Pole dancing is a liberating experience— it imbues you with a sense of power over your body that makes it both exciting and uplifting. Of course, anyone can try out this activity. In an interview on the possibilities of pole dancing, Anna Kia even advises, “Don’t talk yourself out of it by saying my body isn’t ready, I am not strong enough, not small enough. Pole is for everyone and everybody!” Certainly, pole dancing has become an inspiring and accessible way for people to feel joy and relieve stress. However, it is still important to gear your body for the strenuous activities pole dancing entails, especially so you can avoid incurring bad falls, sprains, and broken bones. Because this fitness activity necessitates a full body immersion, it’s important for you to develop your muscle strength and flexibility. Fortunately, any one of the five exercises we’ve listed below will do just that, and stand as an excellent complement to your pole dancing.

Lifting weights

Lifting weights can help you achieve the strength gains and performance improvements that pole dancing requires. However, you should create a program that focuses on muscle strengthening that is specific to the activity. For instance, doing farmer’s walks is a great way to stabilize your shoulders, improve your grip strength and tone your legs. Meanwhile, reverse flys let you work on your upper back muscles. This can reinforce balanced strength in the upper body and prevent injury from slipping on the pole.

Yoga

One of the reasons why yoga is a popular practice is because it increases flexibility. This is because as you adapt to various physical postures, the elasticity of your connective tissues increases. Specific yoga poses can do wonders for your flexibility on the pole. To boost your hamstring flexibility, try choppers, pole splits, and jade splits. For your back, incorporate the crescent moon, cobra, or wheel. These inversions can make you more comfortable being upside down. Not to mention, using the weight of your own body helps alleviate the strain that may come with more demanding pole dancing techniques.

Pilates

Pilates is a form of low-impact exercise that not only strengthens muscles, it also improves postural alignment and flexibility. The ability to control and stabilize your muscles is important in pole dancing since uncontrolled movements can result in an injury. To activate the correct muscles during your pole techniques, utilize breathing exercises, shoulder bridge preparation, leg lifts, and toe taps.

Calisthenics

Calisthenics combines aerobic and anaerobic exercises and requires nothing but your own bodyweight. It provides you with a solid strength base, which is important if you want to incorporate external resistance into your training. Calisthenics makes pole dancing easier, as it improves your muscle strength and allows you to lift your body weight. Start off your own calisthenics routine with leg raises, lunges, push-ups, and squats. You can gradually increase each set as time goes by.

Cardio Exercises

One factor that makes cardio exercises crucial in pole dancing is that dancers are essentially performing acrobatic techniques. With that, it’s important to build endurance that allows you to sustain some of the more intense moves. Consider reducing your cardio sessions to four-minute workouts. Alternate between full-effort exercises (doing flips, high kicks, or power spins), high-intensity ones like dancing or aerobics, and recovery to mimic the demands of pole dancing.

Exclusively written for polefitnessdancing.com by Allie Cooper