Understanding Overstretching with Jennifer Milner, NCPT

[00:35] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Welcome back to Bendy Bodies with the Hypermobility MD, where we explore the intersection of health and hypermobility, focusing on dancers and other aesthetic athletes. This is the founder of Bendy Bodies, Dr. Linda Bluestein, here today to interview the co-founder of Bendy Bodies, Jennifer Milner. Hello, Jennifer, and welcome to Bendy Bodies.

[01:03] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Hello. Thank you.

[01:09] Dr. Linda Bluestein: I'm super excited to chat with you today about stretching, getting the most flexibility that a dancer can in a safe way, and things like overstretching. Some listeners are new to the podcast, so could you start out by just telling us a little bit about yourself?

[01:28] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Sure. I am a retired dancer. I danced professionally as a ballet dancer and as a musical theater dancer and enjoyed that for several years before an injury took me out of performing. Along the way, I learned about my body and that my hypermobile body wasn't normal and that not everybody took their shoulders out of the socket. So I had to start learning how to take care of myself in that respect.
[01:57] When I stopped dancing, I became a certified Pilates teacher and realized I really loved working with dancers. I worked for West Side Dance Physical Therapy in New York City for a long time, working as the official PT clinic for New York City Ballet and training dancers from all across the world.
[02:17] Now that I live in Texas, I train dancers still, thanks to Zoom, from all across the world, specializing in hypermobility, just trying to pass on some of the hard-fought lessons that I have learned myself, and learning a lot from you as well.

[02:32] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Well, I've learned so much from you already, and I've wanted to have this conversation for such a long time, so I'm super excited. I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot. You work a lot with hypermobile dancers, but I'm sure you also work with some that are not hypermobile, particularly when it comes to stretching and injury. What are some of the differences that you observe between those two groups?

[03:01] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Well, first of all, it's important to say that you can be hypermobile for a lot of different reasons. Hypermobile simply means, as you know because I hear you say this all the time, that you have a greater range of motion than normal in a specific joint. So you might have greater range of motion just in one joint. You might have lots of joints in your body that are hypermobile. You might have hypermobility and other issues that go along with it. It's a huge topic that is a big umbrella covering a lot of different aspects. But today I just want to talk about joint hypermobility and set the other issues to the side.
[03:41] So if we're looking at a joint, why might a joint be hypermobile? Well, for one, it could be the shape of your bones. If we're looking at your hips, one hip socket isn't always the perfect replica of the other hip socket — in fact, it rarely is. A lot of dancers know that maybe your left has a little bit more turnout than your right. That could be soft tissue, but it could also be that you just have a slightly different shape to your socket.
[04:08] So if we think about a bowl — if we have a really nice shallow bowl and a spoon with a long handle, we can do a lot of stirring in that bowl with the spoon. The spoon can go to all the different corners and really angle steeply as you whisk it around. Now, if we transform that into a really deep bowl or even a tall glass and imagine that spoon in the glass, the spoon's hitting the edge over and over again along the rim. That's a very different kind of movement, and it's purely based on the shape of the bowl — which is the shape of your hip. You might have a really nice loose joint in one hip and not as loose in the other purely based on your bones.
[04:54] You could also have isolated joint laxity. When we talk about the things that are in your joint, we have ligaments which connect bone to bone, and tendons which connect muscle to bone. Those are what give structure and support to that joint and attach the muscles. For whatever reasons, you might have looser ligaments just in one particular joint. Your knee, for example — you might have loose ligaments in your knee and a patella, a kneecap, that has a tendency to slip off and subluxate or even dislocate. At the same time, you might have a knee that tends to dislocate because the muscles are actually tighter, and those tight muscles are pulling the kneecap off track. So you could have what we would call hypermobility in that knee, but it might actually be because of tightness and not because you have super loose connective tissue.
[05:53] Another reason that you might have a hypermobile joint would be connective tissue quality. Your ligaments, your tendons, your joint capsules, your fascia might all be built differently than a lot of people. You might manufacture collagen differently than other people do, and that would mean that a lot of your joint capsules would have a different movement quality and a different structural stability. If that joint capsule is less firm and less structurally sound, then your muscles may actually be more tight, as they're trying to do the job of your connective tissue.
[06:32] And then finally, you might have what I would call an artificial hypermobility. You may not have been born with it, but you may have stretched yourself — done some of this overstretching that we're talking about — to encourage a joint that is now hypermobile. In stretching, you haven't just stretched your muscles; you've stretched the entire joint capsule. We'll get into that in a little bit.
[06:57] So if I'm working with a hypermobile person, I often see joint instability. I'll see that they have a lot of difficulty controlling their body, that they can't quite tell their body what to do and have it respond as quickly as people who may not be hypermobile. They don't necessarily stretch for the aesthetics of it because they don't think they need to stretch, especially if they're super hypermobile and really floppy. But they might tell me that they feel really tight, because their muscles are doing the work of those joint capsules and that connective tissue — so the muscles are actually really tight.
[07:37] As far as injuries go with the hypermobile population, I see connective tissue injuries such as Achilles tendinopathies, SI joint instability, things along that line where the connective tissue is being asked to handle a load it's not really qualified to do. I'll see those low-grade connective tissue injuries pretty frequently.
[08:03] If I see a hamstring strain, I would see it more frequently at the origin of the hamstring — right where it attaches to the sit bones, in the tendon where the hamstring connects — because they might use it as a stabilizer. If you think about someone going into a penché where they're standing on one leg and the leg behind them goes into an arabesque so far that the foot is pointing to the ceiling — a nice 6 o'clock penché — that standing leg is really resting back into that hyperextended knee and leaning all the way into the back of that hip socket. That poor hamstring tendon is working really hard. So that's a common place for me to see a hamstring issue in the hypermobile population.
In the non-hypermobile population, I would say maybe 80% of non-hypermobile dancers come to me saying they need to work on their flexibility — more stretchy, more bendy. They're often frustrated because they feel like they've been working on it and not getting anywhere. If I see a hamstring injury in them, it's going to be more likely to be in the belly of the hamstring, the meat of the muscle in the middle of the back of the thigh, rather than all the way up on the sit bone, because they're stretching that muscle a lot when it's not really prepared to, pushing it too far until the muscle recoils and protects itself. So I'll see more muscular issues with them. I might also see them using the wrong hip flexor muscle for extension as they try to get their leg even higher.
So there are different approaches to the way they move and just different needs for each of them. Of course, all of this is being said with a huge generality — nobody fits exactly that mold.

[10:03] Dr. Linda Bluestein: I'm glad that you explained about hypermobility versus joint instability, because those are separate things — the joint instability being about keeping the joint in proper alignment, as compared to joint hypermobility meaning it has excessive range of motion. You were also talking about some of the injuries, which is very helpful in pointing out some of the differences that you see. Do you see those differences whether it's an overuse injury or a traumatic injury, or do you see traumatic injuries differently in one population compared to the other?

[10:37] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: That's a really interesting question. The vast majority of the injuries that I see — keeping in mind I'm not a physical therapist, so people may not come to me fresh out of a trauma — but the vast majority are overuse injuries, especially because I work with so many hypermobile people. They kind of seek me out, so I can recognize when a tendinopathy is starting to creep in or a bad pattern is developing and say, hey, we've got to get on top of that before it becomes something bigger.
[11:10] The biggest exception to that would be ankle injuries, because in my hypermobile population I do see a lot of sprained ankles and ankle rolls. No matter how strong and how hard they come back from it, once you've sprained an ankle you're at such a high risk to sprain it again, because again, we're stretching out those ligaments and they don't bounce back the way that muscle does. So for traumatic injury I would say more ankle sprains. But in general, I see more overuse injuries with the hypermobile population. In the non-hypermobile population I also see more overuse, but again it's more muscular — I see the wrong muscles working, which might lead to some sort of tendon or ligament issue.

[12:03] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Okay, that's so helpful. Let's talk about overstretching. Can you start out by telling us what overstretching is and what some of the problems might be?

[12:14] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: When we're talking about overstretching, we're talking about trying to take that joint into a bigger range of motion than it's built for, than it's actually designed to go. Most commonly, people overstretch their hips and their knees. Some people think it's very desirable right now to have hyperextended knees and that backwards swoop to the knee. So if people don't have that big hyperextension, they might try to stretch and achieve it. And then the hips get stretched out whether people mean it or not when they're doing oversplits — because some people consider it desirable to have that oversplit for jumps, for grand saut de chats and grand jetés, and to have that hypersplit in the air.
[12:58] When we're talking about the joint, when we're talking about overstretching, we're actually talking about stretching all that connective tissue. We're not talking about the muscles that attach at and cross the joint — we're talking about hanging in that joint. In your oversplits, you're stretching the capsule of the hip, you're stretching all the tendons and ligaments around it, and you're not really effectively targeting the muscles crossing that joint. People think they're stretching their muscles, but they're actually really stretching all of that passive connective tissue.
[13:35] I talk about how muscles are like a rubber band: you can pull that rubber band and stretch it, feel that energy build up, release it, and it comes back together — which is why we have to stretch for our splits every day. We can't just stretch once and never have to do it again, although that would be great. If your muscles are like that rubber band, then your connective tissue — your joint capsules, your ligaments and tendons — they're like Silly Putty or Thinking Putty. You stretch it and it stays like that. It's not going to rebound and come back together magically. That's why with an ankle sprain, once you've stretched that ligament, it's going to stay stretched, and you have to work to get the muscles to do a better job stabilizing that ankle because the ligaments won't.
[14:21] Same thing with your hips. If you've overstretched that connective tissue, you don't have that labrum — which is a docking port for your femur — doing the job it's supposed to do. With overstretching you can have loose connective tissue, capsular instability, poor proprioception (which is your body's awareness of where you are in space), and reduced passive muscle tension.
[14:50] Think about pizza dough: you can either have one really small pizza with a really thick crust, or you can stretch it and have a much thinner crust for a bigger pizza. As you're stretching that crust, sometimes it gets really thin and transparent and you think, this is not going to be enough to hold my pizza toppings. We're stretching that muscle and it's getting thin, so it's not going to have what it needs for that immediate firing. As we stretch it and take it into those further reaches, we're not going to have that muscle tension we need to do what we want in a really fast manner.
[15:32] That sort of limp overstretched capsule is not going to be able to absorb force for your big jumps and your big moves. Think about those high bouncy balls — when you bounce one, it bounces way back up high. But if you take a hacky sack ball filled with rice and throw it on the ground, it just kind of splats and stays there and doesn't rebound. We don't want to be like a hacky sack ball. We want that strength and tension so that when it drops, it reabsorbs that energy right away and goes right back up. We want to take that force that's going into the ground, store it as potential energy, and immediately turn it back into kinetic energy and fire up.
[16:20] If you are overstretched or your joint capsule is overstretched, that energy, that force just dissipates and it's all gone, and then you have to start all over again to regather that force to be able to jump. Every single jump feels like your first jump. The first jump is the hardest, and once you get going it gets easier — but if you have those overstretched capsules, you're going to feel that. You're going to have a slower response time, you might have lower jumps, you might be faster to fatigue. So there's a whole host of things that can happen.
[16:51] And even if it's artificial hypermobility, you're going to experience all of that as well. I just got a new dancer who came to me because she spent a couple of years working with a stretch coach and is having a lot of trouble jumping and couldn't figure out why. I can tell by working with her that we're going to have a lot to do to build up those muscles again and get them back online faster with a faster response time, because she now has that artificial hypermobility. Her dance teacher said her plié just kind of dies, and you can see that — you can see that energy just kind of die with it.
[17:31] The other thing to think about with overstretching is: as you're opening up one side of your capsule or one side of your joint, what's happening to the other side? As you're stretching the back of your knee — if you're sitting on the floor with one foot up on a chair and pushing that knee down — the back of your knee is opening up, but you're putting a whole lot of pressure on your meniscus that doesn't need to be happening and isn't super healthy for it.
[18:00] Or think about foot stretchers. When you use one, you're trying to stretch open the front of that arch to give you a nice arch, but what you're actually stretching isn't really the arched part of your foot — you're stretching higher up on the ankle. As you're opening that up, you're pinching the back of the ankle. In someone who isn't finished growing, studies suggest that can actually encourage the growth of an os trigonum in the back of the ankle, which is the bone that can inhibit going to a full point. So as you're opening up the top of the foot, you're pinching and putting a lot of impingement pressure on the back of that ankle, which can lead to Achilles tendinopathies, FHL tendinopathies, and posterior tib tendinopathy.
[18:50] One thing might be getting longer and looser, but you're putting pressure on something somewhere else. There's going to be some sort of give and take with overstretching, and it may not be what you're hoping for.

[19:00] Dr. Linda Bluestein: It definitely sounds like it's not what it's cracked up to be — you could be thinking this is such a great idea, but you lose other things in the process quite significantly. Not that it's just ineffective for stretching. So is overstretching ever indicated?

[19:21] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: I have a really hard time thinking of a time when it would be indicated to overstretch. I know there are people who come to me feeling like they can't straighten their knees all the way. In dance, you at least have to have the look of a straight leg — we're not necessarily looking for hyperextension, but at least a straight leg. Sometimes that's your bony structure, the way your femur and tibia fit together. And sometimes it's because you have really tight connective tissue in the back of your leg. The back of your knee is where your calf muscle crosses your hamstrings — there's a lot of connective tissue that can get tight back there and inhibit the knee from straightening.
I may do very safe exercises of contracting the hamstring and quad at the same time to get that leg to learn how to work in a straight and long position. It might seem to the dancer like I'm helping move their knee into an overstretched position, but we're never passively stretching it — we're working it to try to get there, and then doing other exercises to try to release behind the knee. So even for them, I wouldn't advocate sitting in an overstretch for that spot.
[20:47] The short answer is no, not that I can think of. There might be one that exists, but I don't know what it is.

[20:52] Dr. Linda Bluestein: What are some of the other unsafe stretching practices that you see?

[21:02] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Well, related to overstretching, I might see people adding weight to the stretch — like a friend sitting on their back when they're in a straddle split to try to push them closer to the ground, or putting books on a knee to press it down when one leg is up on a chair. Adding weight — if I don't want you to sit there in the first place, adding weight is certainly not moving in the correct direction.
I would also say static stretching in general. There have been lots of studies in the past 5 to 10 years saying static stretching doesn't really prepare you to dance, and it doesn't really decrease your chance of injury. Especially coming out of Australia, the Australian Ballet's studies show that strength training is actually better for you than passive stretching when it comes to increasing flexibility. So static stretching may have a place at the end of the dance day — hanging out in a stretch for a few gentle seconds — but definitely not something I would want to see at the beginning of dance or in the middle of class when you're still trying to work.

[22:20] Dr. Linda Bluestein: That makes sense. You've been working with hypermobile dancers for many years. What signs, if any, have you observed that tell you a dancer needs to be particularly vigilant when it comes to these unsafe stretching practices?

[22:36] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: I'll have dancers say they're feeling a lot of pain in the back of their knee — when they stand at barre on one leg, the back of the knee gets really tired. If I have them show me what they do, they're locking their knee. I can see them hanging back in their hyperextension or trying to push into a hyperextension and not supporting the back of their knee with their muscles.
[22:59] If dancers tell me they're feeling a pulled muscle or a muscle strain fairly regularly, that's a sign to me that they're not warming up well or that they're doing too much static stretching. We'll talk through the routine they do before class starts to make sure they're priming themselves well by doing dynamic stretching instead of passive stretching.
[23:18] Chronic hip issues — popping hips — is really common in a lot of dancers and is not something you should ever dismiss as, "well, it doesn't hurt, so I'm sure it's fine." If something's popping regularly, that should get looked at. We should talk about why it's happening. It's usually a biomechanical issue of your body trying to make a shortcut — you either don't have enough strength where you should, or you're trying to force a range of motion you don't comfortably have, or both. If there's chronic hip issues, I'm going to say, let's look at what you're doing in your stretching, make sure the right muscles are coming online, make sure we have access to everything we need, and make sure you have the strength to hold your end range of motion.
I've also seen and heard a big increase in just the past 5 to 10 years of serious hip issues in the younger dancer. I do think there's a correlation between that and overstretching, and the number of hip surgeries — hip replacements in teenagers — that we're seeing, which is just crazy to me. Who knows what we're going to see 10 years from now.

[24:39] Dr. Linda Bluestein: And that's tragic. But it makes sense given what you were saying about the labrum, and pulling on the vascular structures like the ligamentum teres — hips are not meant to go into those positions with the femur being pushed in those directions. It's just not anatomically correct at all. Those are a lot of great pointers. I know you can't get inside the heads of dance teachers who advocate some of these overstretching practices, but do you have any ideas as to why they might be doing those things in their studio?

[25:30] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: I don't think there are a lot of teachers out there going, "let's see how I can ruin my kids and mess up their lives." The vast majority of dance teachers are acting from a place of genuinely trying to help the kids be better dancers and move forward in their career. I think most dance teachers genuinely don't understand these practices and the ramifications of them, even though those teachers may have their own issues as a result. I've worked with dance teachers who have said, "Oh my gosh, I just realized my hip issues are because of the way I used to stretch or the things I did when I was dancing — I just thought, bad luck, I'm a dancer, but now I can see it's because of this specific thing." So I think if they could see that a student is going to need a hip replacement at 20 if they keep doing these things, most teachers would not say it's worth it. They would say, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that."
There's also the reality that dance studios operate on a very thin profit margin and are always working hard just to keep the doors open. You're constantly trying to stay competitive and attract students. Competitions are everywhere now, and when you enter, you want judges to score you high so you can use that to bring in more students. Students want things they can put on Instagram — they want the fancy stuff that looks cool. They see things on social media and say, "I want to do that, will you help me?" So teachers go, "well, I see it, everybody else is doing it, I've got to try to keep up." And I do honestly think that as teachers become better educated on this, as we get the word out, the pendulum is starting to swing back in the other direction.
Some of it also comes from when we were dancers ourselves — we take what was done with us and keep doing it and hand it down. I can't tell you how many times I've taught a dance class and said something and thought, "What just came out of my mouth? That was my teacher." I think we instinctively move in that sort of fashion. But the dance world has moved so much faster now. I have 10-year-olds coming to me for help on their tours en l'air. When I was 10, I couldn't do a tour en l'air at all. It gets so much harder at such a younger age.
[28:26] So we take the rules that applied to us when we were younger and forget that dance is moving so much faster and so much more extreme than when we were dancing. It's a combination of things.

[28:41] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Wow, that blows me away. I think when I was in my early 20s maybe I would have done that move a handful of times, and I don't even think I ever did it in a performance. To be doing that at age 10 is really crazy. So obviously, for most forms of dance, flexibility is extremely important and aesthetics matter — you want the nice lines. What are some alternatives to overstretching and other unsafe practices in order to optimize and maximize flexibility?

[29:17] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Flexibility is the key word, because we want to be flexible — we don't want to force hypermobility. When people say they want to work on stretching, that's different from saying they want to work on their flexibility. I want people to understand that any good program that works on increasing range of motion will work on strength just as much as it works on stretching.
There are two types of stretching — dynamic and static. Dynamic means using the muscle through an entire range of motion with muscle activation. Sitting in the splits is a static stretch. Doing a grand battement is a dynamic stretch — you stretch your hamstring on the way up, and if you're working hard to bring it back down, you use that hamstring on the way down. You take it through a range of motion without stopping and staying in any one spot. That really primes the pump — it oxygenates the muscle, brings awareness to it, and it's like booting up your computer to get it ready for the day, except your computer is your body. Dynamic stretching is key at the beginning of class.
[30:39] If you feel really tight, working with someone who understands the safe principles of building flexibility is going to be so important. You want to know that there's a difference between neural tension, connective tissue tightness, and fascial tightness. Neural tension means your nerves might not glide through your body as smoothly as they can — it's like when you're flossing and the floss gets stuck on something and doesn't slide smoothly. That can really hurt if you try to force it. With nerves, you want to floss them and release them in a different way than you'd release a muscle.
[31:34] Fascial tightness is like having a piece of plastic wrap stuck to you and then expecting the muscles underneath to glide smoothly, when the plastic wrap is stuck and not letting the muscles do the move they need to. So you may have some fascial work that needs to happen first. Or it could truly be muscle tightness — is it because the joint is unstable and the muscles are doing work they weren't designed to do, or are the muscles just built tight? Each one of those calls for a different approach.
[32:08] Working with someone who really understands how to spot the difference between the kinds of tightness — and the appropriate ways to release through them, whether it's releasing with a ball, doing dynamic stretching, or different modalities — is going to be super important. And of course, making sure that you also know how to strengthen that full range of motion, that you're not just contracting your hamstring in a short range of motion but making it work at its active insufficiency as well. All of those things are going to improve your flexibility, but you want to make sure you're doing them correctly. Getting eyes on you is a really great way to do that.

[32:55] Dr. Linda Bluestein: All of that makes a lot of sense. In terms of dancers and dance parents who are trying to find a studio or an instructor that supports safe stretching practices and safe practices for improving flexibility, where do you suggest they can find that kind of information or sort that out for themselves?

[33:22] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: There are a lot of great resources on the internet now. We're both members of IADMS, the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science. You can go to iadms.org, and they've got a directory of different practitioners across the country — that's a great way to find someone near you. There's also Doctors for Dancers, which I think is doctorsfordancers.com. And they also have a directory, as well as DanseMedica, which is D-A-N-S-E Medica, all one word. DanseMedica has a great directory of practitioners as well. You can find people local to you or people who work over Zoom. A lot of people Zoom now, and that's made it a lot easier — you don't necessarily have to find someone in your backyard.
[34:07] If you're going to look for a group program because you can't really afford a lot of privates, we have our very own Jen Crane, who is a fellow Bendy Bodies team member. She has the My Flex program out, which is a fantastic flexibility program that does release work as well as strengthening. If you're going to try a group program that you can buy and download and work at your own pace without someone supervising you, you really want to look into who wrote it. Are they a physical therapist? Are they a retired dance teacher? Where does their knowledge come from? And what kind of results matter to them — do they want to point to a super bendy person, or do they want to say this person has been healthy and dancing for 10 years? Do your research if you're going to do a group program online, because you won't have somebody supervising you closely.

[35:10] Dr. Linda Bluestein: That's good advice. And so even if you're looking for a studio, IADMS would have some dance teachers in there as well. I believe DanseMedica is also now open to dance teachers. You could also ask someone like yourself what studios in Dallas you'd recommend for, say, a 12-year-old who's very serious about dancing professionally — what do you know about the local studios and what would you recommend?

[35:46] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Absolutely. And it's important to remember that you just want to find that one person. We always talk about that — find that one knowledgeable person, and even if this isn't their lane, they can help you find the person who will help you in that lane. I have dancers ask me for referrals for studios all the time. I'm not strongly affiliated with any studio, so I can speak pretty honestly about the different studios I've worked with. And I have worked with dance studios all across the world, so I can provide input in that way.
Sometimes I'll just scroll through a company or studio's social media. You can learn a lot by looking through there and seeing what they hold up and value. So you can do a lot of your own detective work online, and then find someone like me — and I'm happy to chat through different options if I know anything about the places you're looking at.

[36:51] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Well, that's a wonderful offer. In terms of the hypermobile dancers themselves, what do you wish that every hypermobile dancer knew about flexibility?

[37:10] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: To me, flexibility is an aesthetically pleasing range of motion. What I wish everybody understood is that flexibility is strength through a full range of motion. Gentleness is controlled strength, and flexibility is controlled range of motion — having a really aesthetically pleasing full range of motion, but also having the strength to control it.
[37:37] Everybody says, "I can hold my leg over my head if I use my arm, but as soon as I let go, my leg falls." Well, Giselle isn't allowed to use her hand to hold her leg over her head. So you better figure out a way to do it. That's what I wish people with hypermobility understood — find someone to help you get that strength. The right person isn't going to try to limit you and hold you to 90 degrees or tell you you shouldn't be doing that. They're going to say, "You want to lift your leg over your head? Okay, let's figure out a way to give you the strength to do it safely."

[38:13] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Can you wrap up by telling us where people can find you, and was there anything else we didn't talk about that you wanted to share?

[38:23] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: As far as things we didn't talk about yet — overstretching is a complicated issue because it's a decision made as a young dancer or a professional dancer. You might feel like you're in an uncomfortable position when your school tells you to overstretch. You might feel pressure from competitions where judges have made comments and you feel like you need to do more of that work. So I get that it's a complicated conversation. I'm not always the best person for that conversation because there are limits I'm not willing to go past just to try to make you a more marketable dancer — and I think it's good to have someone like that in your corner.
[39:02] I know it can be complicated, and we're certainly not trying to vilify all the people who have done overstretching. We just want to bring more information so that people can make more informed decisions and understand the inherent dangers and concerns behind a lot of passive overstretching.
[39:25] As far as where people can find me, you can go to my website, jennifer-milner.com. You can find me at Bendy Bodies, of course — @bendy_bodies on Instagram. Or you can find me on Instagram at @Jennifer.Milner.

[39:41] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Terrific. We will have links to all of that in the show notes, as well as links to the organizations that Jennifer mentioned. Well, great. It's been fabulous to chat with you. You all have been listening to Bendy Bodies with the Hypermobility MD. Today we've been chatting with the co-founder of Bendy Bodies, Jennifer Milner. It was great to chat with you, and I know I learned a lot. I'm sure our audience will as well.

[40:11] Jennifer Milner, NCPT: Thank you.

[40:13] Dr. Linda Bluestein: Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bendy Bodies with the Hypermobility MD, where we explore the intersection of health and hypermobility for dancers and other aesthetic athletes. If you found this information valuable, please share it with a colleague or friend and leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Remember to subscribe so you won't miss future episodes.
[40:35] If you want to follow us on Instagram, it's @bendy_bodies, and our website is www.bendybodies.org. If you want to follow Bendy Bodies founder and co-host Dr. Bluestein on Instagram, it's @hypermobilitymd, all one word, and her website is www.hypermobilitymd.com. If you want to follow co-host Jennifer Milner on Instagram, it's @Jennifer.Milner, M-I-L-N-E-R, and her website is www.jennifer-milner.com.
[41:13] Thank you for helping us spread the word about hypermobility and associated conditions. We want to hear from you — please email us at [email protected] to share feedback. The thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the co-hosts and their guests. They do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any organization. The thoughts and opinions do not constitute medical advice and should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, as this information is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please refer to your local qualified health practitioner for all medical concerns. We'll catch you next time on the Bendy Bodies Podcast.