The Masochist Diaries

Pole dancing, like many other sports, is an activity for a masochist. Firstly, it is physically demanding and hence muscle fatigue and cramping, along with shortness of breath, are to be expected. Also, it is easy to get injured, especially in the beginning, as the muscles that you use, and the moves that you do, are really nothing like any daily activity, or even the more traditional sports. I've injured my lower back two times when I was learning to get upside down on the pole; it is easy to get overzealous and stop listening to your body. Furthermore, you get an influx of adrenaline and endorphins while on the pole learning new moves, so often times, an injury is not noticed until the next day. While preparing for a competition, I strained my right wrist during practice, but didn't feel the pain (read: so weak, can't even lift up a teacup) until the next morning. Back, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands are the most common injuries in this sport.

I've found that because there are not as many repetitive motions in pole, the injuries that you do get tend to heal much faster. With track, I ran the risk (no pun intended) to be out for a complete season as hurting an ACL, a hamstring, or a meniscus and not noticing/treating it in time makes the injury much more extensive due to the repetitive motions required for running. With pole, excluding your dominant shoulder/wrist/hand, the injuries tend to heal over a weekend, or maximum a week. This doesn't mean you are safe, as you can still strain something pretty badly and be out for months, but my general tendency seems to be more injuries, but less time required to heal. Most injuries I get stem from my stubborn nature and inability to stop while I'm ahead - overworking. As I said above, it is important to really listen to your body and know when to push, and when to get shoved.

In addition to the serious stuff, there are also the battle scars of pole dancing:

• Blisters: remember spending hours on the monkey bars, and coming home to your parents sporting blisters on your palms? You'll get to do it all over again if you start pole! The hands take quiet a beating, especially while developing your grip or getting used to new moves. The blisters do eventually go away only because they get replaced by callouses. If you are a primped up, well manicure, high maintenance, chihuahua carrying, hair sprayed piece of work, pole is definitely not for you. (Although, I just described elements of many of the ladies at my studio, so I don't know how much truth that statement holds...basically, kiss your soft hands good bye.)
• Bruises: these are common as you spend a lot of time crashing into the pole or falling to the floor. Also, the nature of the sport is getting pressure off your feet, and onto some other part of your body as you hang on a vertical brass bar, and since the rest of your body is not used to pressure, you get bruises. Spins or moves that require leg holds (fallen angel, x-grabs, knee holds) are well known culprits.
• Pole Burn: this one is my personal favourite. Hanging off the pole by your elbow, back of the knee, or your thighs may look pretty, but feels utterly horrific, especially when you are starting out. You are basically taking your skin and making it stick to the brass through muscle pressure and natural friction. The nerve endings literally feel like they are burning. Some famous culprits: skydiver, jack-knife, chopsticks, and of course drops.
• Scratches: to this day, I am unclear as to how I get scratched on the pole. The pole itself should be smooth and polished, but I suppose when you are in the midst of twisting yourself into a pretzel (yes, there is a pole move called that), you don't notice when you start drawing blood. Once, I somehow managed to scratch the inside of my thigh with my high-heel while getting into the helicopter (another pole move), and I remember while doing some floor spins, my right arm went rogue on me and I scratched my forehead o_O When I went to Burning Man back in 2010, there were so many poles there, I practiced every day, but paid for it the next morning through millions of tiny scratches. I'm still mystified as to what the source of those was; perhaps something in the playa dust?
• Flesh Wounds: I'm not kidding you. This all goes back to the fact that you are really not used to putting much pressure on anything on your body other than your feet, so if, for example, you are practicing your shoulder mount, the spot where the pole connects to your shoulder, is going to get very sore. For the first few months of that move, I had an all out flesh wound that I'd cover up with some make up so that my dates wouldn't notice. When I practiced Cowgirl spin into shoulder mount, I literally drew blood. "Umm, you should probably stop doing whatever you were doing, because you are bleeding," someone at the studio said to me, and sure enough, looking in the mirror, there was a stream of crimson tricking down my back...

So, although pole will turn you into a streamlined flexible muscly machine, it will also make you look like a victim of an abusive boyfriend, at least for the time periods when you are learning new moves. If only there were someone out there smart enough to create a material that has the texture of human skin, yet is very durable, and still light enough to support being active, so we can protect our sensitive bits. HINT HINT NUDGE NUDGE. I promise you I'll get you a nice little niche market for your troubles ;)

What Separates the Men from the Boys

I've always considered myself fairly hard core as far as athletics were concerned. I was female athlete of the year three years in a row in high school, was a star in basketball and volleyball, and made my university varsity track-and-field team, which had the strongest female middle distance team in the NAIA. Naturally, I was feeling extremely confident during my first days at the pole studio. Unfortunately for me, the full range of movement required for the combination of dance and gymnastics that is pole, was never a criteria for my training in the past. It was a brutal blow to my ego and confidence when I started facing the below issues:

1. I am 6 feet tall. I was always proud of my height and body, and you probably won't meet another woman out there who has a better body image of herself than me, but trying to lift 3.5 feet worth of limbs vs 2.5 feet makes a huge difference as far as physics are concerned (yes, I did just measure the length of my legs...). At the beginning, some moves took me  twice or three times as long to learn as the average height girls. 
2. I have ZERO flexibility. If you have kids/planning to have kids, do not let them become professional runners! Your hips, hamstrings, calves, back, knees, and shoulders tighten up worse than Pinocchio, not mention the high impact jarring that missaligns the spine, knees, and feet. Do you really want all that, in addition to a raging endorphin addiction??? 
3. My muscles are retarded. I grew up as a lean running machine, with minimal muscle mass to keep off bulk. Add to that the fact that tall people develop later (yes, weak and pathetic in addition to flat and non-hippy, huzzah!), and all of a sudden I'm at the back of the class, feeling like my ass has a sack of potatoes attached to it, while everyone else is doing back flips off the pole. I didn't really start developing major  back/shoulder/thigh muscles required until 1.5 years into this endeavor.
4. My metabolism is in overdrive. This doesn't sound like a disadvantage to a normal person, but it's a deal breaker for a poler. It takes me 2 minutes to get my body scorching, and I don't cool down for a good half hour. Just a little moisture on my hands, shoulders, and elbows, and I'm slipping on the brass (and especially chrome) worse than a gecko on Teflon. I have developed a system to keep myself as cool and grippy as possible through a combination of an industrial fan aimed straight at my pole, and three different types of grips (aka handcrack): liquid chalk based, liquid glue based, and powder chalk based. Someone invent a pole-suit already! There is a market for these things! (More on pole gear later).

But I also came to the studio with a lot of advantages: my core was strong, my endurance could beat the likes of the Energizer Bunny, and above all I had the training habits of a serious athlete, so I didn't expect less from myself than the usual 110%. I came to the studio 5 or 6 times a week for two hours, training on the pole, stretching, strengthening my hips, and undergoing basic dance instruction. I went to the gym to work on my wrist and back muscles. I ran to keep up my endurance so that one day I could perform a 4 minute routine (which as I found out is very much akin to the intense 800 m races I used to run). Now, after almost three years of this, I'm starting to see the beginning of some results. 

Still, that is not enough to be a professional pole athlete. 99% of pros come from an intense gymnastics, dance, and sometimes ballet background, and are fit to join the ranks of Curque du Soleil. They train consistently, and at a young age, in the classics, and tend to stumble onto aerial pole as adults. As with most sports, there is a specific body type that gives you optimum advantages: being short and stout, much like in gymnastics, is the best combination. This sport clearly doesn't deserve any of the stigma and stereotypes that the public puts onto it. The pros and amateurs of today are not just pole athletes, they are pioneers!

Ab Initio

I remember the day I became a pole addict like it was yesterday, which is saying something as it was the night my girlfriend and I were high-impact partying in a small club in the suburbs.


We were pretty much regulars at that club back then, since it was a couple of blocks away from my girlfriend's house. It had a gorgeous 2.0 inch diameter solid brass pole that was about 10 feet high (they don't make them like that anymore). That beauty never really saw much action, until a tubby brunette girl decided to bravely get up and pull off a couple of moves. Now that I think back about it, nothing she did was that complicated - moves that I learned in my first couple of months of poling - but it did look much more impressive than the usual cheesy rubbing that ladies attempt in drunken stupor.  The crowd cheered, and I was completely awestruck. While other girls at the venue echoed cries of "slut" and threw dirty looks around the room, all I could think of was "I have to learn how to do that".


Hungover the next morning, with YouTube on my laptop, I started researching what has now grown into an almost unhealthy obsession. Professional performances, amateur pole competitions, and online training videos whirled in front of my eyes and sucked me deeper into this new world of vertical acrobatics. I saw graceful displays of intricate and original choreography, a mixture of gymnastics and dance that was inspiring and super-human. And all this was done on a brass pole 10 feet in the air, with no mats, helmets, or nets - and usually in high heels. I was sold.


I was living with my parents at the time, so purchasing a pole and installing it in my home was out of the question. My parents wouldn't find out about my poling adventures until two years later. I did however get the brilliant idea of practicing the moves I learned off YouTube videos on an abandoned tether-ball post at a neighborhood elementary school; I did this in the early hours of the weekends, when the school was deserted.  Nothing I practiced was outrageous or sexy, in fact it was a lot of falling and crashing into the pole as I had no idea what I was doing, but I was so determined to figure it out on my own that I resorted to that particular plan. By the way, practicing on a tether-ball post is not advised, as they are usually weathered and rough; within 20 minutes, the skin on my hands was blistering and ripping. (Stay tuned for a post about pain and poling.)


This went on for a couple of weeks until I convinced my boyfriend at the time to allow me to install a removable pole at his place. I got my first one from craigslist, which I quickly traded for a new one from a local vendor. Since neither of us knew how to install or use the thing properly, one day my practice ended in the pole falling smack in between the flat screen TV and the fish tank. Up on the top of the closet it went, to collect dust, while I surfed the web in search of local pole dancing studios that offered lessons.


I bravely made the one hour trek downtown to sign up with a studio run by a reputable name in the Canadian pole dancing world. I was confident in my abilities, as I was a seasoned track-and-field runner of ten years. I made my university varsity team coming out of high-school, and only 1.5 years later had to have knee surgery, which put me out of the sport for the rest of my life. So, pole seemed like an easy and exciting substitute. WRONG. No amount of grueling circuit training and brutal 800 m races could have prepared me for the next part of my pole dance adventure. But don't worry, everything turns out fine in the end.

Introduction

Pole dance, or aerial pole, is an amazing sport that has made its way out of dingy clubs and circus rings, and into dance studios and private homes of men, women, and children all over the world! Unfortunately for the advocates of this activity, much negative stigma surrounds our beloved sport; after all, there is still a brass pole at 99.9% of strip clubs. It is due to this stereotype that I commit myself to this blog, the mission of which is to educate and entertain all those who are interested in aerial pole/pole dance, and to segregate the noble from the sleazy.

I have been practicing pole dancing for almost 3 years now, starting from complete scratch. My background is in middle distance running, so I have no flexibility, and no additional dance ability aside from my natural instincts. My range of movement involved running counter-clockwise laps on a rubber track for ten years, not anywhere close to the 360 degree matrix like demands of pole dancing. After much injuries, pain, and bravery, I'm now at a comfortable level, but still have eons to grow.


Join me in my memories, my adventures, my insight, and the progress of the sport and myself alike!