Stuff You Should Know - Contortionism: Bend It Like Gumby

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

If you could put your leg behind your head, would you? Of course you would! You might even make a career out of it, amazing people around the world with your flexibility. That’d make you a contortionist! But first you’d better get started with stretching.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You Should Know. That's right. Boy, Livia had a good title on this one. Did you like it? Go ahead. Well, this is about contortionists and Livia titled, uh, what she sent us, bend it like Gumby. That's right. I think it's good. It is good. Yeah, Olivia always comes up with the best titles.

Yeah, and now we know that she listens to some of these because she heard you take a dig at her. About explaining what a socket and electrical plug does? Yeah. Yeah, she's a good sport, though. Let's see, what else, Chuck? I guess you already spoiled what this episode's about. It's about contortionism, which, which is a good sport. which I guess we were going to have to get into eventually.

Yeah. I mean, obviously we're talking about bending your body. Right. In ways that are, yeah, like Gumby. Bending your bodies in ways that are extraordinary. And as we have learned, it's something that maybe you're kind of born with and definitely something you can work toward and maybe a bit of both. Yeah, I always assumed it was just a born thing in that like one out of every 15 million people

were born as a contortionist essentially. And I figured, yes, of course, they have to train and everything and, you know, choreograph. There's a lot of types of contortionism that are essentially contortionist ballets, especially like the ones you see at Cirque de Soleil, which if you say that funny, it's a hilarious thing to say. It's a good joke. But I guess I just didn't realize that it is something you can, like you or I could go train to be a contortionist. We would fail utterly, but we could at least go train. in our 50s and still do a lot better than we can right now

because it is something you can adapt your body to. Yeah, for sure. And it's also something that's been around a long, long time, right? Yeah, it has one more thing. It will help you a lot while we're going through some of this stuff to just, if you can, look it up, watch videos, but even like just photos sometimes can kind of get the point across. It's just one of those things while we were studying this.

I was like, this is going to kind of be tough to describe in some cases, but we'll do our best. Yeah, well, I don't think it's going to be that hard to follow. People know what we're talking about. Okay. So we are talking about contortionism, and you did say that it is very, very old. The oldest thing we've found that is pretty much a certainty that they're depicting a contortionist was an image that was found in Syria, an old, old Polaroid from 2300 BCE. and there's some contortionists and they're holding swords.

And the best that historians can come up with is that it's possible that so there's some Hittite writings that describe a performance where contortionists basically jump through hoops of swords as basically a performance essentially that basically say, can you do this? No, you can't. Yeah. And, you know, that followed, of course, we have to talk about all the usual suspects, of course. China will come in. Don't worry. But ancient Egypt, they found pottery fragments that date to 1,200 BCE that definitely show women dancing and backbends, like, you know, contorting themselves. Sure. And the Greeks also did this later on as well, right?

Yeah, the Greeks is where we finally start to get to unambiguous descriptions of contortionism. I think as far back as, well, about 2,500 years ago, something like that. contortionists had become like an actual thing. Like they were part of troops or performers that performed in Greece. Like if you went to, say, a public festival, let's say Dionysus was being celebrated that day, there's a chance that you might find somebody doing a contortionist act as just kind of part of the festivities. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I mentioned China, and this is one of those cases where we don't know if it, if people in China,

and this was like 221BCE to 220 CE, if they were influenced by people from other parts of the world or not, or whether it developed independently, when people over there realized that they were bendy. But when they look at some of the clothes that contortionists were wearing in China, it seems like it maybe was influenced by people in Europe, but also could have been maybe that's just the garb. They were all wearing Benetton.

Yeah, exactly, stretchy stuff. So, yeah, that's very interesting, because usually something came out of China and it influenced Europe rather than going the other way around, especially that far back. So, yeah, as a person of European ancestry, I'm quite proud of that. Of course, you know, you would think India is probably a pretty obvious spot for contortionism. And you would be right because there are sculptures in temples from India. These date to 10th century CE that also show women in contorted poses. This time, it got a little sexier, though.

Yeah, I think a lot of times you think about something like the Kama Sutra, and there are definitely contortionist poses in the Kama Sutra. Yeah. But there's the, to just think of it as like, oh, this is just, you know, like you said, just sexy. There's a spiritual aspect to that whole thing, too. It's like a tantric yoga practice. But it is also sexy, just admittedly. But there's this, that made me kind of wonder, Chuck, like,

did like yoga and Buddhism and Hinduism and the incorporation of all these physical movements that include contortionism, did that kind of come out of this contortionist, I guess, heritage or whatever that dates back to at least the Hittites? Or was what the Hittites were doing essentially the foundation for what would later become, you know, Buddhism and Hinduism? Yeah, and to be clear, when we say sexy, we mean they're deposition. pictures of actual intercourse because oh yeah thank you for saying that's really annoying to me about all of this and livia picks this up sort of at the end of the article but i'm going to go ahead and address it now is that if you get you know a hundred people in a room and there's a contortionist there's probably going to be some dim-witted man making some stupid sexual reference about somebody

being bendy about a woman being bendy and that's just dumb so that's not what we were talking about We were talking about, like, you know, actual pictures of sexual positions in this case. I think that was great because you could interpret it a way where we sounded like dirty old men, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, the guys who like kind of elbow one another, like, huh? Check it out, huh? I mean, come on. So some people have a further way to come than other people, you know?

Yeah, that's true. So back to India itself, there's a clear, um, like comparison between contortionism and yoga today. And actually, it's kind of neat. Because if you go online and you look up like contortionism or training or something like that, it's essentially people who are into yoga and they're trying to figure out how to go even further. So they're following ancient practices that have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that are contortionists by nature.

Yeah, for sure. England might not be the most obvious place to think about men. in doing contortionist poses. But that's exactly what happened in 17th and 18th century there in the form of posture masters, posture masters is what they were called. That sounds like a mattress. A posture master? But that's what was going on.

It's a little odd to think about now, but it might be like an actual performance. Maybe sometimes it was something that they would do on the street to raise money, like busking or maybe to try, instead of like holding a sign outside your business, there might be a male posture master sitting outside your tavern to try and get people in there. But it was kind of a big deal, and they kind of became sort of famous in England at the time. Yeah.

I mean, this was before TV, radio, internet, even newspapers in a lot of cases. And you could, as a male contortionist in particular, because it was a male-dominated field at this time, at least in Europe. And it seems like basically throughout the world that you could become distinctly famous, like a guy named Joseph Clark, who apparently in the late 17th century was a very, very famous contortionist in England, so much so that his last name was shorthand for contortion in England and then eventually would morph into shorthand for giving somebody something that they want. That's right. the circus is obviously going to come into play and that is when the circus came into play

and that was, and we've done quite a few episodes on the circus back in the day but as a reminder, this was late 18th century when Philip and Patty Astley they had a, you know, a lot of the early circuses were like horse riding tricks like equestrian stuff. Yeah.

And there's definitely formed out of that out of their Astley's riding school in London. And, you know, once the circus started spring writing around, it came to the United States. And within that circus world, contortionists started kind of performing on the regular. But, you know, it started to get, and which is like it is today, it gets kind of mixed in with other sort of acrobatics. Yeah, and just stepping back a couple of paces, once it reached Europe and England in the 17th and 18th century, there was no spirituality associated with it.

Once it reached Western Europe, it was performance from that point on. you know. And yeah, once it hit the circus, it's really started to morph into what we understand is contortionism today. There was one trick I have to say that Patty Astley did on her horse in the very beginning of circuses. She would ride her horse really fast and her arms would be covered in bees. Yeah, that's a pretty good trick. That's a wild ride for everybody involved. Yeah, but, you know, maybe she was a beekeeper. It doesn't matter what she was doing, Chuck.

She was riding full throttle on a horse with bees all over her arms. I mean, I'm assuming, like, they changed, like, the shape of her arms because there were so many bees, that kind of thing, not like two or three bees on each arm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That wouldn't have much impact, I don't think. That impressed me quite a bit. It was a pretty good trick. So the actual word contortionist that came around in 1860 before then, you know, it was just called other stuff. depending on what culture it was coming from.

But if you were in the U.S. or if you were in England performing as a contortionist, you probably said that you were either Chinese or Turkish or German or French, or maybe you were. You might have just claimed to be one of those things because it had such a rich tradition in being bendy like that. But at this point, it started to be mainly women who were hired by male circus owners and a lot of times performing exclusively for male audience. audiences. Right. And so, yeah, it kind of evolves even further. And luckily, that, that,

that went from, like, the point of a contortionist act, eventually evolving to, you know, a couple of dudes in the audience, like elbowing one another, where most people are, like, getting what the point is. But that said, there are contortionist acts today that are very much geared toward the the sexual nature of the whole thing. And, you know, they're performed by women who are doing that on purpose. So, you know, whatever, more power to them. There is, like, a thread of that. Like, you can't just be like, nope, that doesn't exist. Stop, stop saying that. But the point of most contortionist performances, it seems like, is not that. That's a very niche thing these days. Yeah, for sure. There was one, you know, kind of notable early contortionist, we got to mention here,

name. Well, her real name was Beatrice Mary Claxton, but Beatrice Claxton isn't the best name for a contortionist. So she went by Anna Bertoldi, which is much more of a sort of a circusy name. And starting at like age eight years old, she was touring around. And as we'll see, you know, contortionism is mainly a sport of the young. You can age out of it like ballet in a lot of cases. But she was a kid doing it. And she performed all over Great Britain. And then eventually traveled to the U.S. in 1891. And one of the reasons we mentioned hers is because she was very famously one of the early people that Thomas Edison filmed with his kinetoscope.

Yeah, which is pretty cool. I mean, you have to be pretty famous in and of yourself to do that, but to, you know, be memorialized in one of the earliest film strips is definitely going to help your fame later on in history as a contortionist, I would think. Yeah, for sure. So you want to take a little bit of a break and come back and talk about the epicenter, ground zero of contortionism? Hmm, where could that be? On the brink of disaster, this lone survivor is Earth's last chance.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we're back, and I talked about the epicenter of contortions, and I'm just going to reveal it now. It's Mongolia, everybody. That's right. It has long been that sort of epicenter. It still is that epicenter. It still is that epicenter. And we're going to tell you why, because one of the reasons it started as a big deal there is, or at least we think that it had to do with sort of meditated practices and also like a dance, a Buddhist dance known as the Psalm, which is also, you know, also, you know, it's very religious, obviously tied to Buddhism, but it has to do with, you know, training your body and mind to work together to do incredible things. I also saw that it has secret meanings that you have to be a very high, highly advanced Buddhist monk to basically be led in on, which is pretty neat. Oh, cool.

There's also a folk dance in Mongolia that's indigenous to Mongolia, from what I understand, B-L-G-E-L-G-E-E-E. And as far as folk dances go, I'm not usually a huge fan of folk dance. Like, I wouldn't go to a community center to see a folk dance performance. But this is a pretty cool folk dance to just check out on video, in part because of the movements, which include contortionism, including full backbends to where the dancer's back. is like flat on the ground while they're on their knees. But also just the incredibly colorful costumes that they wear, too. It's really neat. What is a folk dance performance?

Like, what are you avoiding? I don't even know what that means. It's kind of like when people from different cultures perform traditional dances. Oh, okay. That's a folk dance. I got you. Okay. I mean, what do you think, like square dancing?

I guess that's probably a type of folk dance. Yeah, no, it's just, you know, any kind of cultural dancing, for some reason it's never floated my boat. But I got you. I'm not yucking anyone's yum because I couldn't do a single step of any folk dance. And I'm usually impressed with anybody who can dance in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, me too. So 12th century is when it starts to become a really sort of mainstream thing in Mongolian culture, basically, at, you know, festivals, court appearances, obviously. And then 17th century is when there was a Buddhist leader name,

Andor Gigan Zanzibar, who inspired these contortionists with these, I guess they were, was it like just art sculptures, basically? The people like in all sorts of kind of contorted positions? Yeah, he was like, do that position, I dare you. He would make sculptures of them. Yeah, I thought that was, yeah. And the guy was so, I guess,

popular that, like, he actually advanced contortionism by pushing them to their limits, I guess. Wow. As a sculptor. Yeah, I mean, you can bend clay in ways you can't bend a body. That's right. That's why you can bend it like gummy, man. That's right. So Mongolia is, and I thought this was pretty interesting, too.

There's, like, contortionism evolving in different places around the world, you know, kind of simultaneously. But Mongolia basically took the mantle. And one of the reasons why is because they became a Soviet state in the 40s. And as part of the USSR, the government bankrolled the Mongolian state circus, which became world-renowned. It traveled the world. That's one of the ways that became world-renowned. But also because they were really, really good. And one of the centerpieces of the Mongolian state circus was contortionism.

And from that, it grew in popularity very, very quickly because there was a lot of funding for it. There's a lot of publicity for it. But that created a mushrooming of contortionist schools in Mongolia, some of which are still around today. Oh, yeah, for sure. The first one and the first sort of superstar of that circus was a contortionist's name, Tendayosh. And that was the first school.

But like you said, there's a lot of them still there. And it's not just like, hey, if you're from Mongolia and you're a young girl, and your parents think you're like pretty flexible early on, they may send you to this. Like that certainly happens, but people from all over the world, like gymnasts will go and train. Like anyone who wants to sort of increase your flexibility

in an extreme way, there's no better place in the world to go than contortionist school in Mongolia. No, they know what they're doing in other words. Yeah, for sure. Their circus isn't nearly as big ever since they peeled away from the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

But it's still like a big kind of rich tradition in that country. Oh, yeah, big time. Right now the biggest school, I think the oldest school, is owned by a former sumo wrestler. And he is Mongolia's most famous, most revered sumo wrestler. He got out of the sumo game and bought the school for contortionism. The thing is, it's kind of in this decline so much so that Mongolia has been trying to get, UNESCO heritage protection for Mongolian contortionism, because it's just not quite as widespread, even though there's more schools than ever. It's just become much more diluted. I think there's a

lower barrier to entry for being, like, say, a teacher or a school owner or something like that. And then simultaneous to that, a lot of Mongolian contortionist trainers are going abroad, and so they're taking it with them, but at the same time, someone in, say, like England, who sees an English contortionist, they don't, they're not regarding the idea that that person was trained by a Mongolian contortionist teacher. They are looking at the English contortionists. And so in that way, it's becoming less and less identified with Mongolia.

Yeah, and it's kind of, I was kind of disappointed that UNESCO turned them down. They try to get, you know, it added as a list of intangible heritage, which it seems very clear that that's the case. but they rejected the proposal. This was in 2011. They said that advocates didn't make a strong enough case for its significance in Mongolian culture and society, which just, I don't know.

I'm not on that board, obviously, but it seems pretty obvious to me as an outsider that it's like super tied to Mongolian culture. Sure. Well, you will be heartened that the Mongolian folk dance beelgi is protected under UNESCO heritage. I don't just take it one step further, UNESCO. That's right.

Because also, what's the big deal? I don't know. I was trying to think about that. I'm sure that they have a kind of mentality that's like, we don't want to open the floodgates or else, you know. But, I mean, there's plenty of stuff that I'm sure deserves protecting that they're turning down. And you know what? I'd be interested to know about that.

I'm going to look into that, and we'll do a short step on all the stuff UNESCO's turned down for heritage protection. Well, if you want to learn about the mechanics, now is your time to look at it. listen closely. This is the point where you were probably talking about maybe looking up pictures and stuff, but, you know, I think a lot of people have seen a lot of this stuff. If you've ever watched, uh, when we were kids, that's incredible. Uh, or America's got talent these days. They'll have acts like this or certainly if you've ever been to like Cirque de Soleil or something. Yeah. But backbending, there's like kind of six main, um, sort of overall things you can learn. and then within that, you can do all sorts of stuff

to incorporate little side tricks and then mix these together for performative purposes. But backbending, that's sort of the classic place that you start, the classic backbend. Yeah. One of the things is the chest stand, and essentially it's where you're on your chest, see, so I'm going to, like everybody get in this position, I'm going to walk you through it.

You're on your chest flat, I guess it's prone on the floor, and you bend yourself at the waist, and you bring your hips back, back, back, back, back, back. And then you have your feet on either side of your head. You can do this, everybody, just hang in there. And then your feet are flat on the floor on either side of your head. Remember, you're still on your chest, but now your legs are completely over you, and your feet are on either side of your head flat on the floor. That's the chest stand.

That's the most basic one. anybody can basically do that just jumping into it. Well, my only note with that description is when you said your waist went back, back, back, technically, I think your waist is going forward, forward, forward. So that might have confused people. Okay, yeah. I think maybe that's why I was like, this is hard to describe because I knew I was going to screw it up just royally.

Well, you've also got the front bend. If someone has got a little humor to their performance, you're probably going to use a front bend because that's a one. that is when you're sort of doing the opposite in which you fold your head and chest all the way between your legs to where you're sort of looking at your own butt. So obviously, insert joke right there. Yes. These are the ones that really get to me. Like there's like some sort of preternatural like zap that contortionist poses can do to you, or to me at least.

And the like the human pretzel one or the human not, those are the, the ones that they just zap me. It's a very thrilling way, but at the same time, I'm like, there's some part of my lizard brain that, like, that ain't right. Body's not supposed to do that. Yeah, I mean, we go to Circtus O'A. every year when it comes to Atlanta in the fall. That's kind of one of our little family traditions. And there's always some kind of contortionist, I feel like, but this last one, and I can't remember which one it was called, but they had a guy, and it was, He was the best I had ever seen. It was, I wasn't quite sure what I was watching at certain points where you can't even tell which arm was which.

It was definitely one of those brain-breaking sort of performances. It was incredible. Yeah, for sure. Those are, I think one of the other things, too, that I've noted, especially with Cirque de Soleil performances, is it's not just like, hey, look, I'm in this pose and I'm holding this pose, and now I'm just going to get into the next post. like the transition from one pose to another is incredibly important. That's kind of what makes it like a very ballet-like performance, you know? I think that's just, that makes the whole thing like even more amazing, but at the same time, it zaps me less than just like a, here's a pose,

check it out, let it really sink in what I'm doing right now. Yeah. It's like I like it when it's the way that you describe where you're like, can't even tell what's what. Yeah. I mean, I think definitely the next part, balancing is when that comes into play. That's, I think a lot of, like, the feats of strength combined with, you know,

I said they kind of mix things up in circuses. And the feats of strength is definitely when balancing comes in, because that's when you're contorted and opposed, and maybe you're, like, lifting yourself off the ground in a little ball that you can't even figure out with just like your fingertips or something like that. Yeah, very famous one of these is the Marinelli Bend. And that is essentially kind of like, it's like a chest stand. It's very similar to a chest stand, except that rather than having your weight on your chest, you have all of the weight in your entire body on your teeth, and you're probably biting a pole,

and that's what's holding you up while you're doing your chest stand in the middle of the air. It's quite impressive, and I looked it up. There is a Mongolian contortionist named Satsral Erdenabalig, and she holds the record for holding a Marinelli bend for four minutes and 17. seconds. That's a long time. With her teeth. Yeah. Dislocation, that's another one that probably might trigger some folks. That is kind of one of those deals where it looks like you're popping your shoulder or

your arm out of joint or something like that to achieve the sort of performative effect. The shoulder passed through was sort of a classic move. That's where you hold a stick with both hands and you move the stick. and you move the stick all the way, you know, in front of your body, and then over your head into your back, but you're not changing your grip. So your arms are twisting and contorting in ways that look like they've been dislocated. Yeah.

The splits, too. I always think of those splits is kind of like a cheer. Yeah, it's classic. It's like a cheerleader thing or, you know, your friend in the neighborhood can do it. Have you ever done a split? No, I'm not split-y. I mean, I used to be very flexible. Like I could put my ankle, like my foot behind my head.

Wow. When I was young and stuff like that. When I was one. Come close now. And Ruby the other day was just laughing at me because I was actually fairly close. But I was never a splitter. All right. Fair enough.

I wasn't either. But one of the basic things that you have to learn is the splits because so many of the other kind of movements and poses are based on. being able to do a split. That's a basic one. But if you really want to be impressed, go look up over splits, which is doing a split, but say one foot is on a chair in front of you and the other foot is on a chair behind you and you're a foot or so off of the ground, almost making a, just the beginnings of a you with your legs. Yeah, I like that standing split where you're on one leg and you have reached behind you and grabbed that foot and brought it all the way over. That's always, because that's also incorporates balance, obviously.

I don't remember who did that, but I think one of the American skaters in the Winter Olympics did that while they were doing like a spin. Yeah, oh, yeah. But it was like perfectly 90 degrees perpendicular to the ice. It was really amazing. Oh, you got to. Or you'll get that half-point deduction. And then twisting, too.

This kind of, twisting is not necessarily in and of itself opposed. although it would be impressive, but it's kind of like a fundamental part of a bunch of other poses, right? Where if you're twisting yourself around or if you're moving yourself so that you can't tell what arm is what, you're twisting to some degree. And what's really fascinating to me about this is that each individual vertebra is rotating and it's rotating to a degree that the average person can't do, obviously. but just the idea of your spine, I would think of it as moving in one thing,

but it's just like, think, think, think, think, each vertebra is moving itself. I think that's an amazing skill, just that. Like if somebody walked up to me and said, I can twist all of my individual vertebra, can you? I would say, I don't think I can. Yeah, and I wouldn't know if I am.

Exactly. I know somebody's going to write it and be like, don't be stupid, Josh. everyone's vertebrate trist individually. I get that. I guess I'm trying to get across that. I'm impressed by contortionists, okay? For sure.

Should we take another break? I think we should. All right. We're going to come back and talk about sort of the dark side of this right after this. On the brink of disaster, this lone survivor is Earth's last chance. Now on Audible, Project Hail Mary

from best-selling author Andy Weir. After waking up from a long sleep, millions of miles from home, Rylan Grace faces an impossible task to save the earth. narrated by Audible favorite Ray Porter. Project Hail Mary is funny, tender, and propulsive. Immerse yourself in the best-selling audio book as the story hits theaters.

Now a blockbuster film starring Ryan Gosling. Project Hail Mary. Listen, watch, save the world. Listen now at audible.ca. Slashash-hael Mary. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness fitness and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong. Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.

Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out, on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's T-W-O-Persent on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either.

We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

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And that is to say there are some syndromes and some disorders that could lend itself to this. So I guess that's the dark side. The first thing we should clear up is that double-jointed is not a thing. I know that's something that everyone kind of learned on the playground, like, look, I'm double-jointed. But what people don't have extra joints, what people are really talking about, there's what's what's called hypermobility.

Yeah. And that is something that, obviously, if you are hypermobile, then you have a pretty good leg up to being a contortionist, and they would diagnose that, or I guess rather rate your hypermobility on what's called the Baton scale. Yeah. And nine is the highest on that scale. and if you're a contortionist, you're probably a nine. Yeah, but also, aren't you a jerk if you make a scale

and you just leave it at nine rather than ten? I just, I feel like there had to be a reason for that, but I didn't ask. Well, you add a point for each thing that somebody can do, so it's things like, can you touch your thumb to your forearm? And I can do that very easily. I'm doing it right now over and over again. But you want to be able to do that with each hand. there's like can you does your knee go back a certain degree behind itself there's just a bunch of

different ones and you add one point for each limb that can do that and I guess it just adds up to nine he wasn't being a jerk I was just kidding yeah so I mentioned early on that genetics could play a part and that's certainly true you know if your parents were contortionists or your mom is a contortionists, you may be born more flexible, you may be born with hypermobility. But sometimes it does correlate, like I said, with the genetic conditions. The first one is EDS, Ellers-Danlos syndrome. There's really 13 of those syndromes. So it means that, you know, if you're a contortionist, you may have one of these.

Not always, but it's possible. Yeah, I think it's sometimes called circhicolet disease. And there are, like you said, 13 of them. And they, because the one thing they have in common is that they affect your connective tissue. So you can have one that makes you very hypermobile, very extendable, hyper-extendable. Because the connected tissue in your joints is not as, say, stiff as somebody else's, so you can go way beyond the normal range of motion. But then there's also other ones that keep you from being able to control your own breathing

or your teeth fall out of your head because your gums are not connective enough to hold. hold them in there. So there's a whole bunch of different ways that this can affect you. It just happens that a couple of the forms of EDS or a couple of the symptoms of some types of EDS make you much more hyper-mobile and hyper-extensive. Yeah, for sure. Sometimes if you are hyper-mobile and you have the EDS, and that's one of, I guess, sort of the pluses, it can have some harmful traits, although it can also help with skin, hyper-extensibility, like having really stretchy or maybe joint instability is obviously a bad one. Right.

Because that can lead to injury and dislocations and stuff like that. But we should point out that there doesn't seem to be any weird high rate of injury for people who are involved in contortionism. And definitely not, does it mean like you're going to die younger? That's sort of an old wives tale that contortionists die young. But that may have to do with the fact that it could be go along with some of these syndromes. Yeah, I also wonder if it has to do with just going out of the public eye at a very young age, because in Mongolia, I think the average career of a contortionist goes from about age six to age 13. So I wonder if that just kind of helped develop that old wives tale over the years. Oh, like people think they died and just aged out? Yeah. Exactly.

Oh, interesting. One of the things that was always kind of obvious to me is that women are more flexible than men on the whole. There are actually distinct physiological reasons for this, one of which, I mean, body structure obviously, but hormones apparently affect your connective tissue. And it's, I guess, strength or degree of flexibility. And so when women take progestin-progestin-only birth control pills, they're more hyper-mobile than when they aren't on birth control pills. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, jumping back to the syndromes, the second one is something called Marfan syndrome, which I feel like we've talked about at some point.

I know I've heard of it, but that's another genetic condition that makes that connective tissue like super flexible. Right. In this case, it's about sort of like EDS. It's about one in four thousand, each of them are. And, you know, this one you can call shortness of breath, heart palpitations, eye pain sometimes. Yeah. And, you know, those are the two main ones, but outside of this, there's an umbrella term called hypermobility spectrum disorder that kind of covers, you know, other things that lend itself to extreme flexibility. Yes. And like you said, you do have advantages to this. So if you're a woman on a high level of hormones who has Marfan syndrome and maybe a hypermobility spectrum disorder, you are probably a, like what I thought all contortionist,

we're essentially a born contortionist, there's challenges for all the advantages that it offers. And then obviously the drawbacks in other ways that it affects your health. But as far as contortionism goes, it has just a suite of advantages for you. But there's also like drawbacks in that like you will have to probably do more strength training than the average person because, again, your connective tissue is weaker than other people's, which makes you easier to flex or more flexible. And then also you might be more prone to injury, like you were saying, you can dislocate way easier than other people. Yeah, but they've, you know, they've done studies, and they haven't found it's any different than any other sort of, you know,

professional athleticism. Yeah. They've even put people in the wonder machine and have the contort in an MRI and didn't see anything odd going on. So they basically said it's all good. Keep doing what you're doing. Nothing odd going on here. Yeah.

So if you wanted to get into contorting, Chuck, where would you start? That's the question I pose to you now. Let's start stretching immediately. I think that's a good plan. Yeah, but you should probably start as a small kid. Like some people get into this as adults, but much, much, much more often. Like, I would say, 95% of the time you're starting out as a kid because you have a lot You know, you're flexible as a kid.

You got more collagen fibers going on. Your muscles and joints don't have as much calcium at that point. So kids are just bendy. They are, super bendy. You also want to do a lot of strength training, too. And you're going to, like, if you want to be an actual professional contortionist, you're basically going to need to dedicate your life to it. You have to train every day for hours and hours a day.

And that whole stretching thing is not just like what you do to warm up. there's, it's actually part of your training is to stretch because there's a really interesting reflex called the myotatic reflex. Be myostatic. But essentially when you flex a muscle or when you press on a muscle, the reflex is that your muscle automatically contracts. It's how your body keeps you from falling down essentially is this, this automatic reflex. The problem is that keeps your muscles from expanding or stretching further. So if you just stretch like normal, like if you do a hamstring stretch, your muscles are no longer than they were before you did that hamstring stretch. It feels better and they're looser, but they're not actually longer, which is really important

in contortionism. So they've figured out that there are certain ways that you can do stretching. They're called pro preoceptive neuromuscular facilitation stretches. And essentially, this is how you train your body to actually elongate the muscle fibers. Yeah, and you are well on your way at that point. You obviously got to be drinking plenty of water, too, because that's going to keep that spinal support, keep those discs nice and cushiony. And that's just a good, obviously, when they tell you to drink water every day. There's lots of reasons for that, but that's one of them just as a regular old person walking

around, not twisting themselves into shapes. True that. And, you know, they have found that it gets, obviously. it gets better with time. Like when you start training, your muscles aren't going to change that much in the first few weeks. But your neurons actually shift in their behavior and your pain tolerance is going to increase and your range of motion is going to extend. And again, this is just, you know, for contortionism, but flexibility and stretching is kind of one of the keys to aging well, you know. So this advice is for a lot of people. Yeah. When I was looking up a lot of this stuff for contortionism,

I ran into tons of videos that were just like for that, like just to become a more flexible average person. It is a super important agreed. Yeah. Okay. So if you want to go see a contortionist, there are videos on the web, but it's much, much different to see it in person. So, you know, maybe like you said, make an annual pilgrimage to Cirque de Soleil like your

family, Chuck. Yeah. It's worth it. Yeah. I think it's fun. Well, since Chuck said he thinks it's fun. Everybody, that means it's time for listener, mate. Guys, I'm going to call this no corrections, just compliments.

That was in the subject line, so I'm always prone to read one of those. It was a nudge listening to Jane Stanford episode was a nudge to finally write in and thank you guys for what you do. So what Sarah has done here was wrote a top, sort of a stuff you should know, top 10, which means it's four things long. Five things long. Six, seven, eight, six. 9, 10. No, there's 10. But maybe I'll read like six of them. In true stuff, you should know style. Yeah. So here we go with number 10. Thank you for your friendly banter at the beginning of the episode. Number nine, thank you for the witty episode names. Number eight, we always

try to make the episode titles kind of fun. Most of the time. Yeah. Sometimes it's straightforward. You can't, you know, mock something like, oh, I don't know, anything serious or sad. Yeah. Number eight, thank you for the movie, book, cocktail, barbecue, rice, recipe, recommendations that you share, sometimes topic specific and sometimes not. Number seven, thank you for your obvious desire to not show just kindness to different groups of people, or be politically correct, but to actually be kind to people. All right, that's nice. Yeah. Number six, thank you for your openness about your own lives, pets, and relationships, which makes us feel like we can relate to you. That's a good one. Yeah, for sure. Number five, thank you for being surprisingly informative on unique topics, but also admitting that some of them are not as tantalizing.

Parentheses, I'm looking at you, hard sciences, is what Sarah said. And can we all admit that the true crime and holiday extravaganzas are the best? So Sarah's into those. Okay. Number four, thank you for coordinating the intro-outro jingle to the overall style of the episode. We need to thank one person and another whole. whole set of people for that. Obviously, Jerry is the one who's picking those out. Sure.

So she's doing the coordination, but stuff you should know, listeners are the people who perform and those to begin with and record those. Yeah. Yeah. And Dave and Ben pick them out too. Jerry's the all-time goat. Yeah, for sure. She's the all-time greatest of all time. That's right. Number three, thank you for the mispronunciations and the accents, especially in the Halloween episodes. Sarah really gets what we're trying to do here. Number two, thank you for creating something we can usually safely listen to with kids in the car and still be entertained or just have on in the background.

So we feel surrounded by friends. Number one, thanks to you both for coming to Madison, Wisconsin, and April. Yeah. Yeah. Second row seats. So Sarah, I guess we'll be seeing you on the second row there. And if you haven't got tickets for Madison yet or Akron or Chicago, there are still tickets available. Yeah.

It's stuff you should know.com on the tour button. That's right. That was really nice, Sarah. That was a great email. I'm glad you selected that one, Chuck. Yeah. Thank you very much for all that, Sarah. And thanks for listening, as much as you obviously do.

And if you want to be like Sarah and send us a clever, cool, neat email, we love those. You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter.

I'm on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%? That's TWO%. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

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