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Safety tips for defying gravity
”When you fall and you’re disoriented, you need to have enough air awareness to identify where the ground is relative to your body. With pole fitness you have the added benefit of a pole almost always nearby to grab in order to adjust for a more desirable landing position.” Amos Rendao, professional parkour athlete
I am an amateur pole dancer with a passion for safety. As I begin to learn tricks like meathook and fonji and start focusing on table top drops, castaway front flips and back flips I’ve started looking for a way to fill the gap between my pole dancing talents and the potential risk for injury. Every pole dancing student has thought about this question at some point, “How am I going to keep myself safe from falling and minimize injury?” Safety doesn’t have to be an unknown variable. If you know how to approach safety it can mean the difference between a potentially crippling head or neck injury versus a wrist injury. I have gone outside the pole dancing community to a parkour gym to find the best safety tips and learn more about body awareness as it relates to minimizing injury.
I am at Apex Movement in Boulder, CO with Amos Rendao. He is internationally recognized in the parkour community for his talents in teaching safe falling methods and minimizing injury in movement arts like pole dancing, tricking, and freerunning. Amos has an extensive background in martial arts, which is the origin of his proven safety techniques. He simply adapted these falling techniques for the real world of hard surfaces and people who don’t have a background in martial arts. He states that there is a lot of cross over between parkour and pole dancing. One of the most obvious is the high impact nature of both sports including hardwood floors, inversions and the fact that falling is an inevitable part of the learning process. In order to prioritize safety you have to understand air awareness and be able to identify where the ground is in relation to your body. Falling is all about reaction which is why air awareness and a repertoire of different falling techniques is so important. “You’re never thinking. You’re reacting.” If you think you’re more likely to hesitate and that’s when you become more vulnerable to injury. The key is to not hesitate if you ever find yourself in a compromising position on or off the pole.There are several components to minimizing injury. While it may not seem intuitively obvious to start safety training for the pole on the floor the goal is to get you to focus on major points of contact that could minimize injury before taking your skills higher up on the pole. When we worked on parkour back rolls my first lesson was to learn how to slow down momentum by using a forward split in my fall. The back roll exercise is a safety drill and a starting point for being able to take my safety skills higher on the pole and simulate a fall in real time.
Five years of pole dance muscle memory proved to be an extremely challenging hurdle and seemed more like a comedy of errors at times. The first mistake I made was in my split position. I was immediately going into a sexy back rollover using the standard middle split position, which increased momentum instead of slowing it down. After this error was fixed we were back to another issue with my forward split. I was extending my back leg out diagonally, which doesn’t slow down momentum in a fall and also puts your body in a more compromised landing position. I was mentally thinking about not going into a middle split position but my body was functioning purely out of muscle memory. After I mastered keeping my back leg straight I was having problems keeping my front leg straight. I was going into a passe lever position. After numerous attempts I was able to simulate a forward split and follow the line of my fall; it was much easier to gain body awareness and understand how I am minimizing injury through slowing down momentum.Let’s face it. None of us are perfect. We are very fallible creatures by nature. The best of the best can slip unexpectedly and fall. The value of learning safe falling methods is not limited to pole dancing. It’s a life skill that can prove to be very valuable and possibly save your life. I am willing to accept that my approach to safety training might seem a bit unorthodox to many people in the pole community. The idea of safety drills in preparation for an accidental fall doesn’t exist in the pole community; I’m going to change that. Amos has agreed to work with me and create a safety training program that is tailored to my safety needs as a pole dancer. Instead of focusing on just understanding body awareness in relation to the pole I’m learning about body awareness that will teach me to understand where my body is in relation to the pole and the floor. I am learning how to slow down momentum and use major points of contact on the body that can minimize injury from a fall that originates from an inverted position. Safe falling may not be the best approach to prioritizing safety for every pole dancer out there but my safety tip for the day is to prioritize your safety and find what works for you.
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11 Replies
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I think this is something more of us should be passionate about and aware of if we want to increase the longevity of our bodies and our ability to perform at peak, or at all! Thank you for sharing and doing to leg work on this. I am looking forward to hearing more and learning from your mission. Best of luck to you, and again, thanks so much for the safety reminder! 🙂
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Thank you for your kind words vegetarianpoledancer. I will definitely be posting more in the future.
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I completely agree with this – I used to do parkour (for about a year), and then some fall training after that (long before I did pole) and it has made me a lot safer when upside down than I think I would have been had I not. Even just walking around I trip over less than I ever used to 🙂
I also look forward to hearing more! good stuff
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Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find fall training in my area? I live downtown Toronto so I'm sure there must be something here but I wouldn't know where to start looking. Where do I find the cool parkour kids? 🙂
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http://www.themonkeyvault.com/
http://www.meetup.com/Downtown-Toronto-Parkour-Club/
Parkour is everywhere 🙂
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Thanks Koidragon, I had a feeling!
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vegetarianpoledancer I hope that you can find a good parkour gym but I caution you to take it slow. As far as I know Amos is "the" parkour athlete who specializes in safety training. Find out if the parkour gyms in your area have any instructors who have received training from Amos or if they follow his youtube videos etc. Because we're thinking outside of the box and taking parkour safety training and applying it to the pole you need to make sure that any of the instructors you find will be able to understand your safety goals as a pole dancer. I'll definitely keep posting updates. Good luck. You can also look for a dojo in your area i.e. Aikido, Ninjitsu, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. There are several martial arts that teach safe falling and it would be a good start for you at the very least.
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Also, there are a lot of stunt fall training options out there, professional gyms based on teaching athletes and actors how to fall for movies etc. Judo is another good one, as is Greko Roman Wrestling – BJJ, generally speaking, tends to go into take downs and how to fall more-so once you are already at a higher level, as the focus is on training on the ground already. Mind you, this is insanely important too (I may be biased). 🙂
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Thanks ladies, I appreciate the extra insight. I am looking forward to checking into these suggestions. It sounds like there is enough variety for me to find someone in this large city that can safely focus in on the specifics of pole. I may also look into some of the opinions of cirque trainers I worked with over the Summer. I hope everyone sees the importance of training safety on both the ground and in the air. I mean, we are stunting both in pole!
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Thank you Koidragon for the support and additional comments 🙂
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Gymnastics also has a lot of emphasis on safe falling and spotting too. You may be able to learn something from them too.
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