FIT Los Angeles · Hypermobility & Performance

The Hypermobility Doctor in Los Angeles for Athletes Who Keep Getting Hurt

If you are an athlete — or you are the parent of one — and the same flexibility that makes the body extraordinary is the flexibility that keeps breaking it down, this is the practice built for that body.

A ballet dancer has been pulled out of three productions in eighteen months — hip flexor, hamstring, then a labral tear that finally got an MRI. A high-school gymnast lands every pass cleanly until her ankle gives out for the fourth time. A baseball pitcher’s elbow keeps loosening up faster than his coach can keep him on a count. A volleyball player’s shoulder subluxates on a hit and pops back in before the ref blows the whistle. A swimmer’s knees lock backward in the kick and her coach says it is “form” but she is the one who hurts after every set.

None of these athletes has done anything wrong. None of them is fragile. What they share is a body that is more flexible than the average body — and that flexibility is the reason they got good in the first place. It is also the reason they keep ending up injured.

The clinical name for this is joint hypermobility, and on the more genetic end of the spectrum, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) or hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD). It is the most common connective-tissue condition in elite athletes and the most consistently missed in everyday sports medicine. The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center of LA, in the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills, was built — among other reasons — to give these athletes a place to go.

Why Hypermobility Is the Edge — and the Risk

Hypermobility is not a defect. In most of the sports where it is common, it is the prerequisite. A ballet dancer’s arabesque requires hip extension that an average hip cannot produce. A gymnast’s back walkover requires spinal mobility most spines do not have. A pitcher needs late cocking of the shoulder past where a stiffer shoulder would tear. A swimmer’s ankle has to point past plantar-flexed neutral to finish a kick that is actually propulsive.

These athletes are not unusually lucky. They are unusually built. Their connective tissue — the collagen-rich network of fascia, ligament, tendon, and joint capsule — is structurally different from the connective tissue of someone built for, say, powerlifting. Some of this difference is post-natal (years of trained mobility). A great deal of it is genetic: an EDS variant, a near-EDS connective-tissue profile, or what is now called hypermobility spectrum disorder when the picture does not meet the full Ehlers-Danlos criteria but behaves the same way clinically.

The same connective tissue that gives those joints their range is what is supposed to hold those joints together. When the tissue is more compliant than average, the joints move further than average — and they also stop short of their end-range stability later than average, or sometimes not at all. The athlete relies on muscle to do the work the connective tissue would normally be doing. When the muscle fatigues, the joint subluxes, sprains, or grinds the cartilage. Eventually, the fascia around the joint scars, restricts, and becomes its own source of pain — independent of the joint that started it.

This is why a hypermobile athlete’s chart often reads like a misprint: a left knee, a right ankle, both hips, the low back, and now the shoulders — all over five years, all with “clean” or “minor” imaging. The cause is not a series of bad-luck injuries. The cause is the underlying connective tissue, and treating each event in isolation will never resolve the pattern.

The Sports Where Hypermobility Lives

If you are an athlete in any of the following disciplines and you keep ending up on the sideline, there is a meaningful probability that hypermobility — diagnosed or not — is the engine behind the pattern. An EDS specialist in Los Angeles sees these sports represented over and over again:

Dance and Ballet

Hypermobility is selected for in ballet. The schools recruit on it. A dancer with a flat extension and a deep port de bras is a dancer who advances; a dancer with average mobility either trains around it or stops advancing. The injury patterns that follow are now well-documented: anterior hip pain in turnout, repeated lateral ankle sprains in relevé, low-back pain in back extensions, snapping hips, snapping shoulders, and an SI joint that subluxates and then re-locates with each rehearsal. These are not freak injuries. They are the predictable consequence of running a hypermobile body at performance load.

Gymnastics and Cheerleading

The same is true at the higher end of gymnastics and competitive cheer. Backbends, leaps, contortion skills, tumbling, and basket tosses all reward the body that bends further. The shoulder, the wrist, the lumbar spine, and the ankle take most of the cost. An athlete who can walk on her hands at six can usually still walk on her hands at sixteen — and by then she is also living with chronic wrist pain, episodic shoulder instability, and a low back that does not love a heavy school day in a chair.

Throwing Athletes — Baseball, Softball, Quarterbacks, Javelin

Throwing demands shoulder range that is essentially hypermobile by design. A pitcher with a “loose” arm throws harder, longer, and with more deception than a pitcher with a “tight” arm — and a meaningful fraction of professional pitchers carry exactly the joint laxity that, in another body, would have read as pathological in a pediatrician’s exam. The cost shows up in the labrum, the UCL, the rotator cuff, and the long thoracic. A young thrower who has had repeated shoulder “tweaks” with no clear MRI finding is, much more often than the sports-medicine clinic notices, hypermobile.

Volleyball and Swimming

Volleyball combines repeated overhead loading with explosive landings and lateral movement — a near-perfect injury menu for the hypermobile shoulder, hip, and knee. Swimming asks the same of the shoulder and adds a hyperextended kick that loads the knee in the opposite direction the knee was built for. Swimmers with hypermobile knees and shoulders are common at the elite level; they are also overrepresented in early-career career-ending injury.

Soccer, Tennis, and Court Sports

Soccer punishes the hypermobile knee. Tennis punishes the hypermobile shoulder and the hypermobile wrist. Both punish the hypermobile ankle, and both reward — at the developmental level — exactly the kid who moves a little more flexibly than the others. The first ACL tear is almost always presented as a freak accident; in a hypermobile athlete, it usually was not.

Pole, Aerial, Contortion, Yoga, and Pilates Instructors

The performing-arts world and the high-end fitness world both attract — and then reward — hypermobile bodies. Aerial silks, pole, and contortion select directly on connective-tissue compliance. Yoga and Pilates instructors at advanced levels are, statistically, more hypermobile than the general population. Many of them arrive at our office in their late twenties or thirties wondering why the body that once did everything is now hurting in three places at once.

Signs the Athlete in Your Life Should See a Hypermobility Specialist

You do not need a diagnosis already in hand to schedule an evaluation. The signs that an athlete — child, adolescent, or adult — would benefit from a specialty hypermobility workup are usually visible long before anyone names it:

• Repeated minor injuries on different parts of the body, year after year, with no single mechanism that explains them.
• Joints that “pop out” and back in — a kneecap, a shoulder, a thumb, the SI joint — sometimes painlessly, sometimes not.
• MRI or X-ray that comes back “clean” while the athlete still hurts every time they perform.
• A coach, choreographer, or teacher who has remarked on the athlete’s unusual flexibility, or who has said “you are made for this.”
• Chronic ankle sprains, repeated more than three times on either side, especially in dancers, gymnasts, and court-sport players.
• Bruising easily, skin that scars unusually, or skin that has been described as “soft” or “stretchy” by another clinician.
• Fatigue out of proportion to the workload — the athlete is the most flexible on the team but also the most tired the day after a meet, a recital, or a long practice.
• Lightheadedness on standing, palpitations, or feeling “off” after intense practice. This can be a sign of POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), one of the most common comorbidities of hypermobility.
• GI symptoms, food sensitivities, or unexplained skin/allergic responses. These can be a sign of MCAS (mast cell activation syndrome), another common EDS comorbidity that complicates training and recovery.
• A child who is “double-jointed”, can do unusual party tricks with the fingers, can sit in a W-position from the floor without effort, or whose elbows and knees hyperextend past straight.

If two or more of those describe the athlete in question, a specialty evaluation is worth the visit even before injury number four. Hypermobility responds far better to early structured treatment than to retrospective damage control. Our hypermobility and EDS program was built for exactly this profile.

Why most LA practices miss it

A Geneticist Diagnoses It. An Orthopedist Treats the Joint. A PT Treats the Episode. Nobody Treats the Athlete.

There is no shortage of capable clinicians in Los Angeles. There is a shortage of clinicians who put the pieces together for a hypermobile athlete. A geneticist confirms an EDS subtype but does not write a training plan. An orthopedic surgeon fixes the labrum after it has torn but does not address the underlying connective tissue that allowed the tear. A physical therapist strengthens around the joint that hurt last week but is not equipped to read the next three joints that are about to follow it.

A hypermobility doctor in Los Angeles who treats athletes specifically needs to do all of the above at once: confirm the diagnosis, map the fascial pattern, treat the joint that is currently failing, prevent the joints that are about to fail, and write a program the athlete can actually train inside. That is what The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center of LA is built to do.

How an Ehlers-Danlos Doctor Built for Athletes Differs From Standard Care

Most Los Angeles patients searching for an Ehlers-Danlos doctor arrive at one of three doors: a geneticist, a rheumatologist, or a generalist who has read about EDS but does not treat very many. None of those doors is wrong. None of them is sufficient on its own for an athletic body that needs a roadmap.

At The Fascia Institute of LA, Dr. Jacques Courseault, MD, designed a different pathway — one that was developed first for patients in our New Orleans practice, refined on professional, collegiate, and Olympic-level athletes, and brought to Beverly Hills as the foundation of our hypermobility and EDS program. Three things make it different in a way that matters for performance bodies:

One — Diagnosis Goes Beyond the Beighton Score

The Beighton score is the standard nine-point clinical scale for joint hypermobility. It is useful and it is also incomplete. It does not measure the dozens of secondary joints that matter to a dancer or a thrower. It does not differentiate joint laxity from fascial dysfunction. It does not capture the fascia, ligament, and capsular behavior that drives day-to-day pain in a hypermobile body. We use the Beighton score, and we go past it — every evaluation includes a head-to-toe ultrasound assessment using Fascial Mapping®, a 488-point diagnostic protocol developed in our practice and offered nowhere else.

Two — Treatment Addresses Fascia, Not Just Joint

The piece almost universally missing from EDS treatment in Los Angeles is the fascia. In a hypermobile athlete, fascia is the connective-tissue scaffolding that compensates — and over time, scars, restricts, and starts to drive its own pain pattern. Treating the joint without treating the fascia leaves the engine of the problem in place. Our practice’s signature procedure, Hydrofascia Release™, is an ultrasound-guided injection technique developed by Dr. Courseault that releases fascial adhesions and dysfunction at exactly the depths conventional manual therapy cannot reach. It is the procedure NBA, NFL, and Olympic athletes — including Shaquille O’Neal — have flown in for. The same procedure is what we offer the local dancer, the high-school thrower, and the volleyball player who keeps getting hurt.

Three — Care Is Coordinated, Not Episodic

A hypermobile athlete does not need one visit. The athlete needs a structured pathway that confirms the diagnosis, identifies every secondary site that is going to become the next injury, treats those sites preventively, and writes a training plan that respects the underlying connective tissue. Our 5-Visit Hypermobility & EDS Protocol was designed for exactly this. It is described in detail on our hypermobility and EDS page; in summary, it includes a comprehensive intake and history, a head-to-toe Fascial Mapping® assessment, targeted in-office procedures where indicated, a coordinated manual-therapy and movement plan delivered inside our Fascia Performance Program, and a follow-up structure that watches the body across a season, not a single visit.

Beyond the Joints — The Comorbidities Hypermobile Athletes Actually Live With

Joint laxity is the most visible part of hypermobility. It is rarely the only part. Athletes — and parents of athletes — should know that the same connective-tissue profile that produces the flexibility also tends to produce a handful of comorbid conditions that are routinely missed in standard sports medicine. The three most clinically important:

POTS — Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome

POTS is a dysregulation of how the autonomic nervous system manages blood pressure and heart rate on standing. In a hypermobile athlete, POTS commonly shows up as lightheadedness on standing, brain fog after long practices, an unusually high resting heart rate after a meet or recital, and a feeling of “crashing” the day after intensity. Athletes are often told they are “deconditioned” or “underhydrated” when in fact they are some of the better-conditioned bodies in the room. The dysautonomia is real, it is connective-tissue–linked, and it responds to targeted treatment.

MCAS — Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

MCAS is a dysregulation of the mast cell — the immune cell that releases histamine and a long list of other inflammatory mediators. In hypermobile athletes it commonly shows up as unexplained skin reactivity, food sensitivities, GI flares, and recovery that is unpredictably slow after specific meals or specific environments. Athletes are often told they have “anxiety” or “vague allergies” when the mast cell is the actual driver.

Chronic Fatigue and Recovery Failure

The classic story is the dancer or gymnast who is the most talented in the room and also the one who cannot recover between practices, the one who needs Sunday afternoon in bed to make Monday morning, the one whose body is producing the work but not absorbing the work in a healthy way. This is not laziness, and it is not lack of conditioning. It is the systemic load of running a hypermobile body at performance intensity, and it has answers.

An EDS specialist who understands athletes addresses the joint and the comorbidities, not one or the other. That is the standard at our Beverly Hills practice.

Trusted by Professional Athletes — Available to Your Athlete

The same protocols, signature procedures, and standard of care that have changed careers for professional and Olympic-level athletes are the protocols we use with the dancer, the high-school gymnast, the throwing-arm baseball player, and the volleyball setter who keeps subluxing her shoulder. Hydrofascia Release™ is the procedure Shaquille O’Neal turned to during his playing career. Fascial Mapping® is the diagnostic protocol used on NFL quarterbacks including Jameis Winston. Both are now available in Beverly Hills — for athletes of every kind, at every level, including the one in your home.

What to Expect at Your First Visit

The first visit is a physician evaluation with Dr. Courseault. It runs longer than a typical sports-medicine intake because the body in front of us deserves the time. You can expect:

• A complete history — injuries, sport, training load, family history of hypermobility, comorbidities, prior workups.
• A clinical examination including the Beighton score and the secondary joint patterns standard scoring does not capture.
• A discussion of the right next step — usually Fascial Mapping® at the second visit, occasionally further workup before that if the picture warrants.
• A frank, plain-language conversation about what hypermobility means for the specific sport in question, the realistic trajectory of treatment, and how the protocol is going to interact with the athlete’s season, school, or career schedule.

The visit happens at 415 N Crescent Drive, Suite 130, in the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills. Parking is straightforward; the office is physician-led and small by design. We are an out-of-network specialty practice and offer a Good Faith Estimate before every visit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is hypermobility the same thing as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome?

No, but they sit on the same spectrum. Joint hypermobility refers to the joint behavior itself. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome refers to a family of genetic connective-tissue disorders, of which the most common (hypermobile EDS, or hEDS) is characterized largely by joint hypermobility plus systemic features. Many athletes have joint hypermobility without meeting full EDS criteria — what is now called hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD). Clinically, the treatment for the athletic complaints is very similar; the genetic and systemic workup differs.

My child is “flexible.” Should I be worried?

Worried is the wrong word. Aware is the right one. Most hypermobile children are completely fine and turn that flexibility into an athletic or artistic strength. The ones who run into trouble are the ones who train heavily on the hypermobile body without anyone watching for the predictable injury patterns. If your child is in a high-load sport (dance, gymnastics, baseball, volleyball, soccer, swimming, cheer) and is unusually flexible, a one-time specialty evaluation is a reasonable form of preventive insurance.

Does treatment mean my athlete will lose flexibility?

No. The treatment is not about reducing range of motion — it is about restoring the connective tissue’s ability to stabilize at the ranges the athlete already has. A well-treated hypermobile dancer keeps her extension and stops getting hip-flexor and SI joint flares. A well-treated thrower keeps the late cocking and stops loosening up the UCL.

Do you accept insurance?

We are an out-of-network specialty medical practice. Many patients submit superbills for partial reimbursement; we provide the appropriate documentation. A Good Faith Estimate is provided before every visit, and our pricing structure is published in advance so families can plan.

Are you only for elite athletes?

No. The protocols were refined on professional and Olympic athletes — and they were built to be available to every hypermobile body that needs them, including the local high-school dancer, the rec-league pitcher, the corporate marathoner, and the parent who once danced in college and never stopped paying for it.

Where are you located?

The Fascia Institute and Treatment Center of LA is in the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills, at 415 North Crescent Drive, Suite 130, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. Patients travel to us from across Los Angeles, Orange County, and the West Coast for the protocol; many of our athletes fly in from out of state.

How do I schedule an evaluation?

The fastest way is to request a consultation through our contact form, or to call (424) 378-3488. New-patient slots are limited each week; reach out early in the season.