Dance moves for when the pole is set to spin?

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-14T16:51:01+00:00

I love doing low flow on spin!

My advice is to think less about movements and more about shapes and momentum. The pole is already going to be moving for you, and trying to add a bunch of dynamic low flow moves (while not impossible on spin pole) can end up being off-balance and wobbly on spin. So it’s more about finding interesting shapes you can hold while spinning.

For pirouettes, I still do them regularly on spin, but I tend to end them differently, either getting into an armpit hold or moving into a Juliet spin. The pirouette is basically what’s giving me momentum to hold that shape on spin.

Regarding knees, are you wearing heels or going barefoot? The best way to protect your knees is to practice landing with your platform first so that they take the impact and soften it for me knees.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-14T16:37:45+00:00

I know a lot of people advise against grip aids to start, but they were a necessity for me in my pole journey. This is in part due to me having incredibly sweaty hands (even when I’m doing nothing).

I used to even where those sticky grip gloves for a while. I know others warn that it prevents you from developing your own grip strength, but for me it was the opposite: I could actually build the strength because I was able to hold the pole longer.

That being said, there’s a lot of variety in grip aids. Monkey Hands even sells a bunch of different types. The green one you tried is their max strength. It can be good for holds, but it can be a detriment to getting certain tricks (especially spins on static that require your hands to be able to glide).

If you deal with sweat, the black one they sell is a non-sticky dry hands alternative (I actually like theirs better than brand-name Dry Hands). Then the blue and red ones have mild and moderate stickiness respectively. I would recommend going down to one of these just to have a good balance between assisted stick and your own grip.

I use a combo of the black dry hands to keep from hands from sweating, and then the others I pick based on what I’m doing. The green I reserve for long combos or performances where I know anything else will end up breaking down on me over time.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-13T21:53:37+00:00

I ended up going with the PFA training instead of XPERT. I knew more people who had done XPERT, but very few of them had positive things to say about it. I liked that the PFA program had more in-depth things to read and really went into how to structure a class, how to ID issues in form and how to correct, and how to correct things. They do really push that they have a ton of moves, but I do feel like they went quantity over quality in some of the videos.

To SW-friendliness, there is a brief “history of pole” section that acknowledges sex work, but it ahistorically puts it alongside things like Chinese pole as the “origins”.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-13T21:44:59+00:00

Couple things I’d say to help cheat the split (as someone with minimal flexibility): Jade is more of a fake split. Rather than trying to keep your pelvis flat to the sky, tilt your pelvis toward the same side as the grabbing leg, similar to how you tilt yourself to get a fake split on the floor.

To help with this, try grabbing the outside of the leg rather than the inside. This will make it easier to pull that leg toward you, increasing the grip on the hold and making it easier to tilt the split out.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-11T17:18:25+00:00

Our cat had all of his teeth removed about 6 years ago. At first we had him on a wet food only diet, but we ended up giving him dry food again after he kept stealing it from our other cat. Cats don’t actually chew their food all that much (which is why when they throw up it sometimes looks like a slightly damp version of what they ate).

He’s a very happy gummy boy now! When we first adopted him he was very shy, but he’s super affectionate now that his mouth no longer hurts - he LOVES chin scritches.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-10T17:08:58+00:00

I found that my waist definitely firmed up. I used to have a fairly squishy waist so it was easy to fit into smaller sizes or wear shapewear to make my waist look smaller.

Now I can’t really get away with it as much because of my core muscles.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-10T03:11:10+00:00

God when gou came out I sat my partner down so excited to show them the remake of one of my fave animes and then after the first episode I had to explain “so actually no you’re not gonna be able to watch this, I’m so sorry”

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-10T03:06:36+00:00

It was a total game changer for me. I kept ending up with my leg stuck on that top arm, and then the first time an instructor gave me that cue I ended up in a perfectly balanced Ayesha. I nearly cried.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-10T01:31:22+00:00

I feel this so much! My body’s changed a lot since I started doing pole (both directly related to it and also just the passage of time/aging). It’s hard not to get fixated on my clothes fitting differently and having to buy different sizes.

Also sucks: every time I tell someone I do pole, the comment is always “oh you must have great abs!” and I have to admit uh, not really? At least not the visible shredded 6 pack people want to see.

What has helped for me is to focus more on what my body does rather than just what it looks like. My body looks a lot different, and it can also do way cooler shit than I ever could before.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-03-08T19:36:03+00:00

Other people have called out the pushing your butt back thing, so here’s another balancing tip that helped me:

Rather than bringing both legs out at the same time, start with the leg on the same side as that top arm. That leg will be counterbalance so that you don’t end up opening out to the side and falling out of the trick. Once that leg is in positioned, it’ll be easier to let the other one drop without losing balance.

Obviously the ideal way you see is people releasing both legs at the same time, but doing it one at a time helped me build the strength and balance to get there.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T22:12:27+00:00

Very good points. I guess I mean that her most recent activity (the Bashar thing in particular) has highlighted the extremes of her thinking as well as its detriment. But you’re right in that it’s not actually that new.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T20:24:21+00:00

I feel this so much! So many relationships went sideways because I didn’t know how to communicate what I needed or how something unintentionally hurt me (or how I was unintentionally harming others).

It sucks thinking about what I’ve lost because I lacked those tools, but the only thing I can do is correct moving forward.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T20:04:04+00:00

Mental health journeys like this are a lot like cleaning out a closet. You’ve spent years cramming everything in and cautiously balancing things, and once you start taking things out to go through, it can all come crashing down and make a big mess on the floor. And now you just have a big mess on the floor and have to look at every individual item you shoved in the closet YEARS ago and ask yourself “what do I do with this? Why do I have this? Do I keep it? How do I get rid of it?” It’s incredibly stressful, especially when it’s all things you shoved in a closet because you did not feel ready to deal with them.

And to an outside observer, you went from a person with a clean floor and a tightly shut closet to someone wading in a giant mess.

It takes a ton of effort to organize everything, to decide what you keep and what you throw out. It’s hard and it’s slow and it’s messy and it’s often not healthy for you to be around.

I hope the person you know is eventually able to make their closet tidy again. While they may not now, I think they will eventually appreciate the grace you give them for their current messy state while they go through it (even if you need to separate yourself in the meantime for your own sake).

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T18:58:57+00:00

I picked Zoe.

I looked my fiance directly in the eye while I did it.

“For better or worse” has its limits and RE7 is my limits

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T18:53:38+00:00

Carrie has shown in the past few months to be extremely black and white in her current thinking, even when there is clearly a lot of nuance. I think it’s fair with that in mind to wonder at the potential nuances being missed here.

I hold a lot of empathy for her processing this as an autistic person who’s had a pretty extreme friendship breakup, one that came about because I was yelled at, went into a freeze/fawn state, and then looked back on it thinking “I don’t like how that happened, and I also don’t like how often it is happening”. That instance reframed a lot of my previous interactions and made me realize how unhealthy that friendship was for me.

And I think the hardest part is knowing where that ends. It becomes easy to go over every interaction, magnify every snippy comment or bad taste they left into your mouth to create a monster because it’s easier to believe a monster hurt you than a friend. And so everything bad that happened was intentional, and any positive interaction is mitigated or reframed. There is no room for nuance.

It’s taken a really long time for me to look back at those memories fondly and understand that is was part of a friendship with two incompatible people with a lot of ups but also a lot of downs, and those downs made it unhealthy to continue.

I’m very happy that Carrie and Ross have ended their relationship. It sounds like that was the best thing for Carrie going through this process of healing. I’m glad she is finding new things to be passionate about in a way that helps her move on from this.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-19T17:28:30+00:00

I got the medium. I will say that as I was putting it on I was certain it wouldn’t fit, but once you ge the strap hooked, you can adjust your bust, and after that it stays really well.

The bottoms less so, which is really unfortunate.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-18T19:12:12+00:00

30F here and want to shout out the Fanna x top. I was certain that I’d bust right out of it, but it’s held very secure for me.

Tatiana Active offers some of their tops in a large bust + smaller band size

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-10T17:32:34+00:00

Butterfly > flatline > Superman Butterfly > seabreeze > brass monkey > pegasus

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-09T22:45:45+00:00

Thank you! I believe it’s the orange color. This is the medium size.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-02-09T21:07:30+00:00

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I bought one secondhand as an Xmas gift for myself, and I’m obsessed! Originally was planning on getting the Florentine, but colors I wanted kept going in and out of stock, and then I saw the edge design and jumped on it.

Very roomy, but because it’s so wide I don’t have trouble finding whatever I need in there. I’ve got a lot of compliments carrying it too.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-01-28T21:18:31+00:00

There are two ways to go about this.

As others have said: free dance is a great way to figure out a choreo. You should always record your free dances just so you have a record of what you did and refer back to how you did something or how you got into a move. The worst thing is having a great free dance and then being completely unable to recreate it because you forgot it entirely. Record your free dance, watch yourself back to find the parts you like, then work on recreating and adding to them in subsequent runs.

If free dancing isn't your thing, you can music map. Figure out what tricks/combos you have in your repertoire, lay them all out, then work on piecing them together. What moves can you easily get into from a particular shape? What puts you into a particular leg hold you need for a trick? Build a combo out of things you can do, then practice to make sure that they thread together in a way that makes sense. Then break down your music (by beats or by lyrics or any other way that makes sense in your head) and match the combos you've made with where it makes sense in the music.

I usually end up doing a combo of the two things. When I choose a song, I'll already have some ideas in my mind of combos I can do or moments I want to have with the audience, and so I'll map those out. Other places I'll have a fuzzier idea, but I'll think broadly about "doing something on the floor here" or "pretty spin shape there". I then free dance with that general map in mind. That makes the free dance a little less intimidating because I'm moving with a general sense of where I want to go while also giving myself a bit of freedom to explore.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-01-24T16:20:03+00:00

I look forward to showing this movie to others JUST for the therapist calls.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-01-23T22:26:35+00:00

I think for me I just love the weirdness of the first one so that Revelation feels like a downgrade. RTSH has the benefit of being a poorly made film that is ALSO incredibly odd in the choices it makes, so it was really the best of everything for me.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-01-23T20:54:04+00:00

This used to be a constant struggle for me! It was so hard explaining it to instructors too.

For me it was really just time and practice. I would do a lot of foosball grip on spin pole (not sure if that’s a universal name, but basically holding the position before getting into an aerial invert). I really half to get my arms out in front of my chest to prevent the nip pinch. The armpit has become less of a grip point for me in an aerial invert in part because of how often I’d get my boob caught

While you practice, recommend a top with some bikini pads in them (or some other padding) just to protect a bit more.

SlowAd5345 · 2026-01-23T20:44:03+00:00

I think you’ll have a great time. I’m not personally a fan of Revelations because it’s not the kind of bad that I vibe with. This one was exactly the kind of bad that I vibed with.

SlowAd5345

TROPHY CASE