Can Pole Dance Help You De-stress?: The Science Behind Exercise and Stress Reduction

Show Notes:

In this episode of 'Science of Slink,' host Dr. Rosy Boa explores the evidence-based research surrounding the question 'Can pole dance help you de-stress?' Dr. Boa reviews various studies on how exercise, particularly aerobic activities like freestyle pole dancing, interact with the body’s stress systems to reduce stress. Topics include the physiological mechanisms like the HPA axis, recommendations for effective exercise regimens, and the benefits of integrating creative elements and deep breathing. Rosy also highlights the challenges of staying active when stressed and provides practical tips for incorporating stress-relieving activities into your routine.

Citations Mentioned:

Mastorakos, G., Pavlatou, M., Diamanti-Kandarakis, E., & Chrousos, G. P. (2005). Exercise and the stress system. Hormones (Athens), 4(2), 73-89.

Breus, M. J., & O'Connor, P. J. (1998). Exercise-induced anxiolysis: a test of the" time out" hypothesis in high anxious females. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 30(7), 1107-1112.

King, A. C., Baumann, K., O'Sullivan, P., Wilcox, S., & Castro, C. (2002). Effects of moderate-intensity exercise on physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to family caregiving: a randomized controlled trial. The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, 57(1), M26-M36.

Spalding, T. W., Lyon, L. A., Steel, D. H., & Hatfield, B. D. (2004). Aerobic exercise training and cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stress in sedentary young normotensive men and women. Psychophysiology, 41(4), 552-562.

Stults-Kolehmainen, M. A., & Sinha, R. (2014). The effects of stress on physical activity and exercise. Sports medicine, 44, 81-121.

Martin, L., Oepen, R., Bauer, K., Nottensteiner, A., Mergheim, K., Gruber, H., & Koch, S. C. (2018). Creative arts interventions for stress management and prevention—a systematic review. Behavioral Sciences, 8(2), 28.

Zaccaro, A., Piarulli, A., Laurino, M., Garbella, E., Menicucci, D., Neri, B., & Gemignani, A. (2018). How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 12, 353.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to the Science of Slink

00:32 The Stress-Relieving Power of Pole Dancing

01:11 Real-Life Experiences and Observations

05:25 Understanding the Science Behind Stress and Exercise

08:31 Effective Exercise Strategies for Stress Reduction

15:56 Incorporating Creativity and Deep Breathing

21:22 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript: 

Welcome to Science of Slink, the evidence based pole podcast with me, your host, Dr. Rosy Boa. That is, that is a research PhD, by the way. I am not a medical doctor and none of this is medical advice. What it is, is going to be a research review of some of the research that is going to answer the question that I have posed in the title, can pole help you de stress?

Spoiler alert, yes, that's the answer. If that's the only thing you wanted to know, So, so nice to have, have had your ears for a second and I will see you later. But if you are here for the science, that's what we're going to get into. Some of the mechanisms by which exercise is hypothesized to, you know, interact with stress, Recommendations around how much, what kinds, in order to get the greatest stress reducing benefit.  And also a couple of other things that are sort of related to things that I certainly do in class and teach about that help to further increase this, this stress reducing ability that pole dance has.

And I actually was going to do something else for this episode. I was going to talk about a bunch of sort of the scientific fields that I draw on when I'm, I'm doing my research around these things and sort of, you know, break down here some of the major journals and here's what each field does.

But we were in class on Wednesday  and coming into class, like everyone who's there live, cause some people joined through the recordings and some people joined live. Everyone who was there live, we came into class, we all felt awful  we were fucking stressed. We were having a bad time. We didn't want to be there.

I shouldn't say I didn't want to be there. I did want to be there. But you know students were like, you know what? I, I'm kind of dragging myself to be here today. I'm doing the best I can, but I am not feeling it. I'm only here because you're here basically.  Which I get, let's be honest, we've all been there in our, in our pole classes in various times.

And then at the end of the class, you're having a little debrief at the end, and the folks who are live are like, You know what? I feel better. I feel rejuvenated. I feel good. I got those, those, you know, good, good exercise endorphins. And just like more hopeful, more resilient, less stressed, better in my body.

All around, every single person who was there live had that experience. And this is a thing I know to be true  from, you know, observation of, of teaching. Oh, that's another thing that we talked about  in class was I think I've been teaching pole for what, seven years at this point? Hey, oh, time continues to move forward, huh?

But one of the things that I have seen over and over again is that pole, especially, you know, not to toot my own horn, but especially the way that I teach it, can genuinely turn somebody's day around and help them feel better. And if you ever scrolled all the way down to the bottom of my website, a little stinger at the end is like, because pole should make you feel better.

Because it should, right? This is a thing that you are doing for fun to make your body feel better and your brain feel better, hopefully. And if it's not, something's wrong because we got really strong evidence that movement, and again, Particularly the way that I do it, because I incorporate a lot of these research findings into my work should make you feel better.

So,  it's a stressful time. Let's just not beat around the bush, especially if you are a marginalized or multi marginalized person in the U. S. right now, if you are queer if, you know, you're none of those things, but you work in science having, having a bad time right now. But  It is at these times when it is the most important that we remember what tools we have in our toolbox to take care of ourselves mentally and physically and to actually make time to show up and do it.

And if that means getting bullied into it by you know, your pole teacher friend on the internet. I'm happy to play that role for it for you. Make time to move. Hey, even, even if you're just listening to this, right? Maybe you pop on the podcast, maybe you go for a little walkie walk, right? Maybe you, you do some like more active chores, right?

Maybe you like wash the dishes or something. I like listening to podcasts and I like do dishes and vacuum and stuff. Maybe move your body a little bit while you're listening to this, if you can.

It's a stressful time. We know that exercise can help with stress, I'm about to tell you that in a bunch of different ways and also talk about the mechanisms and some other things that we can do to help and you know, some specific things that you can do to make your, your practice even more effective but also, I want to acknowledge that it's not going to make the stressors go away, it's just going to make you more resilient to deal with them And,  and this is just Mama Rosy, this is me being old you are under no obligation to give yourself secondary trauma, right?

If consistently, say, checking the news every couple hours is making you feel bad, Don't do that, right? Like, you absolutely, especially, again, I'm talking about U. S. folks you absolutely have a, you know, responsibility to be informed about the things that you can do stuff about, but you do not need to keep opening the box full of horrors every couple minutes and be like, ah, horrors are still there.

Oh, look, a new one. I'm counting them. I'm imagining what it would be like to eat one of these horrors, even though no one is making me eat it right now, right? Like, that's. That's not good for you. It's going to burn you out. It's going to reduce your overall capacity to do shit in your life and show up for yourself, for your community, for people around you.

So don't do it to yourself. And I'm talking to me here. I'm talking to me just as much as anybody, right? We have to take care of ourselves, our suffering, each of our individual suffering adds to the whole, we cannot, you know, through our martyrdom of feeling bad, make everything magically better. That's not how it works, so alright, I'll get, I'll get off my soapbox.

Let's get into the science.

First off, very well established exercise can help reduce our stress response. And in terms of what's the, what's the mechanism here. And I'm going to say straight off I'm a fitness professional, right?

Like I certainly have training in you know.  some degree of anatomy and physiology and just sort of general body stuff. But I am not not an organic chemist. I cannot get into the nitty gritty. But the pathways seem to be and this is from exercise and stress system from hormones in 2005 the general mechanisms.

There is a stress system in the brain, quote unquote, and also it's sort of distributed throughout the body. So in particular the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, sometimes we'll see that HPA,  hormones, you know, and also the autonomic sympathetic system. So nervous system. So it is in your brain.

Yes. But also it is distributed throughout your body. And I think you know that right? Like you get really stressed. There's a big adrenaline spike. Your heart rate goes up. Your blood pressure grows up. Your heart rate variability goes down. It's less variable between heartbeats. So cortisol levels in the saliva spike, right?

It's distributed throughout your body. It is not just in the brain, but obviously the brain plays a pretty big role. And exercise helps to interact with that system in a way that reduces the some of these systems, but not others. So one of the sort of main takeaways from, from the particular article that I'm, I'm citing here, which is Mastorakos, Mastorakos et al.  I feel pretty confident saying that's Greek and it's Greek to me, a person who does not speak Greek. And yeah. One of the things that they pointed out is that exercise helps to modulate especially this HPA axis, right? The hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and that system.

Not quite so much things like reducing overall levels of cortisol. In fact, if you're a long term intense exerciser, that may actually raise your sort of base levels of cortisol. And of course, hormones are extremely complex in the ways that they interact with the body, right? It's not like up good, down bad, you know,  there's an optimum range, and for different things and you want them to fluctuate.

And homeostasis is good, but we don't have complete homeostasis all the time because we're, we're squishy machines that are, that are very, very complex. So I don't want to reduce the complexity of this but One of the main takeaways from this article is, yes, exercise can help reduce the physiological symptoms of stress.

However, long term, particularly very high intensity exercise can actually lead to greater stress on the body and can lead to secondary effects of disruption of the hormonal system. So particularly for folks who menstruate, things like amenorrhea.

That's the sort of general mechanism. That said, when we are looking at specifically what interventions can we do to reduce someone's symptoms of stress, right? So these could be self reported. There's a number of psychological batteries that people will, will use for this. Or again, it could be a physiological measure. So we could do something like heart rate variability. We could do something like cortisol in the saliva. We could do something like heart rate.

Various symptoms that are associated with higher stress. We do have some information. So one thing that we know is that part of what makes exercise effective for reducing stress is the fact that it's often a break from the stressors themselves, right? So this is Briosch 1998 exercise induced

 Anxiolysis, A N X I O L Y S I S in medicine and science and sports and exercise.

They were looking at, you know, is it just exercise or is it exercise plus you getting a break from the thing that's stressing you out. So they had, they had a bunch of different conditions but the two that I'm most interested in here are, they had a condition where people exercised.

You know, just spending time doing that and then and the stress here was from school. They had people exercise while studying and what they found was that the exercise while studying didn't help.  It didn't reduce the, the stress factors that they were measuring as much as just exercising on its own is.

So. exercising, right? Like interacting with hormones, all that, you know, all that jazz in the body. But also it's giving your brain a break. So that period of disconnection from whatever it is that your stressor is, is part of what makes exercise effective.

So if you're a home poler and, you know, one of the things that's stressing you out is let's say caregiving duties and you are not able to do your home pole in a place where you are away from your caregiving duties it's probably not going to be as effective as if, say, you were in a room where you can close the door, right?

Or where someone else is able to, to take point on those caregiving duties where you give yourself some time not only to move your body, good, great, we love it but also to give yourself a break from the thing that is stressing you out.

If we're looking at dosage, right, like how much do you actually need and this is from King et al., 2002, effects of moderate intensity exercise on physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to family caregiving. Caregiving is another one of these stressors that they, they tend to use because it's a, it's a chronic stressor that, I mean, anyone who's ever been in that position is. It's very aware, it's hard and it's a, a lot, and you don't really get a lot of breaks.

This is RCT, Randomized Control Trial in journals of gerontology. And what they found was they were looking for, like, how much do you need to do to get a measurable effect? And I think they were actually looking at a full, a full year of the intervention. And what they found was that if folks were doing between 120 to 160 minutes a week, so about three hours they had measurable improvements on their, their stress scores on all these psychological batteries that they were using.

So about three hours a week. And also that is. In terms of general health and well being, also the general recommendation, so there is that big cardiology study a while ago that I've talked about a couple times.  That was looking at the amount of exercises needed to reduce all causes mortality, and it's right around three hours of moderate intensity exercise a week,  which is about what I give my students  in my membership.

That's about what I teach. I actually teach a little bit more than that, especially because I want to give folks more chance to, to join live. So I might, might be adding a couple more classes in the future, possibly. But three hours is fine. You don't need to do more than that.

Type of exercise aerobic exercise seems to be more beneficial than strength building or weight training exercise.

And this is Spalding et al. 2004 in psychophysiology, aerobic exercise training and cardiovascular activity to psychological stress in sedentary young normotensive men and women. So we're not looking at people with high or low blood pressure, which is another thing that we can use as a, as a stress measure.

And what they found was aerobic exercise. So something that gets your heart rate up basically where the processes that are happening in your body are using oxygen was more beneficial than strength training, specifically, they were looking at weightlifting. In like a pole setting, I would say that this is freestyling is what I would call more aerobic.

So when I'm building my, when I'm building my programming for my members,  members close your ears if you don't want to know a secret.  The freestyle classes that we do twice a week, that's your cardio, that's your aerobic exercise, right? Because you, you dance for most of the hour, right?

You spend most of the hour moving. You're, you're making demands on your heart. And it's not necessarily high intensity, right? Like it's moderate intensity but that consistent movement is aerobic and it's It was a freestyle class that people were really feeling better after, as opposed to something like a conditioning class or strength building class it's not necessarily going to be as effective.

I think you'll still see some effect, but it's not going to be to the same degree as you will with aerobic exercise. So if you're like, I'm going to lose my mind if I don't somehow regulate aerobic exercise, freestyling, pop on some tunes, boogie down get your heart rate up, basically, is what I'm trying to get at.

Some tips and specific takeaways that you, you can use here. Definitely does help. Mechanism is through integrating with the stress system and then these body wide systems that react to stress.

more effective than other interventions, and particularly if you get a break from your stressors while you're moving and that that is part of what seems to give you the benefit around three hours a week.  You know, you can do more if you want to do more, right, especially if we're, especially if we're avoiding getting into that, like, a lot of high intensity exercise where you start to see negative repercussions in terms of your physical health but three hours is plenty and then specifically aerobic exercise, right, so something where you're moving a little bit more, your heart rate's getting up a little bit more rather than, like, I do one maximal lift and then I rest for five minutes.

That's not quite as quite as helpful for specifically the stress reduction. For strength building You know, depending on your programming, that may be what is most beneficial, but not necessarily for stress reduction.

And I will say, no one has looked at stress in poles specifically but there is, and we talked about this a while ago, the Pfeiffer et al 2023 study, effect of pole dance on mental well being and the sexual self concept, a pilot RCT, Randomized Control trial in BMC psychology.

And basically what they found was that it does improve mental well being, but they weren't specifically looking at stress and they weren't using some of the same measures of psychological and physiological stress that some of these other studies are. So it's not quite apples to apples, but the closest thing we have suggests that yes, pole dancing does improve have the same effects, which, like, why wouldn't it? It's still exercise. It counts

And it's at this point in which I include the unfortunate kicker which is that.

Alas there's a direction in the other fact is an effect in the other direction as well, which is that stress actually makes it harder to be physically active, unfortunately. So this is a kind of a bummer  meta analysis from sports medicine by Stoltz. Colemanen and Sinha 2014, the effects of stress on physical activity and exercise, and what they found was overwhelmingly all the studies they looked at, the more stressed you are, the less likely you were to be able to make time to move, right, the more hurdles you had.

Which makes sense, right, because when we have, you know, big life stressors, usually that cuts into our leisure time, which is part of what makes it stressful and just in general makes it harder to be physically active.  Which is where, you know, and I've got a lot of episodes on this, right? Like what can help with your motivation?

Some of the big things,  you know, do something that's pleasurable, do something that you genuinely enjoy, right? That you want to show up for do something in communities. You have other people there to support you do something where you feel like you have a high locus of control, right? Where you have a lot of ability to choose what it is you do.

 Part of what I think makes freestyle particularly effective. I could not find any studies on specifically freestyle dance and stress but. That ability to choose what you do, I think is part of what makes freestyle so effective and easy to come back to as opposed to some other types of some other types of pole movement.

But, there's some other things you can also do and can incorporate into your pole practice whether you're working with me, whether you're on your own, whatever you're doing, that I think are also really helpful.

And one of those is including a creative element. Now, if you remember I don't think anyone has specifically published research on dance therapy and pole, but we did talk to Dr. Cat Liang a while ago. I think the episode title is something like, Dance therapy and pole dance who has done some sort of exploratory work on it that I don't believe has been published yet.

But incorporating a dance element, incorporating a, um, creative element we do know can be particularly effective for stress reduction. So there's a really good meta study is from 2018. So a little bit older in behavioral sciences. Creative Arts Interventions for Stress Management and Prevention, a systematic review.

We love systematic reviews, we love meta reviews, meta studies. All great because they pulled together a bunch of evidence and research. And this is Martin et al. And basically what they did, what they were looking at a bunch of studies around different types of creativity and arts therapy, including dance.

Looking at specifically the effect on stress. And what they found was they helped.  Overall the studies they looked at in all of these different fields 81 percent of the included studies reported a significant reduction of stress in participants due to the interventions in one of these four modalities.

And then looking specifically at dance studies analyzing DMT, Dance Movement Therapy, or dance interventions found a significant reduction of stress signs, and this is all of them that they looked at there were six in the study and two thirds, so four of those six reported a decrease in anxiety levels and negative affect.

And affect is like, sort of your emotions about stuff, so positive affect would be positive emotions, and negative affect would be negative emotions. So,  above just exercise, dance specifically, something where there is a creative component, also seems to really help and seems to be pretty effective.

 And then finally, and this is, listen, everyone has told you to do this, but I'm going to tell you also, and if you're not doing it, yeah, maybe, maybe you sprinkle it a little bit. And this is deep breathing. And I think that this. It can be something that can be incorporated in a pole practice.

So folks who've taken class with me know that every time we start, I have us be still for a moment, breathe, focus on our breath, a little, little mind body connection moment at the beginning of class. And and I will sometimes, particularly before flexibility, when I'm trying to help you get to a more regulated nervous system, so those flexibility interventions are going to work better.

I will cue deep breathing particularly. So deep breathing and this is from another meta study. We love systematic reviews, right? From 2018, Zakhar Wadol in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience How Breath Control Can Change Your Life. I don't love that title, but a systematic review on psychophysiological correlates of slow breathing.

And for them, for their study, they were looking at Six breaths per minute as sort of their threshold for slow, which sounds like very few, but then if you think about it, that would be like five seconds of inhale, five seconds of exhale,  which, you know, think, inhale, two, three, four, five, exhale, two, three, four, five.

It's slow, but it's not undoable. And I am reading directly from the study here.  A common trend emerges in some of the included studies, namely the association between an increase of heart rate variability, so I mentioned one of those, those physiological correlates of stress, more variability is good in this case and of LF power during slow breathing techniques, six breaths per minute and psychological behavioral outcomes of decreased anxiety, side effects of relaxation and arousal so lower arousal.

So one of the ways that sort of mental emotional state is described in psychology is you have one axis that's affect, so positive or negative, and another asset axis that's perpendicular to that, which is arousal, high or low. So high affect, high arousal would be like joy, low affect, low arousal would be like depression.

Or, you know, moroseness, I guess. Together with increased ease and comfort, relaxation, positive energy and pleasantness. So the pulling together a lot of the work on deep breathing, it does seem to be associated with overall reduction in stress signals as well, so.

All of this together, what is my recommendation? If you're like, I got to put together this pole practice to help reduce stress as much as possible. Spoiler alert. I do these in my classes. I teach online if you want to come take a class with me. But I would start with slow breathing. You know, maybe think about six breaths a minute especially to music.

I didn't get too much into the music literature here. But. Music can help reduce stress. I don't think that's a surprise to anybody listening. Start with some slow breathing, focus on movement. That's not necessarily particularly strength challenging, but where you're moving continuously, focusing on including some creativity.

So I do like, honestly you know, an hour of free dance three times a week will will change your life.  It might, I mean, it changed mine. Just a little aside, but when I was in grad school, I, I saw a therapist because I was not doing good. And after I'd been dancing for a while, she graduated me.

She was like, I don't,  listen, this is not helping you as much as your dance time is helping you. So you know, I, like, I don't think you need me anymore. I'm not saying that will happen to you. This is no guarantee of the outcome of my services, but that is what happened to me. So,  all this to say,  Shit's stressful.

Life is stressful, usually, for adults, and I think right now, even more so, especially for marginalized folks, folks who are  in a, in a position of uncertainty, right? And I think we do know that that is one of the things that's associated with just like, real, real bad stress is just not having a sense of control and having a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen.

And that's, that's a lot of us right now. And being able to help your body manage that stress, right? Giving yourself, you know, more space in your brain, more capacity to do things rather than, you know, getting, getting stuck in sort of a Unpleasant headspace you can't get yourself out of is incredibly powerful.

It's an incredibly powerful tool. You know, you can absolutely,  it's a business. Come take classes with me, but you know, you can also just do it on your own, right? Put on a song, boogie down. Give yourself some time. Do some deep breathing. You know, focus on focus on aerobic exercise focus on something where you can give yourself a break from your stressors in some way, right?

Like you, you have a time of separation, whether it's temporal or physical or even just mental.  Give yourself, give yourself that right? Like it's not, it's not even a gift. It's like  movement is your birthright. Right. You, you get to move. So you kind of have to move if you want to keep moving. And  making time for it, prioritizing it is not selfish.

It is necessary. You know, helping encourage other people in your life to do the same thing for themselves. Again, not selfish. It's necessary. You need to take care of yourself. We, you know, we need you out here. And also we need you to be functional and you know, as  doing the best you possibly can given the situation, right? Know that being stressed is going to make it harder. Give yourself some grace but as much as you can, do what you can. And I think the evidence is pretty clear that it should help at least a little. And you know, if you're the type of person who is convinced by scientific research hopefully that gives you a little, little, little nudge, little nudge to, to go, you know, make some time to move, maybe sign up for a class.

All right. Well, that's all I have for you today. And I hope that you are doing as well as you possibly can. And slink with you very, very soon. And if not, I will, we'll see you elsewhere.  Take care of yourself and take care of the people around you and I will talk to you very soon.

Bye!