Hi everyone! I have been wanting to get into various martial arts for a while now. The one thing stopping me is all of my joints are hyper mobile and bend far beyond a neutral position with little effort. Does anyone have recommendations on a type of martial arts that might be safer for my joints than others? Or should I avoid this field of movement and find an alternative defense style? Thanks!
Usual Disclaimers:
Not a doctor, not a specialist in hypermobility, and unless you live in Arizona, probably not able to work with you directly. If you are in the Phoenix area, I'd feel confident working with you, but I'm not willing nor able to take responsibility for what you do with my advice without my direct supervision.
Until the pandemic I owned a small gym focused on very controlled, slow movement, high intensity, strength training, and because it was very low force, with strictly controlled range of motion on machines (largely hard limited by machine settings), I had several clients with hypermobility issues, including one of my oldest friends and martial arts training partners. I know at least one of my clients was officially diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and I strongly suspect at least 2 others had the condition as well.
I can't easily speak to which martial arts would be best for you, especially not knowing how severe your condition might be. I had one client who would semi-regularly hyper extend their knee's just walking on grass or less than perfectly even pavement and dislocated a finger just picking up a very lightly packed suitcase. I assume you don't have that level of challenge going on since it sounds like you've been doing karate and MMA for a while. My friend, client, and MA training partner, who had hypermobility issues was able to train in Judo, Hapkido, Aikido, Kenpo, Shinkendo, western sport fencing, HEMA, and FMA during the time I've known him. He'd only occasionally dislocate a shoulder (which he found slightly annoying and a little troubling, but not particularly painful) or have other, more minor, problems with fingers and elbows, in the grappling arts at schools that sparred hard. He never gave his hypermobility much consideration when choosing an art. I
can say that when my friend stopped doing martial arts and became very sedentary in a tech job, his shoulder issues (and over all health) got much, much worse.
Regardless, I found that every client I trained saw a lot of improvement from weight lifting. I personally recommend researching something like I was doing, with a slow, controlled, protocol, on quality machines that let you define the complete range of motion, ideally with hard stops. If you were training with me (based on the limited info you've presented), I'd start relatively light and when I increased weight, do it in small increments, ask you to pay attention to your body, and coach you to stop if you felt like (or I saw that) you were unable to control the weights with your muscles, such that the joints were taking an inappropriate load. Obviously, this isn't going to be a cure all for your issues, but I think it's likely that the more muscle you have the safer martial arts will be for you. I think there's probably also a lot of benefit to learning to be aware of and really control range of motion under load, in a safe environment.
I guess the one last thing I'll say is that universally, my clients had a lot more trouble with pulling movements than pushing movements, which makes sense I guess. From that perspective, I'd guess that striking arts (preferably without high kicks or other extremes in range of motion) would probably be good choices if you're looking to minimize risk, but still train. The kenpo I did ~30 years ago fits that description pretty well, but there can be a lot of variation from school to school and lineage to lineage, and I won't vouch for the self defense value of any of them. I believe that Wing Chun generally doesn't do much in the way of high kicks, but I'm not sure how their Yee Gee Kim Yeung Ma stance would be for your knees, etc. The Filipino or other weapon arts might be good, depending on how much trouble your fingers give you. I'm sure there are people on here who might have other suggestions if this direction sounds useful to you.
