[iani]

So, I got BITNB, and since I was the one starting this thread asking for reviews.. I thought it would be good to leave one, too =)

From a strength perspective: it’s not amazing, it will definitely not replace any conditioning sessions in the gym, and tbh the legs/butt sections feel rushed and a bit useless. Ab section on the other hand is nice, and I find it much better and ore useful and functional than the crunch-fest that was abs on RLNA. Keep in mind, strength is not the main objective of the video, so it makes sense it’s not amazing, and the good thing is that even the leg/ab exercises are back flexibility oriented.

Everything else: REALLY GOOD. The flexibility exercises are sound, good, well paced and pretty well explained, I like the sequence they are in, and how you are always led through opening your shoulders before starting the actual back bending, and encouraged to not only bend from your lower back. A lot of active flexibility, and of simple exercises to open up backs that are tight from sitting in an office all day. Bridge section is also VERY good imho, giving good pointers on how to improve.

Music is cool like always, and I now have a total crush on Stacey, too… so, as everyone else said: if you liked RLNA, this is at least as good as that, of not better.
Caveat: it is VERY back specific (as if the name was not enough), so don’t think you can use this as your sole training program, cause it won’t do much for strength or lower-body flexibility.

PS: is it me, or Cleo’s arms and shoulders (and her whole body, tbh) are INCREDIBLE in this video? I always had a major crush on her, but she looks so *fit* and *healthy* in this one… *swoons*. Sorry 😀

[iani]

Yay!!! Thanks a lot, that’s exactly the kind of info I was looking for. It looks like my treat of the month is gonna be spent on Cleo! =)

[iani]

It’s harder because you are wearing something that restricts your movements and makes your brain fully aware of the fact you cannot jump down if all else should fail (tbh I doubt jumping out of a failed invert is ever an answer, but your brain is very gullible).
Mostly, though, you are putting sth fairly heavy at the end of a pretty long lever, and asking your abs to just perform the same, when conditions are definitely different. Physics can be a bitch.

[iani]

Thanks a lot =)
Sadly there’s no studs in this kind of ceiling, but my contractor is doing some calculations and studying up on safety requirements for rigging (I was lucky to find this guy!!) and will get back to me with options soon… can’t wait!

I am trying to avoid an A-frame for several reasons… price, space (pole and fly gym go more or less in the same place and I plan to swap them, if I have to move the A-frame every time I want to pole, I am gonna be too lazy), ease of cleaning around whatever solution I find… so I hope to figure out sth that can be attached to the ceiling.

[iani]

6 kids, respect! And with a ballet background, for many things you will need to remind your body how to do things rather than learn from scratch.
Try to figure out some clear goals of pole things you want to achieve, and then figure out what the steps for getting there are. It will make training in a consistent way easier, more fun, and seeing yourself achieve goals will make everything more rewarding.

And remember to train safe, and to make sure you are treating your body right. Pole is a lot of effort, and the potential for injury is proportional, I am sure you know this from ballet. Do all the research needed before trying something new, and if you train at home, make sure you have the strength and flexibility required before trying something new 🙂

[iani]

Honestly? With that attitude, you could be 20 and strong and flexy and get nowhere 😉

Pole is hard. But it’s amazing in that anyone, if they work at it, can get to do things that are absurdly cool and which they would have never imagined.
I know polers who started around your age and who are miles better than me (31) (ok that means nothing as I am a beginner, but they are actually advanced and really quite good). Two of them had no sporty past.
Starting at 46 with no background in dance or gymnastics means it will be very hard to get some things down. You might never have the pointed feet of someone who did ballet since they were 4. The flexibility and core control of a gymnast. But you can definitely become as good as any 20yo who starts without a specific dance/gymnastics background.

Replace the “half-heartedly” with a “passionately”, and you can get to anywhere you want 🙂

[iani]

I took the survey and thought it was fine. I have no psychology background so the “offensive” bits might just have gone over my head.
Is it maybe possible that people got offended because some things are sore points for specific reasons?

In any case, peace and pole

[iani]

I never used an activity monitor but was looking at some of the wrist ones last week and they seem very interesting. From those who use one, do you really find it worth the price? Do you actually keep it on most of the time, or is it annoying for every day wear? How reliable is it, and how useful do you find it?

[iani]

That sounds like a lot of work!
Only obvious stuff to say, but make sure you pamper your body in every way you can if you are asking it to work a lot for you… try and sleep at least a full 8 hours on those days, eat well, warm up as thoroughly as possible.
Kudos for your hard work!

[iani]

I cannot pole for some months cause of knee injury, but this should mostly be doable! yay! Thanks Veena, for unknowingly giving me motivation to do something at a time when training is super frustrating!

[iani]

Don’t feel discouraged! Things take time, and we do not all find the same things easy.

Pole is good at making you realize where your weaknesses are. If strength is one of yours, then don’t get discouraged, just take it as extra motivation to train it 🙂 Veena’s conditioning lessons are pretty cool, so you even already have a good starting point.
Another thing I notice for a lot of girls who do not have gymnastics or fitness background, is that they do not know how to engage their shoulders and back, which is a bit of a pet peeve for me. When you lift yourself off the ground, you are definitely not aiming to do it all by arms strength. It should be at least half from your back, so maybe try to get familiar with the concept of lifting yourself using your back with static pole holds, and then apply it to spins and such. Veena’s lessons about shoulder positioning and scapula mobility are really great for this.
(Seriously, I always thought I would never be able to do a single pullup. If I try with my arms alone, I probably still can’t. After learning how to engage and use my back, I can now do 10 straight pullups, which is more than many guys can. There is hope for everyone!)

[iani]

Rant warning.

I wanted to make this challenge so much, I even got a camcorder, figured out how to use stuff, was so hype about it all. So hype about the fact it was for beginners like me so I would have no excuse.

Then I missed 2 days because of figuring out how to use the camcorder cause I’m a fool, and now it seems like every single day there are people over and I cannot pole (pole is in living room). And now it’s my birthday and it was planned that I would have some time to relax and pole and catch up, and guess what, bf is on the couch with friends watching a tournament on stream. (I like them and I understand the tournament is today and they cannot watch it at another time, I am not complaining against them, but DAMNIT I wanna do my challenge T_T )

/endofrant.

Sorry, needed to vent.

[iani]

Totally agree with what has been said, and my addition to the “look at your clothes and how they fit and not at the scales” (which is golden):
Nobody seems to ever remember this on nutrition programs, training schedules, and the like, but… the female body lives on a 28-day cycle (more or less). You cannot expect it to forget this just because you are training.

Try to compare yourself once a month or so. The week-by-week approach a lot of guys take when training to lose weight or get buff does not really work for girls, and can be very frustrating. And frustration leads to 1kg ice cream buckets, and 1kg ice cream buckets lead to… well, happy places, but also to the jiggly side =D

(Real life example: I always get 3 to 5kg on “those days”, and feel and look bigger. I normally lose it right away in less than a week, but if I were to take pics of myself expecting to look cut it would be a severe disappointment =)

[iani]

This is my starting point… let’s see where I get to! (Hopefully I will get to better camera conditions, if not to my splits!)

[iani]

I feel so stupid. I’ve been taking vids with the new camera, but I am still looking for a free software that will allow me to crop them and trim and import to instagram… at some point I will spam the challenge with all the days that have gone so far, in the meantime does anyone have suggestion? camera records in mp4.

[iani]

Mmh I will try setting it tighter or less tight and see if it helps. I am always uncertain of how tight is right, as there seems to be a lot of room between “it budges if you try to move it or spin on it” and “it does not spin freely”.

The screws are the original and it did that since the start, I think :/

[iani]

Hijacking thread for another X-pole question.

I notice that lately, if I screw the pole to static position, after a couple spins it loosens a bit. It will not go back to spinning position on its own (and thank god for that), but it always seems to have this half inch spinning back and forth rather than being perfectly static.

It’s not that annoying once I know to expect it, but I wanna be sure I am not breaking my pole… anyone else has this?

[iani]

just made an instagram account and got myself a small camcorder for Christmas, for the challenge =) I should receive it on saturday, I’ll start late but so excited! @iani_ancilla

[iani]

The good news: I tried all advice and am doing a lot better, on my “weak” side.
The bad: after feeling around my knees looking for a reason why my right side hurt so much, it turns out I have a cyst the size of a cherry in my right knee pit, which will probably need surgery, and the pain I felt was the cyst pressing into the pole on pone side and my knee on the other. I have no clue yet how long that will mean no pole for me though 🙁

But yay!, at least I get how knee holds should work!

[iani]

*when I said “dead hang”, apparently the meaning in English is not the same as I was thinking of. I meant “hanging without engaging your shoulders and back, the way a dead body would hang if tied by the wrists”. Which sadly is what a lot of people will “naturally” do if asked to reach for something overhead or hang from it.

[iani]

Someone will probably answer this better than me, and bear in mind I come to this from a calisthenichs and lifting perspective rather than a purely poledancing one. The body we have is the same though, and it works on the same principles whatever we do with it.
EVERYONE: if I am wrong please correct me =)

SHORT ANSWER: yes, neutral shoulder/scapula position is needed in most polework, namely in all work requiring you to use strength.

LONG ANSWER (bit of a novel, sorry):
Shoulders are (should be) a fairly “free” joint, so that your arms can move in several directions. You can roll shoulders forward, push them back, scrunch them up… All these have their uses. But shoulder position is directly linked to what your spine is doing, and for ANYTHING that requires strength (be it an invert, an iron x, the strength moment of a climb, a deadlift or bench press) you want your back (spine) to be in PERFECT position, for 2 reasons:
– SAFETY: a bendy/unstable back will make you more likely to get injured
– PERFORMANCE: your back and your core are the stabilizing point of all your body. You cannot perform any arm or leg (or anything else) movement with any real strength if your foundations (your back and core) are not solid and stable. If you do headstands, think of how solid your neck feels during a headstand. Now imagine (DON’T TRY!) to be in one and bend your back this way or that. Even just imagining it makes you cringe at the thought of your neck collapsing under you, right? That’s because your back would not be engaged.

So, to engage your back, you need a few things. You need your hips to be level, your spine to be aligned (think of having your lower ribs pointing “down” rather than forward), your shoulders to be flat and in neutral position, and your abs to be engaged (how much depends on how much tension your back will be under to tolerate what the rest of the body is doing).

From here, you can extend your arms up, but this should not be done by overreaching. That means, your arm should go up, but if you keep your other hand on your shoulder, you should notice how the shoulder is down and engaged, how it feels “solid”, rather than feeling like it’s stretched upwards. If you watch any gymnastics videos, it will be easy to notice how a gymnast’s shoulders are normally pushed down even when the arms are up. Rings are especially good to see the difference between an engaged back/shoulders and a dead hang (what we do not normally want).
If you cannot raise your arm much this way, that usually means you are lacking shoulder mobility, which many of us do. The good news is it’s fairly easy to work on to get acceptable levels =)

sorry for the superlong post, got a bit carried away, but I can outdo many male friends at pullups despite having fairly weak arms (especially weaker than most guys!), all because I focus on working pullups (on and off the pole) from my back rather than from poor biceps trying to work against the rest of my body… so it’s a special pet subject of mine ^^

[iani]

Was sick all weekend and doubly frustrated cause I wanna try this stuff out =) Hopefully tonight… in the meanwhile huge thanks for the help and tips!

[iani]

Can’t say about filming as I do not do it yet.
About body image: I have pretty bad body image problems, I think. I used to do ski racing till 16 so was used to have a killer athlete body. At the same time I’m ugly and everybody always felt the need to point it out to me, so I was always very self-conscious about people watching me. After 16 I had to stop all sports because of an injury, and my body got soft, fat, and awful without me fully realizing (I never looked at myself) until I was 25. I am 30 now, I lost most of that (gym and now pole as well), but it’s still impossible for me to like myself. I feel like my upper body is too thin now, and the lower too fat. If I have a bit of a bloated belly from eating sth that does that (pulses, too much milk… you know, NORMAL stuff) it’s hard for me to get out of the house in the morning, thinking people will notice and judge me and despise me. I feel fat, I feel like my body is ruined and no amount of working out will get it back to how it was. Then the next day I notice I lost 2 cups bra-size in a year and I hate myself for losing that weight.
This was just to say: I am a fucked up case 🙂

The good news: I was afraid pole would make this worse. All those unreachable models, all the skin-showing, all the looking for a good figure rather than a good lift/time/whatever. Pole is a sport that wants you to make sth LOOK good. I really feared I would get in bad places by starting this sport, but it fascinated me and I started anyway.
Man, am I glad I did. It’s still not all ok, granted. But knowing that my abs are there even on a “bloated” day and I can still lift my body with them, knowing that my arms and back are maybe too skinny but they can now do 20 pullups, knowing my legs are still fat but I am closer to splits than I ever was in my life… Knowing that I can show up in class half naked and NOBODY cares about any of this, knowing that people DO watch my body but nobody, NOBODY hates me because of it… That actually makes getting out of the house on bloaty days a lot easier.

Sorry for the novel-length post, but it was liberating, somehow. Most people I know think I have absolutely no image issues and I am fully at home in body… so I guess this was kind of a coming out, sorry to have made you all the victims, it’s what you get for being awesome!

[iani]

If you check Veena’s lessons she has extra good explanation on how to train your knee and ankle releases from the floor 😉

[iani]

My pole is called Paul. It started cause someone asked me for weekend plans and I said “gonna do pole the whole weekend”, and that person asked “who’s this Paul??? What about your boyfriend???”. I love it