[Kimmaaaaay]

Whether or not it helps with the tummy-wrinkles, I did learn a great little trick the other day with the Gemini that helps lock you into the right contact point in your hip pocket:

When you invert up and then put your outside leg over the pole, before you let go with your arms, pull up and pull your chest through from between your arms. When you let go, the pole is automatically in the hip pocket in the right place and you don’t have to re-lock your leg to make sure it’s in the knee pit to hold you up.

That trick might help with some amount of sliding down the pole when you’re getting into your Gemini. The sliding might be pulling the skin around in your hip pocket around and resulting in the wrinkles you don’t like.

Good luck!

[Kimmaaaaay]

I would really love something that would track my daily progress/keep me accountable/remind me when I am trying to do something like the 30 day takeoff or Nailed It in 30. It would also be amazing if there could be sub-groups where people were allowed to chat or post photos/vids of their progress on certain lessons. Maybe just add ways to categorize discussions? Right now we have one large discussion board where you can start up topics and have people add to them, but topics tend to get lost with time and then repeated, and often times I have to fall back on the search feature to find discussions related to specific moves or something that I want help with.

Another thing that would be really amazing would be a combo builder to help with choreography or trying new entrances into things. You have some amazing videos already up that teach individual moves. If you had something even as simple as a graphical interface where a person could drag and drop little icons with pictures of moves (which would link to the lesson videos) into some kind of order, it would be a hugely helpful choreography tool. I write lists and word descriptions on paper when I’m doing choreography but it’d be so much clearer and better if I just had pictures so I could see “oh yeah, this goes from inverted D to extended butterfly” or something. I know that Pole Move Box kind of achieves this with pictures on cards, and that’s awesome, but if I could do it without spreading out a bunch of cards, and keep the routine in pictures on my phone, it would completely blow my mind! 😀

Thank you so much for providing such a great pole resource for us Veena! I don’t know where I’d be without your website as my virtual studio and support group!

[Kimmaaaaay]

My boyfriend has extremely sweaty hands and I have super dry skin (to the point where I sometimes can’t get any grip). We both use a grip aid that my friend who poles in Florida (where it’s super humid all the time) recommended called Stunt Grip. It’s a rosin-based grip aid that is actually activated by liquid. It goes on like a powder, feels a little like Dry Hands (sorta chalky) when you put it on, but when your hands get sweaty, it turns sticky like iTac. When I’m trying something that needs a whole lotta stick, I jump-start it with a teeny spritz of alcohol (but only when I don’t plan on doing spins). It comes off with any kind of lotion. We found that the liquid activation really helped my boyfriend (though there are days where he still sweats through it, so it has its limits). Also, it doesn’t seem to leave any residue on the pole (I use it frequently on my pole and it doesn’t leave sticky patches the way iTac sometimes leaves behind). You can order it directly from Stunt Grip’s website.

I hope that helps! I understand why some teachers discourage a reliance on grip aids in order to build hand strength (I got a little reliant on grip aids when I started doing more difficult tricks and realized my left hand is too weak to do one-handed spins now), but I think most students realize when they hit a wall with hand strength and work on it. Having a temporarily wimpy hand is way better than slipping and falling off a pole! No one should ban you from doing a sport in the manner you feel is safest for you. Best of luck!

[Kimmaaaaay]

I second the magnet suggestion. If your ceiling confuses your stud-finder (my ceiling and walls do because they are are plaster/lathe and plaster/blueboard), try using a small strong magnet (one of those 3/4″ round fridge magnets works) to find nails that are in studs. The magnet will stick to the nails – sometimes it helps to tie a piece of dental floss around the magnet and let it dangle just a teeny bit so you can let the magnet “seek” metal objects in the ceiling. You can mark the nail locations with tiny dots. Once you find several nails, it’s pretty easy to figure out from the pattern where the stud is. Best of luck putting up the pole!

[Kimmaaaaay]

I know I’m in a bit of an unusual boat with my chest size, but I wear a 34FF (sometimes 32), and I’m always really sad because I can never wear any cute tops/sports bras for pole because they all often lack underwire (the ones that have it look like beige orthotic devices). I often fit into the size M pole shorts of coordinated/matching outfits, and then I’m completely out of luck when it comes to being able to fit in the the matching top. There must be more than one ample-chested pole lady who also faces this dilemma!

If you made even just *one* style of “cute” sports top that had an underwire and was sized by cup, instead of S, M, L, XL, I would buy one in every single color available! I realize that expanding into that level of size offerings adds significant complexity to production, but it is a niche that no one has filled. The top doesn’t have to be so supportive that I can jog in it… but just having enough fabric to cover the “girls” and some underwire to make sure they don’t look saggy would make a world of difference (the elastic band on regular sports bras simply isn’t enough to hold things in place when they’re that size…)

Just my two cents! Best of luck with your new company!

[Kimmaaaaay]

Thank you so much for the suggestions! I picked up an exercise band after work last night and am looking forward to trying it.