Let's talk injuries

The oh-so-boring part of poledance. Injuries. It's pretty common, if you haven't got injured yet, you probably will someday. A strained muscle or something. Or maybe it's not even pole-related at all. Maybe one day, at winter perhaps, you will slip on the ice, fall and break your arm. Even a bad cold could slow you down. That's just life, shit happens.

I got my first couple of strained muscles about one week after I got my pole. I'm a fast learner, my body adapts well, and my quick progress fed my ego and made me even more eager to train than I already was. I guess I practiced the first week straight before I hit the wall.

I hadn't paid too much attention to do everything properly from the beginning, and my first bad habit was holding my outside arm way too high in basic spins. I strained my deltoid muscle (shoulder) and it took three weeks to recover. I also strained one of my calf-muscles during a chopper, which took three weeks to recover as well.

This happened in mid-december. I was recovered in the middle of january, but something had changed. The progress I had made was gone. Suddenly everything hurt again. It hurt to climb, it hurt to invert, everything except the basic spins hurt. I basically had to start from scratch again. I exercised a few times in january, a couple of tries in february, but the spark was gone. I was utterly discouraged, nothing seemed to go my way. Everything hurt, the pole was slippery as f***, my legs never got warm enough to stick, I couldn't figure anything out. It was pointless. I gave up.

Until a day in late march. The boyfriend had just fallen asleep, and I was cleaning my room since I couldn't sleep. And the pole was just there. In the middle of my room, where it has been since I put it up. I took a couple of spins. Like, it was just standing there right? Why not just use it? Just for fun? Suddenly those couple of spins resulted in me having a little 30min workout. Put on my new, unworn pole-shorts from lulu lemon which the boy had bought me from his trip to the states. I had a blast. I had fun on the pole until my arms were shaking and sweat was dripping. I had finally found the joy in poledancing again.

Since then I've been practicing regularly, but with a couple of rest-days between each practice. I've learned from the mistake of exercising way too hard way too often. And I've come into a pretty good pattern. I usually work out on thursdays and fridays, because that's my days off work, and when the girls come over for lessons.

Unfortunately, I got injured again. Or I was on the way to get injured. I'm not sure what it is, but my forearms hurt while doing some types of moves, like the fishhook. It wasn't too bad at first, but over time it got worse, and last practice it was so bad I figured I had to take some time off before seriously hurting myself. Dang, I've been hitting some bad speed-bumps lately.... It's been two weeks since last practice, so I'm gonna try again today and see if it's gotten better. And avoid the moves that triggered the pain in the first place...

The fish-hook