Jenyne Butterfly @jenynebutterfly - Tumblr Blog

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dontsearchmethanks

Parts of this still look awkward/choppy but I like this spin.

kadoodlessblr-deactivated201811

Pole dancing Mark won the twitter pole I ran so here it is.

Referenced used including the videos of Mark pole dancing.

Enjoy you sinners. ;w;

its-kesharose

#FreedomForKesha

2012

#pole dance #flexibility #gym #fit #fitness

pulmonaire

deathtaxiforcutie

lifeofoh

fitnessua

missdrusilla

Alright ladies and gents, It’s about time where the tough get going: Two months until Pacific Pole Championships! I’ll be blogging about my competition training, tips I discovered along the way, and random thoughts leading to March 15th.

I thought I would blog today about music selection for competitions. It’s one of the most important choices you can make before you begin, but how do you do it?

My mindset went through these phases in the four days that it took me to choose a song.

“Oh man, I’ve always envisioned dancing to this rad song that I love!” which later became, “Oh god, I can’t stand this song anymore and I can’t move like that”

“The tricks that I’m really good at fit in perfectly with this song” which morphed into “I don’t want to do JUST tricks, there’s dancing too.. right?"

"This song piques my interest, and I bet no one is going to use it” which was refuted by “This is too obscure and is too hard to dance to”.

There’s a billion songs out there and you’re only allowed to use one! It’s enough anxiety to leave you guilty for every day that you haven’t reached your decision. What I discovered was that all the thoughts that I had, both positive and negative, were all valid. Your song must:

Have a rhythm structure that you can follow. It’s fantastic feeling when you experience a song like it’s the first time you’ve heard it, again and again. You may not be able to get enough of it when your headphones are on! However, if you’re uncomfortable moving to the song, don’t choose it. If it’s too fast or way too chillax for your normal movements — don’t choose it. You want a song that will showcase the way you move, not how awesome the song is.

Allow for creative diversity. When you listen to this song, can you envision floor work happening? What tricks are you doing? Are there spins? Do you have time to be aerial at the high, middle, and low points of the pole? Listen again and see if you can see these moments happening in your music.

Highs and lows. A good song will have highs and lows. No, I don’t just mean a catchy chorus or dropping the bass a few times. These are the moments in songs where if you’re singing along, you can’t help but belt out a particular verse or do a dance move. Those are your highs or lows.

Be unique. We hear Top 40 songs all day long in department stores, in coffee shops, and in the car. Even if your dancing is fantastic, don’t turn them off with a played out song that’s already on everyone’s nerves.

And a bonus if

The song has unexpected punctuations. Some people are FANTASTIC at finding songs like this. Michelle Stanek’s Polarity routine and her USPDF Optional round are good/clear examples. Additionally, Sergia Louise Anderson’s USPDF Compulsory and Optional rounds are exceptional. Finding punctuations or moments in the music where you can surprise the audience are pivotal. Pretty routines are easy to make, winning routines will always have this element. Most songs will have a moment like this, it may be buried under other tones or it could even happen so fast that you don’t notice it. But nevertheless, listen hard and find them!

Above all, make sure you love your song. You’re going to be listening to it again, and again, and again. It’s very important that you have a good time dancing to the song as well as tolerance for its repetition.

Enjoying the song will make your smile that much bigger when you perform, and the audience will feel it!

nopainnopolegain

great job

missdrusilla

Training for a pole dancing competition is exhausting mentally, physically and emotionally. You wonder if your choreography will be exciting enough, if the audience will cheer, whether or not you’ll be able to add in that trick you’ve been thinking of before it’s time. You may be asking how do I start, simply put, “doing the damn thing”?

Find your music

Deciding on your music should happen within a week. This is the easiest part of the whole process besides picking your outfit. If you can get it out of the way quickly, you’ll have that much more time to start training.

I’ve written a post previously about how to choose your music. Crack open Spotify and get to listening!

List your strongest and best tricks

Get out a pen and paper or a stack of index cards. Write out your 10 strongest or best tricks that you could practically do in your sleep. These include transitionary tricks and combos. Got it? Good. These are going to be your tricks for your routine.

You may retort with disgust and say that “I want to do an Iron-X for this competition! I can’t now, but I will then!”. Don’t do it. A competition is where you showcase your best and if god forbid anything goes wrong (slippery pole, bad timing) you want to be able to SAVE it. Your 10+ month old elbow grip Ayesha may not wow you, but there’s no way you’re going to recover if you fall out of a Janeiro on competition day if you learned it two weeks prior. Save yourself the added pressure by cutting out anything too risky.

Now comes the fun part. With your index cards or piece of paper, you’re going to play out your music and arrange the tricks in an order that makes sense to the music. Use this as the construct to your routine. If you can run the tricks to the song in the order that you determined, CONGRATS, you’re a third of the way done with choreography!

Start training as soon as you can

I started training in December for a competition that was in March. That may seem like overkill, but it really helped me. I stopped taking regular pole classes or going to parkour sessions because I was at such a high risk of injury in both sports that I couldn’t afford a setback. If you start early enough, you won’t have to worry about getting sick the day of from stress or sleepless nights or if you tweak your shoulder one day.

Visualize it!

Start running your routine in your head all the time. Even if it isn’t choreographed, run the parts that you’re excited about over and over. If you visualize that you can do it, you WILL do it.

Mark it, Run it, Now Full Out!

Make this your mantra. When you’re practicing in the studio or at home you can practice in this order.

Mark it: Play the music and walk through your piece. Mime your tricks with your hands, do small spins and key parts of your choreography. This is to see if you will have enough time to do all the things that you’re thinking of doing.

Run it: Once you’ve marked it, run it! Just doing your routine will jump start your muscle memory. You want to get to the point where you don’t even have to think about your next movement—your body just does it.

Now Full Out: There’s a difference between running it and dancing the piece with all the emotion that you have. It’s important to get a lot of runs in with an audience present where you’re laying your heart and soul out. This will also help settle any fears you have about performing on stage in front of a crowd.

It’s important to run or do your routine full out (even if it’s in pieces) as many times as you can, as often as you can without wearing yourself too thin. Therefore, I recommend that you run your piece twice a day for three days a week every week until the competition. If you start 3 months before your competition, that means:

12 weeks x 3 days a week x 2 times a day = 72 total runs

Can you imagine how foolproof and EASY your routine will be after 72 runs? That’s untouchable. Even if you mess up on stage, you’ll know exactly how to fix it when it happens and it won’t faze you at all!

#pole dance #competition

confessionsofapoledancer

You see them they catch your eye hanging upside down. You watch them gracefully dismount from the top of the pole and you think “I WANT TO DO THAT!” That is the thought and you never dream you can ever be as “good”. You resist and you put the thought behind you. You want to try but your scared....