orngesodalampst

Quick (maybe?) post. Last night I got all 4 of the katas at karate down pat, so there's progress - albeit small - already. I couldn't go to pole last Thursday because we saw Beauty and Beast at the ballet, and this week I don't have Monday night conditioning class since it's done, and all Wednesday thru Friday classes are cancelled. That means I have Pole 2 / Lap 2 tonight and that's it. I can already feel myself getting out of shape. On the positive side, that allows me to dedicate some more time to trying out karate. I paid for it, so I'm going to take advantage of that available time. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of really beginner pole videos online of people inverting, and it's gotten me a little irked. The girls in the videos, just like Darlene in my pole 3 class (who will no longer be coming due to some rift she got in with Patty) and another girl in my pole 5 class, are all barely managing to get up by monkey footing. I'm sure I monkey ...

POLE This last weekend I took my first pole workshop with a traveling instructor. Even though I didn't find it overly helpful (or worth the money), I still consider it a milestone in my pole fitness journey. The instructor was Brynn Route, and we did a series of unconnected floor choreography sequences. I didn't find it very helpful because it wasn't applicable to anything else, and I really wanted to learn some actual pole tricks. If I'm paying $90 for a session, I want to get something out of it that I wouldn't from a regular class (or YouTube). One of the other girls, Jill, was struggling just as much as I was with a lot of the moves in the workshop (Brynn was super nice, but she only showed each complicated sequence twice without a breakdown before having us do it), which was fantastic in camaraderie. At the end of the workshop she turned to me and said, "you're so strong," which just made my life. I told her I didn't really know how to res...

Quick update: after a really rough week (my poor, beautiful Prius, Apollo, was deemed totaled last week. RIP my baby), I picked myself back up off the bottom of the well and got back to exercising on a regular schedule. I had my strength and conditioning class on Monday night, then kickboxing and Pole 2/Lap 2 Tuesday night. I took a break yesterday and went to Pole 5 tonight. I'm still getting stronger, which is encouraging. I was afraid that I had hit a wall, and maybe I did; but I pushed past it by taking kickboxing and really pushing myself during Pole 2 class. I think the difference between this round of pole dancing and when I first started is that I am really actively pushing myself. I didn't do that before. I did what I could do and no more than that. But regardless, today I managed to do all my aerial inverts smoothly, without monkey footing. Just up and over. I figured out that the trick was to engage a dead lift, rather than just trying to pull myself over. When I...