3 Tips for Starting (or Returning!) to Pole Dance

In this episode, Rosy discusses three important tips for those who are either new to pole dance or returning after a long break. The episode covers the importance of easing into the practice gently, understanding realistic timelines for bodily adaptations, and exercising with friends or a virtual buddy to stay motivated.

Link to the warm up video she mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GAP_7LDgo8 

Citations: 

• Franklin, B. A., Thompson, P. D., Al-Zaiti, S. S., Albert, C. M., Hivert, M. F., Levine, B. D., ... & American Heart Association Physical Activity Committee of the Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health; Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing; Council on Clinical Cardiology; and Stroke Council. (2020). Exercise-related acute cardiovascular events and potential deleterious adaptations following long-term exercise training: placing the risks into perspective–an update: a scientific statement from the American Heart Association. Circulation, 141(13), e705-e736.

• de Boer MD, Maganaris CN, Seynnes OR, Rennie MJ, Narici MV. Time course of muscular, neural and tendinous adaptations to 23 day unilateral lower-limb suspension in young men. J Physiol. 2007 Sep 15;583(Pt 3):1079-91. doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.2007.135392. Epub 2007 Jul 26. PMID: 17656438; PMCID: PMC2277190.

• Bohm S, Mersmann F, Arampatzis A. Human tendon adaptation in response to mechanical loading: a systematic review and meta-analysis of exercise intervention studies on healthy adults. Sports Med Open. 2015 Dec;1(1):7. doi: 10.1186/s40798-015-0009-9. Epub 2015 Mar 27. PMID: 27747846; PMCID: PMC4532714.

• Irwin, B.C., Scorniaenchi, J., Kerr, N.L. et al. Aerobic Exercise Is Promoted when Individual Performance Affects the Group: A Test of the Kohler Motivation Gain Effect. ann. behav. med. 44, 151–159 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-012-9367-4

Transcription

  In this episode, I'm going to talk about three things that are very important to keep in mind. If you are A, new to pole dance and starting it for the first time, A, welcome. Hi. Pole's great. We're happy to have you. Or B, if you're returning to pole dance after a long span, right? Basically, if you are in a place where you're not pole dancing regularly, and you hope to get to a place where you are pole dancing regularly, what are some things to keep in mind?

As always, I got the citations in the show notes. So good jumping off place. If you want to get a little bit deeper into some of the relevant literature.

The first thing, hmm, this is a really common misconception I see, and I think part of it comes down to a lot of the language that we have around exercise.

So if you've been told like, oh, no pain, no gain, pain is weakness, leaving the body, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that that can sometimes lead people to push themselves. Pass the point of productive discomfort particularly when you're coming back, that's something you really, really want to avoid. So if you're just coming back to pole or you're just starting pole, start so gently, really ease into it.

If you've just got a home pole, maybe give yourself 10, 15 minutes, do a warmup. I've got a warmup on my YouTube channel. You can just follow along. It's five minutes. It'll hit everything. gently warm up, maybe spend, you know, 10 15 minutes on the pole cool down. Really, really ease into it so, so gently.

If you're working with an instructor, let them know that you're a beginner. Really take your time. And I'm sure you've seen like, you know, you ever done an exercise video or like you've taken a class, you've probably signed a waiver. Well, Or you've seen like the like warning information thing where they're like, exercise can be dangerous, act reasonably right.

Like don't sue us. We did tell you. And I think folks sometimes don't understand what sorts of things that we are worried about as fitness professionals.

So a, obviously with pole, if you're doing things that you're not comfortable with, if you don't have an understanding of how to securely be on the full.

Falls are definitely something that, you know, we've got in mind, but there are some more serious things to keep in mind as well.

A big one is cardiac issues. So coming from being more or less sedentary and coming into exercise and going super hard is a major causative factor for cardiac incidents. The way that you can avoid this is that you can come into things very gently, take your time, try to keep things in a moderate intensity. So you want to be able to speak maybe with a little bit of effort, but you want to be able to hold a conversation while you're exercising, right?

That's moderately intense. If you are gasping for breath, if you can't talk, if you have to like stand there and pant and that's all you can do, that's high intensity, especially when you're first coming back. Step back off of that. And in general, personally, I tend to keep my clients, my students, and myself more in that sort of moderate intensity zone rather than super high intensity.

A, it's not something that we are training for it. Right? We don't have anything that we're preparing our bodies for where we're gonna need that like high intensity for a while. And B, when we look at sort of the positive effects of exercise dosage on heart health, on cardiac health, there's sort of a U shape dosage.

So, So, no exercise at all, never ever giving your heart anything to do, that's no good, but also going super hard all the time for a really long time, that also puts a lot of stress on your heart. So you want to sort of hit that, that middle sweet spot, that moderate intensity sweet spot, especially when you're first starting up, because that's, again, most exercise related deaths happen because people come from not exercising to exercising, go super hard and trigger a cardiac event.

So Not to be too much of a downer, but that's why we have disclaimers, that's why we have waivers and things is to, so that people are informed of some of the risks involved with an exercise program. And that's also what people are like, Hey, talk to your doctor. Right. So if it's been a while since you've been done a physical, you know, had general cardiac health evaluated and you are sedentary, that might be a good thing to check in with first before you start an exercise program, come to pole, whatever it is that you're doing so that your instructor can be informed, right? Or maybe you want to start exercising with a little bit more clinical supervision, right?

Perhaps with a physical therapist to help you get to the point where you're feeling ready and confident strong to begin doing more intense exercise with less clinical supervision. And like, I don't want you to put you off, right? Like, again, you want to do some that is, that is ideal.

In general, you know, bodies enjoy moving for the most part. So I'm not telling you not to, but listen, pole dancers tend to be kind of intense people and people who are drawn to pole dance tend to be kind of intense people. And if you're like, I want to do the best. And like, this is my like, anime training montage.

That's fantastic. Keep that for about three months in your training, right? We're not going to start with the training montage. We're going to start with like the, the gentle intro sequence and really get you acclimatized to this type of movement first before we really start pushing you.

Another potential thing that can happen if you come out the gate and you're like, I'm going so hard, so much, so fast, it's my first time ever on the pole and I'm, I'm on it for like five hours and I'm working super hard.

In very extreme cases, your muscles can actually break down rapidly, right? Like over the course of a day. And this is called rhabdomyolysis. Sometimes you'll hear it called rhabdo. Some symptoms weakness, stiffness, and pain, change to your pee color.

If especially if your urine gets like much darker especially if you've been hydrating, well, that is a big thing. It's more likely to happen if you're exercising and it's very hot and your, your body temperature is elevated. This is a very serious condition. If you have these symptoms, I would go to a hospital, right?

And the way that you avoid it is just don't go super hard. Right? Like pain is a signal from your body, and particularly like intense muscle pain is something that I don't want you to be aiming for.

I don't want you to be taking that as a signal of like, yes, this is a good thing. I'm trying to do this. Now if we're on the pole so. skin pain, right? Friction. Like if ever somebody's done that thing where they take your forearm and like they twist their hands in opposite directions, they pull the skin and it sort of feels kind of burny.

That sort of sensation or pressure into your thighs, probably you're probably working on pole sits. Those are kind of to be expected. It's just sort of part of pole. It will get better over time. That's not what I'm talking about.

If it stops immediately, as soon as you come off the pole maybe you get like a little bit of a red spot, maybe you bruise as long as it's not like intensely painful on the pole and off to the pole I wouldn't be hugely worried about this.

Here, I'm talking about like pain in your muscles. I don't want to scare you, but like I said, pole dancers tend to be intense people. And I want you to give yourself permission to really ease into things. Particularly if you're coming back to pole after a break, I really want you. To be gentle with yourself, right?

It's going to be frustrating. You're going to remember being able to do things you probably can't do right now. That's okay. That's normal. Even if you had been poling this whole time, you probably would have skills would have fallen in and out of your vocabulary with time. Everybody regresses always.

Once you get to a certain point in pole, right? Like there's no way for you to keep working on all of the things you know, cause there's just too much out there. So don't beat yourself up. Really go into it gently and know that that is the healthy thing, right? That is the thing that's going to get you long term benefits.

That's the thing that's going to help your body adapt, and that's going to help you get where you're trying to go much faster than jumping in super hard and potentially doing yourself an injury. So, so gently, so, so, so, so gently.

The second point is that I want you to give yourself time and I want you to have a realistic timeline in mind for bodily adaptations, right?

Obviously we've got our muscles. Right. We've got our tendons and ligaments. We've got our connective tissue. We've got our bones. There is bone adaptation, but it's not something generally I'm targeting as a pole instructor. It's just going to sort of happen as you, as you do strength work, especially if you're doing loaded strength work for, for cross training outside of class.

And then there's neural change which can include things like learning how to do new things. Neural change can happen quite quickly, right?

So you can, over the course of one lesson, not know how to do something and then learn how to do something, right? You can figure out, okay, here's where my body needs to go and begin to build not only a conceptual understanding of what you're trying to do, but also the ability to do it. Also if you're doing things like vestibular training or I've mentioned it a couple times in different places, but I've been doing a course for enhancing athletic ability through neurological techniques.

That adaptation can happen pretty much instantly. One of my students calls it witchcraft. It doesn't last super long but it can really help you produce very quick changes that last over a short period of time.

Muscular changes take a little bit longer, right?

And I think there's Hmm. I don't know if this is a misconception. I don't know. Maybe most people know this, but muscle change actually happens not while you are training, but in between training when you are resting. Right? So if I put my, let's say I'm working on shoulder mount, right? And I'm doing a lot of sort of overhead pulling motions to help build my lat strength to, to get my butt up.

When I am doing my, my strength workouts, that's going to be placing the muscle under stress. My body's like, all right, we've got to adapt. Let's work on that adaptation. And that becoming stronger part actually happens. The rebuilding happens in between training sessions while you rest.

So the more high quality your rest, the better you sleep, the better you're fueling that recovery with, with food, the less stressed you are, the more capacity your body has to rebuild, the faster you're going to see adaptation. But generally, you're going to see muscle adaptation and changes in strength that you notice starting at about four to six weeks.

But it takes time. Building strength just takes time. It also takes, you know, before you build the strength in a position, you have to understand that position, right? You have to have done the learning first in order to, to build the muscular strength. So we're talking A month, a month and a half before you'll start to see appreciable progress in getting stronger.

And then I think this is a, the system that people tend not to think about as much, especially if you're not hypermobile and it hasn't been on your radar is joint adaptation. So the number one type of injury that pole dancers have in study after study, I've talked about a lot of them on the podcast is shoulder injuries and in particular shoulder overuse injury.

So doing too much too fast in your shoulders.

So your muscles are getting stronger pretty quickly, all things considered. Your tendons are getting stronger much more slowly. And if you're sort of familiar with the the structure, right? The muscle attaches to the tendon, attaches to the bone. So if your muscle's getting stronger and the tendon isn't, it's getting put under more and more stress.

And you don't see adaptation to those until about 8 to 12 weeks, right? So about twice as long as it takes for your muscles to adapt. So even if you're feeling stronger and you're like, Oh, I can do this. And you're starting to notice, well, Wrist issues, elbow issues, shoulder issues knee issues, hip issues. If you've been doing a lot of, like, hamstring stretching and you're starting to feel, like, right underneath your butt you're starting to feel, like, consistent, sort of, like, pinchy, uncomfortable feelings, right?

That's, likely a tendon thing. Even though your muscles are ready, your tendons aren't yet. They need more time, they need consistent input, right? So you need to keep doing the stuff that you're working on, building the strength, but not necessarily pushing super hard. And then once you get about 12 months in your whole body should really be starting to adapt.

You if you've been showing up consistently, right? You should be starting to feel a little bit stronger. Probably you're going to feel a little bit more stability. You're going to feel your ability to keep your position in space a little bit better. You're probably going to notice cardiovascular endurance, right?

Your ability to do things for longer is getting a little bit better. So all those things are probably going to be changing. And you'll start to really notice it around the three months mark.

But three months is a long time, right? Like if you're taking one class a week, that's 12 weeks, that's 12 classes, right?

So again, give yourself grace. Know that it's going to take time. Know that this is a process. And if you're in a class with a bunch of people who already have, you know joints and muscles that are super strong from somewhere else, and all they're doing is that learning, that motor learning to figure out how things go, they may be doing things like week two, week three, week four, that it's going to take you another 10 weeks to get to.

And that's okay. Right. Because they've already undergone, a lot of the strengthening processes that you're undergoing right now. That's normal. That is. Super normal. That's where I was when I started. Don't beat yourself up. Know that it's going to happen. You know, love on your body. Be like, okay, this is hard, but I'm building strength.

My muscles are adapting. My tendons are adapting. My nervous system is adapting. My heart's adapting. We are getting better at this by virtue of just continuing to show up and try. So be nice to yourself, have a realistic timeline in mind and know that it's going to be your timeline and that your timeline is going to be different than other people's timeline, and that's okay.

All right. Third thing. This is a big one. Don't, don't do it alone. Bring a friend, have a buddy. And obviously, cause I teach online I'm always really interested in the effects of a virtual environment. And research on that. And guess what? Having a virtual buddy who's exercising with you is very effective in helping you to exercise for longer and put in more effort.

And again, keeping in mind, we're trying to keep it in the gentle adaptation sort of coming into it curve. We're not trying to push ourselves super hard. But having someone else there with you can help you show up more often. Can help you, you know, push yourself a little bit further than you might have on your own. And also just help with general overall motivation.

So there's a really really good study from 2012 Irwin et al. They were looking at people who are bicycling and they had a buddy who's zooming in and bicycling with them or not. This is indoor biking. And having a buddy and it really helped, doubled the amount of time that people were able to, to bicycle and enjoy themselves.

So having a buddy, having a friend if you have other friends who are learning to pole, you can have playdates with them. If you wanted to say live online classes, I teach five a week at this point. So I'd be super happy to have you join us. They're a good time.

So those are the three things that I really want you to go away with. So one is. Ease into it. Ease into it. Go so slowly, especially that first day back, especially, you know, that first time you get your pole, especially like your first one, gently, gently, gently, gently, gently, do not push yourself too hard.

Really go into it nice and easy.

Do give yourself time and have a realistic timeline in in your mind, right? Again, we're talking like three months for your body to really begin to see system wide adaptation. So don't, you know, don't beat yourself up. Don't compare yourself to someone who's been weightlifting for 20 years and comes in and does like cool flips the second day of class. Their body's undergone a lot more adaptation to that type of physical stress than yours has.

It's apples and oranges. There's, enormous variety in people's movement backgrounds. You know, I don't know what your movement background is. Maybe you used to be a professional gymnast and you're still hitting the gym three times a week and you're going to come into your first pole class and pick things up really quickly because you can use a lot of movement patterns that you already have in your body.

And also you've got a long history of subjecting your body to stress that it's acclimatized to. And if that's you, I mean, presumably you are not starting from zero, right? Like you're starting from 10 and trying to get to 11 as opposed to someone who is. completely sedentary. This is where I when I where I was when I started. Wasn't exercising.

Like I went to my grad school office and I worked all day and I came home and I worked all night and then I did not sleep enough. And then the next day I went into the office and I worked all day. I was, I was burning myself out. Anyway, that's a story for another day. But when I started pole, I had no level of physical fitness whatsoever.

And it took me a really long time. It took me about three months to start seeing adaptations where I was beginning to be able to consistently learn the beginner tricks we were trying to learn. So if it's taking you a while. That's normal. That's usual. Have that in mind. Know going into it.

And then finally bring a friend, right?

Like having social support if that's something that you enjoy, that's something that you benefit from can really, really help the process. It can help make it more fun. It can help keep you motivated and help, keep you showing up because again, you got to get through those three months to start seeing the tendon adaptation.

Some folks will actually say nine months. I tend to see that people tend to notice changes around three months, but They're slow, they take so long, right? So don't worry if your journey is slow, that's normal. Mine was. Give yourself time, give yourself grace, get a buddy and get out there.

pole is wonderful. You wouldn't be listening to this if you didn't already think that probably. And I hope you have a really wonderful entry or return to pole.

That's all I've got for you this time. I hope you have a great time. You're having a great. I was going to say great fall, but I guess some of y'all are in the southern hemisphere, so great fall slash spring and I will talk to you very, very soon.

Bye!