jamimah I have rheumatoid arthritis and when I was diagnosed I had to stop dance for several years. I found pole dance in adulthood after getting stable on medications. My medications make the pain A LOT better but the condition flares and the joint damage is progressive, so I know someday there could come a time that I won't be able to pole dance any longer or reach my goals. This sounds WAYYYY more dramatic than I intended, I'm not dying 😂but the idea of not being able to dance anymore is what motivates me to get my tired butt to classes and do the things I want to do right now and be consistent with it. 😬🙃also with RA joint stiffness gets better with activity so moving around actually makes me feel better too as long as I'm not in a flare 🥰

As for the 70 hours, I'm in my last week of residency about to start fellowship for 2 more years. My hours will get better after that and the fact it's temporary is what keeps me going there 🫠

Hiiiii,

My schedule is very chaotic and probably not representative of the average pole person. I work full time as a doctor 40-70 hours a week, depending on if I'm on call, so my pole schedule is "do what I can when I can" which sometimes means doing pole in the middle of the night 🙃😬I've been doing pole for almost 2 years, but I previously was a competitive dancer, so as a child I grew up doing like 15-20 hours of dance a week as a background so my hours of pole training probably reflect that. I do both studio and home training and also do competitions and showcases.

I train at my studio 4-5 hours a week with each class being an hour.

I use the app for my home training and to bring new skills that I want to work on to class at my studio because being so new to pole I just found myself not knowing what to work on, or I wanted to work on things and reverse engineering moves from instagram reels was getting too difficult.

For home training I do about 1 hour of back flexibility training a week, the weekly pole challenge, and then work on skills, running my routine passes, or conditioning at home maybe an additional 5+ hours spread out throughout the week dependent on my schedule (if I have days off work it's definitely more). I usually take at least one or two rest days a week. I also do privates 1-2 times a month. I do a performance or competition every 3-4 months as I like choreographing and performing. A typical schedule for me:

Moday- evening skills class 1 hour

Tuesday-rest or pole challenge/skills at home 1-2 hours

Wednesday-flow class 1 hour

Thursday-flow class 1 hour

Friday-rest or skills at home 1 hour

Saturday-skills 1 hour flexibility 1 hour

Sunday- work on competition routine, apply corrections to pole challenge or other homework I got from bothering Steph for help all week 🙃 1-2 hours

Bothering Steph for help is like a daily part of my schedule at this point, I'm so annoying idk how she does it 🥺😂😭😭

I don't do the gym program... I don't have a gym membership but have a home gym. I lift like once a month with my fiancé when he bothers me, if I had more free time I would consider maybe incorporating that more.... maybe.

"I'm trying to hold a human but I have a thigh gap and trying not to die" with that extreme leg cross at the knees 😂😭

Yes the arm is so much better reaching down! I'm gonna post a video of baby poler Vanessa teaching myself this move and tag you in it bc I think the nuance of the positioning of the contact points is super important in marchetti more than flexibility and you're doing the same positioning error I was doing back then.

Hiiiiii, idk about drills, but I believe your hands/body placement are backwards and that might make this a lot easier. I'm usually the "flier" (person starting on the ground in this scenario) so whenever I set up a trick I think of it as my torso and the bases torso have to face each other like we're going in for a hug. Then for the arm placement I put my hands up like I'm giving them a high five and we grab each others forearms. This is picture of me and my friend getting this correction at pole con and my brain conceptualized it as high fiving. The concepts are still the same even with basing from your inverted position go in for the hug, then high five as flier.

jamimah agree with Stephanie Tallant that the grabbing position will be different for everyone depending on your body and arms (I have T. rex arms). However the higher up your leg you grab the more leg flexibility you will need bc you're essentially pulling your leg into more of a split and similar to a jade split one of the main contact points is your thigh/hip squeezing between the pole which seems unlikely to be able to create that contact point grabbing at the knee (at least for me). One thing I learned because I have short arms (which causes the same problem as thick thighs) is pulling with the top arm and turning my chest towards the inside leg which allows you to rotate that shoulder more and buys you some extra length with that inside arm that's trying to grab the pole. Then once I grab the pole I open my chest towards the ceiling.

Ohhhhhhh yes that makes a lot of sense, I was trying to pull with my arms to counteract that shift which clearly was not working and was straining my arms so glad I tabled it 🙃I'll try again tomorrow after work

This is one of my favorite moves 😍It looks like your arm is flipped the wrong direction, you need to internally rotate your shoulder so that the hand can reach down and grab the pole below your leg. I'd try the move completely laying on the floor first, lift the hips as if to chopper, hook outside leg, then reach the arm around the inside leg to grab the pole below all while keeping your back on the floor so you don't have to fight against gravity and/or spin and see if you can get in the position (picture attached of what I mean, I'm grabbing the pole under my leg here). Then I'd try static, then to spin. Spinning in that little ball to set up marchetti, you get A LOT of momentum which makes the move harder than it already is. Full disclosure, I taught myself this move from IG in my BS (Before Steph) era though so 🙈🙈🙈

Susan Papp Mlodzienski the flying cobra videos are literally the hardest of ALL of Steph's flexibility videos IMO (except for maybe the cocoon stretch one) and she loves to try and sneak a flying cobra video in to kill you 😩😭I say this even after doing the latest "how to get a straight leg capezio" video which was hard but still not as brutal as the flying cobra 🫠

I remember Espi had a "where the f is the pole" video a few weeks ago but then was grabbing the pole this week!

Also I know for a fact you had this move since you had to do it for test out, but I also had a Jasmine to Superman at one point for the same reason 😬😬😬