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student doing the splits before PoleCon 2019

A New Warm Up?

Most warmups, get your heart rate up, might make you sweat, and hopefully prepare your body for the class ahead by practicing some movements you might find in class.

With so much of warm-ups focused on your body, have you ever thought to warm-up your brain?

This may be controversial for some folks who focus on increasing body temperature and increasing heart rate but maybe being sweaty is not the best for pole dancing. There are many studies that show the benefit of a good warm-up for fitness and sport activity but none of them (to my knowledge) are focused on the appropriate warm-up for pole-related activities, especially those focused on tricks or isometric poses done on the pole with transitions between them.

Certainly, doing choreography and training for a routine absolutely involves cardio-vascular fitness and muscular endurance but in a more tricks-focused class? Increasing sweat and our heart rate in the beginning of a class while trying to calm our nervous system enough to try a challenging and potentially “scary” move seems counterproductive.

Regardless of your opinion on the necessity and application of appropriate heart rate increasing activities, you still may want to include warming up your brain during your warmup.

Step 1: start with what you are working on

The first part of any effective warm up is making sure you know what you’re warming up for. If you are doing heels choreography, you want to pay attention to your ankles. If you are working toward a spatchcock you’ll need to focus on forward bending—which is the opposite of what you’d need to work on if you are focusing on achieving your eagle.

Step 2: assess where you are right now

Sure, you might regularly be bendy enough or strong enough to achieve the move you are working on today, but have you tested that before you get on the pole? If you’re a teacher even in a leveled class, you will have a variety of people with different skill abilities, stressors, and resource levels.

Pick an assessment that is relevant to your class or workout that day and test it! Then after you do your warm-up activities, retest. Something simply like a forward fold is good to test your spatchcock preparations, or arching back is a good simple test for your eagle. Make sure to access not just range of motion (quantitative measure) but also how the movement feels (qualitative measure).

Sometimes a good warm up makes things feel less restricted even if there is no obvious range of motion change.

Step 3: add some unique neurology-based drills

Your brain is controlling your movement and telling you whether it feels safe enough to allow you to move into a given range of motion.

You can talk to your brain in many ways including using all your senses! The brain processes sensory information first before motor or movement information. You can use all your senses such as touch, sight, sound, smell, taste to improve your mobility! You can also try to find where your body is in space using your balance or vestibular system. Since people have varying preferences for smell and taste – which are also challenging in a group class setting – we’ll try talking to our brain using touch, sigh, and balance for our warm-up.

Sample Warm Up

Try adding these three options before your regular warm up (or even instead of!).

The example is for preparing for a bird of paradise pole move which requires (at a minimum): thoracic extension and rotation, hip extension, shoulder flexion.

  1. Test your sensory system. Assess: ether standing or seated, fold forward and then arch backwards. Notice how far you can move in each direction and how it feels. Touch yourself all over! Gently rub, press, foam roll, pinch, poke or otherwise interact with your body. Some people will prefer gentle pressure of hands while others might prefer a firmer touch. Experiment! Retest and see if flexion or extension improved.
  2. Test your balance. Assess: Stand in one spot and extend your arms out in front of you. Clasp your hands making a pointer finger and rotate as far as you can each direction noticing how far you can go, noting what you can point, and how it feels. Then, standing in the same spot, stand on one leg. If that is easy, start turning your head or closing your eyes. See how long you can stand until you must put a foot down. Try both sides. Whichever side is worse, do it again. Retest and see if your thoracic rotation improved.
  3. Test your eyes. Assess: Either standing or sitting, test your shoulder flexion and extension by raising each arm overhead (flexion) and behind you (extension). Test both sides and see how far you can go in each direction and how it feels. Take your finger and without moving your head, draw a circle with your finger following it with your eyes. Your circle can be as large or small as you feel is appropriate, it can also be as fast or slow as you prefer. Do a few repetitions in one direction and then the other and then close your eyes, bringing your finger down. Retest and see if flexion or extension improved.

But, does it work?

In my experience teaching these drills over the past few years, at least one of these three things works for everyone in any class. It might not be the same thing for all people and some people will response more clearly than others with a dramatic range of motion change while others might feel less restricted. These three things might be enough for someone very comfortable with their movement to get on the pole or it might be enough to set the stage before your regular warm-up. The more you assess and reassess, you’ll start to develop what movements help you the most to create the most efficient warm-up for your body.

Colleen
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