WWE.com Alexa Bliss fakes an injury at Great Balls of Fire.
At Great Balls of Fire, Alexa Bliss shocked the crowd when she appeared to break her arm during the match, only for it to be revealed that she was faking it in order to distract Sasha Banks.
She was able to do this because Alexa Bliss is double-jointed. Hypermobility, the ability to stretch joints beyond their normal range, affects approximately 20 percent of the population, according to Scientific American.
“This happens because the tendons and ligaments, which make up the connective tissue around the joint, are too loose or flexible,” Dr. Jennifer Hand, who specializes in hypermobility, told BuzzFeed.
Those who have hypermobility in their elbows are able to bend them in strange ways, like Alexa Bliss did at Great Balls of Fire. Doing so typically does not cause any pain, and there is no evidence that stretching joints like Bliss did is harmful to a person.
Alexa Bliss has actually used this trick in WWE matches before. During an episode of SmackDown Live last December, Alexa Bliss was facing off against Becky Lynch, and she bent her arm in a weird way and pretended to be seriously injured. This distracted Becky Lynch and allowed Alexa Bliss to score the victory. At the time, viewers thoughr that Bliss had actually popped her elbow back into its socket live on air, but in fact she was just making use of her hypermobility in a pretty genius way.
At Great Balls of Fire, Bliss did so again by pretending to have injured her arm during the match in order to distract Sasha Banks and blindside her. Sasha Banks apparently doesn’t watch SmackDown Live, because if she did, she would know that Bliss was faking the injury. However, unlike on SmackDown Live, Bliss’ arm trick did not lead to the end of the match, and Banks ended up winning via countout.