“You guys are sissies. I guess that’s why guys don’t give birth.” Valerie from “Pole With Val” pole dancing studio has no pity for our complaints of skin burn. “Sometimes it burns, but that’s life.”
Val is a postgraduate student who has been training in pole dancing and pole fitness for the last eight years before launching her own studio this year.
She teaches both basic pole dancing and Cardio Pole, a fitness class with pole-assisted workouts.
We went along to try out a class with Val and while it certainly didn’t feel sexy, swinging around on a pole is incredibly fun.
“You feel really out of place at the start,” she told us “you don’t know what you’re doing and it feels weird.”
The trick is locking your arms and shoving your hips out in front of you as if you’re just at the end of a thrust. It keeps your weight forward so your momentum drives you around the pole, not crashing you into the side of it. Once I figured that out I stopped smashing the side of my body into the pole and started actually swinging, which was cool.
We went through the basic moves – the sticky-out legs one, the kneeling thrusty one, the pretending you’re sitting down one (OK, I forgot most of the names).
According to Val, “girls take longer to get it sometimes because they don’t have as much upper body strength as guys, but there’s not been a single person who’s too weak to pole, and nobody has been too overweight to pole”.
Once we started to pick it up a bit more (Val said I was “a natural” #humblebrag) she even suggested that we try two people spinning on the same pole, but then changed her mind because “you might smash into each other”. Perhaps we weren’t as good as we thought.
For Val, Pole is a sport and a hobby, but she still feels the stigma of pole dancing being the realm of strip clubs. “The moment you start the class, you know it’s not going to be a sexual experience, but getting here is the hard part.
It doesn’t help that it’s right next to the brothel and right under Stilettos.”
“It’s surprising, I think if people have come even once, they lose all the stigma.” In fact, Val even hosts a regular “Mum and Kids” class; if that’s not escaping the stigma I don’t know what it.
Having pole danced for an hour, I can’t say it felt erotic at all. It was half like playing around on some children’s playground equipment, and half just genuinely exhausting workout.
Student prices at Pole with Val start at $5 for an open class.