They call me Snow 5th Street

Isn’t that how that game is played? To find your stripper name it is your first pet’s name with the first street you lived on? No? It sounded like a good.

Always with my eye out for something new and exciting to try, I went to my first pole dancing class the other day.

Yes, I’ll say that again. I went to my first pole dancing class.

According to the lingo they were using, working out on poles or pole dancing is called Poling. Also, there are apparently different thickness of the poles. I did not lose the irony on that conversation.

I had no real expectations for this class. I asked them first what I should wear. They said a tang top and some shorts. They said socks if you’d like because the floor is cold. I wore socks. I am so tired of cold feet and winter hasn’t even started.

After checking out the map and wishing I had remembered to bring my GPS, I headed out to this location.

It took me about 10 minutes to drive to the area but another 10 minutes to find the actual place. I kept taking the wrong turns. Also, this studio being so new, they were still working on getting a sign and some more lights.   

I find the place, get signed in, I get my little punch card so it shows that I have 4 classes left. I giggle because it seems like all the new things I try usually involve release forms saying if we accidentally die, no one can be sued. That and helmets seem to be my new norm. I take off my layers of sweats and jacket to get to the tiny little shorts and tang top. Then I stand around with a few other people waiting for class to start.

The instructor is like don’t be shy go grab a pole. I go stand by a pole but don’t do anything. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m trying to resist the three year old Shannon just taking one hand and walking around in a circle until she get dizzy and has to stop.

After the poles are check to make sure they are tight. Then it is time to stretch.

I consider myself a pretty athletic person. I run, play soccer, I can do decent in most classes at a gym. This was some of the strangest stretches I have done. I also learned that my hamstrings are SUPER tight! Ouch!

So now we’re all stretched up. We start to do body rolls against the pole. Have you ever done a body roll? It is actually not too hard, but to make it look smooth…. Well, I felt like a robot. I got a bit better after some help with the instructor.

Then we went to some floor moves for how to slide hip down the pole land on the floor, move around the pole and back.

We then picked ourselves up off the floor and went into spinning around the pole. This was not working for me. I couldn’t get it. I was trying to figure out what they were doing and it just wasn’t working. They had to pull out a dry erase marker and put marks on the floor so I could figure out where to put my feet. I thought that was a genius idea, especially since it actually worked. The next moves we did were called fireman pole climb. It’s where you can actually climb up the pole. It was kind of cool, this one I could do.

Then we learned some more moves that we could use just to have some more sexy moves.

Okay, some things that I realized when doing this class. Just being around a pole, it makes things more risqué. I don’t know if it the house of watching CSI or just the taboo nature of pole dancing but the whole thing kind of reeks of sexuality. Even something as innocent as body rolls, when placed next to a pole…well it becomes sexual.

Women, or I guess men too, that do poling, holy wow! They have to be super strong! Like seriously! Do you know how much strength it takes just to hold yourself up on a pole? All muscles are engaged.

Dance and or yoga would both be useful for learning to pole dance. There is some choreography type moves you can made.

When talking to anyone about learning to pole dance, males that accidently “over hear” the conversation per up like when you ask your dog if they want a walk. They instantly get excited.

Just in nature pole dancing is a sexually charged activity. I thought one of the most interesting things to watch, besides how poorly I spin around a pole, was to check out people’s sexy/serious faces when they were doing their moves. It is kind of a mixtures of boredom, badass, and confidence that someone wants them hard core all oozing out at the same time. That was defiantly different then my normal Body Pump class where everyone’s face is slightly in pain and fatique because their arms or whatever part is being worked out is screaming bloody murder.   

I am totally excited to try to try and do the class again. They also have some other classes that involve chairs…so I’ll be checking those out as well.

Happy Adventuring!