reliable map of the body. It is an essential part of how we coordinate our movement and stay physically organized. Many, many of these sensory neurons are located in the connective tissue of our joints, and when our joints are unstable the neurons can start to send unreliable information to the brain. If you find that you are uncoordinated and have difficulty controlling your movements through space, this is a potential sign of joint instability.

4. Balance Issues

Related to proprioception, our body relies on good relationships with our joints in order to organize itself against the constant pull of gravity. Balance comes from a combination of awareness and strength. Joint laxity can rob us of both. If you have difficulty standing on one leg (especially if one leg is much more challenging than the other), find yourself falling over easily, or struggle with weight transitions where you have to move your body through space, that could be a sign of joint instability. This is of particular concern for older folks since falling is such a danger as we age and good balance is one of the indicators of a longer life expectancy.

5. Long Warm-Up Times

The greater the discrepancy between your passive flexibility and your active flexibility (see this post on passive static stretching for more details), the longer it will take you to access your full range of motion. When you have a lot of accessible range that you can’t control, likely your joint is pretty unstable. Your body will be very reluctant to go to that range, which it considers unsafe. That means you will be spending a lot more time warming up aka forcefully overriding your nervous system.

Pro tip: passive static stretching is not a good warm-up. Yes, it may get you into that passive flexibility end range but it will not provide strength, awareness, or stability. If you are planning on using your flexibility for anything cool like dancing or aerial, this isn’t a great way to start your training.

6. Clicking, Popping, or Thunking During Joint Movement

It is not unusual or alarming for there to be some amount of percussive noise during joint movement. Especially when you are just starting your movement after sleep or inactivity, the joints may need to find their place, get lubricated, and find their optimal movement. But if you experience an audible click, pop, or thunk every time you do a movement, that is a sign that something is chronically off-kilter in the joint. If that noise is accompanied by pain, you are in the danger zone for joint injury.

It is possible to have these little noises go one for years without injury, but I always take them as an indication that something isn’t lined up properly an that joint, that range of motion needs attention.

7. Chronically Extremely Tight Muscles

We arrive back at the paradox of joint laxity. One of the most common reactions to an unstable joint is for the body to protect itself by making one or more of the muscles surrounding that joint to get very, very tight. The muscle then takes on the job of keeping the joint somewhat functional. It makes sense, but the result is a muscle that becomes painful, resentful, and restrictive.

It is very common for people with this problem to go to great lengths to try to release their tight muscles. They stretch, go to acupuncture, get massages, sit in a hot bath, strap up to TENS machines, and blast themselves with the machine-gun fire of Theraguns. These measures may give temporary relief by beating the poor muscle into submission, but often the tightness will come roaring back within a few days or even hours, sometimes worse than it was before.

Maybe I have Joint Instability! What do I do?

The first thing I recommend doing if your joints show any of the above symptoms is to lay off the passive static stretching. Even if you have insanely tight muscles in that area, you may be making your situation worse by continuing to stretch.

It’s time to start sleuthing. Somewhere you have some muscles that need to be strengthened, something that is out of alignment. Working on active and dynamic mobility exercises with very light weight and a small range of motion can help to build your proprioception, strength, and balance.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but sometimes the tightest muscles actually need strengthening, not stretching, in order to feel safe and stable enough to finally relax. In this case I recommend very light weight, slow movement, and isometric holds at a low intensity so that you can start to get that muscle working and gaining confidence.

Notice where you have discrepancies left to right. Many of the dancers who suffer from bridge cable hip flexors will talk about their “good side” and “bad side” for splits. This may be the cause of a rotated pelvis, SI joint compression, and other alignment issues, when addressed, could help to stabilize those noodle hips.

Sometimes the symptoms and the cause are not actually in the same joint. It is not uncommon for shoulder joint instability to be impossible to address without looking at spinal and rib cage alignment. I wish I could tell you that this was all really straightforward and easy to diagnose but that just isn’t how the human body works.

A movement coach, be it Pilates instructor, circus coach, personal trainer, or physical therapist can be very useful since we spend a lot of time developing our sleuthing ability. If that is accessible to you where you live and in your budget I think that everyone, even other coaches, can benefit from some outside perspective.

But even without coaching, experimenting with end range of motion strengthening can be transformative. Next week, I'll share my top five end-range strengthening techniques, including the tiny, annoying movements (my clients call it TIM-Time) that have saved countless bendy people from injury. You'll learn exactly how to build strength at your end range while improving your flexibility.

Happy Bendings,

Kristina