Happy Saturday! Today I want to talk about my awesome impromptu practice I had on Thursday night.

Sometimes when you get the urge to pole, you have to pole. That’s how I was feeling the other night on my way home from work. I got home around 7:30 and I figured I would pole for 10, 15 minutes at most before eating dinner. The next thing I know, it’s already 9:30! I wanted to keep going since I was having such a productive session but my body was becoming fatigued and my form was starting to get sloppy, which is always a good indication of when I should stop.

From top left clockwise: superman variation, elbow grip variation, closed inside leg hang (contortion scorpio), another superman variation

What made this such a good practice?

1. I practiced my “bad side”

I am left side dominant (which means I invert with my pole to the left side), so one of my goals this month is to practice more on my “bad side” in order to avoid injuries and prevent muscular imbalances. I decided to work on my gemini climb (aka circus climb), which requires you to do a gemini on both sides in order to climb up the pole. For some reason I’ve been having a lot of trouble figuring out the correct positioning of my left knee pit on the pole. Every time I try to grip the pole with my knee pit, my left hand gets stuck under my knee, making it hard for me to move my left hand up the pole to pull myself up. I think the problem is that I don’t pull my hips high enough up to the pole and I’m hooking my knee too low on the pole. But with practice comes perfection, right?

2. I came up with a combo for the first time

One of my pole weaknesses is stringing moves together. I’m good at executing individual moves, but I have trouble when it comes to combining them together. Mostly it’s because of my sweaty hands (which I will discuss in more detail in a later post), but it’s also because I’m not very creative on the spot, and by the time I think of a move to do I’ve already disrupted the flow of the movement. During this practice though, as I was working on my gemini climb, I naturally let my body go with the music and I came up with a pretty sweet combo: gemini climb to an inverted crucifix, switching to my right side inside leg hang into a spinning scorpio, coming down into a scorpio handstand, hooking my leg to a gemini and then finishing in a superman. I probably practiced this combo 10 – 15 times, and even though I couldn’t do it perfectly, I definitely saw an improvement in the fluidity between my moves.

This was a really fun and productive practice and I’m really excited to keep coming up with different combos! It’s really nice to sometimes focus on improving the moves that I already have, rather than always concentrating on getting new moves.

Check out my pole combo below (with a bonus elbow grip ayesha at the end!):