@jimcoote just to be clear, ‘my’ method doesn’t use soft body physics!
You could assign a Vertex Group to Goal (in the Soft Body settings),, with a higher Stiffness, but that wouldn’t give you a ‘bending’ of the cylinders.
There might be a way to do this with Cloth Physics, because that has a Pressure setting and also a Pin Group (in the Shape settings), but I am not sure how to make that work.
