Find your Flow: an Introduction.

It's the freestyle portion of class and everyone else seems to be getting on with it. They are all in their respective corners, moving seamlessly from trick to trick and looking like they barely have to think about what they're doing, yet, here you are, mind blank, awkward and staring around the room. Sound familiar? You are not alone. This is one of the most common concerns I have heard from my students in my 9 years of teaching. So, what is flow? And how can we find it?

First we need to define a few terms.

Freestyle: an exercise that helps us to find our flow whilst refining our tricks and movements.

Flow: a state of mind and body that is almost meditative and intuitive.

Style: a unique quality to our movement that develops through freestyle and training.

Flow is when we are able to move from the thinking stage to the feeling stage of our practice, it's a state of mind that is often called being "in the zone", and it's not uncommon to hear students proclaim that they'll never be able to do it. Pole dancers with beautiful flow are not unicorns; they just understand the steps needed to get from barely knowing a trick to being able to execute it perfectly. in a sequence, with beautiful transitions, whilst also being in time to the music.

Pole dancing has, unfortunately, a strong culture of there being a tricks arms race. Both instructors and students are guilty of this - with some students just wanting that weeks cool photo, rather than having any interest in how to actually make it look good and be able to perform it flawlessly. There's lots of different types of pole classes for different people and I certainly can't say that there's anything majorly wrong with this, it's just a different approach to pole. A pole fitness class is more likely to be like this than a pole dance class, for example.

However, many of us were inspired by the OGs like Alethea Austin, Felix Cane, Jenyne Butterfly and other early viral pole dancers. We started pole because we wanted to look like them, and these ladies sure have "flow". We were dazzled by their snake like movements, undulations and perfectly executed tricks. The most difficult tricks available then were superman, shoulder mounts and ayeshas, and although the tricks arms race had begun, many of us were still just trying to do a basic body roll and pirouette well. 

It was also a time when online platforms were scarce, many of us were buying Alethea Austin dvds, furiously pausing and watching youtube videos, and would be stuck practicing the same tricks over and over again for months before we learnt anything majorly new, both in studio or online. This necessitated experimentation. How could we put things in different orders? Enter a trick or exit it differently? Could we do it with a straight leg or a bent leg? We could dine out on one workshop with a famous pole dancer for a year. And we drilled and drilled and drilled sequences and moves over and over and over. One of my favourite sequences is still one I learnt from Felix Cane nearly a decade ago. I use it every single time I freestyle.

Many pole dancers today would find this boring but it is exactly why many of us have been able to blossom in to the dancers we are today and it was actually really very fun. It was incredibly freeing to put music on and dance for hours in my bedroom, even if it sometimes took months or years to achieve tricks, that my students today seem to achieve immediately. We all get nostalgic for the past but it was a "simpler time" in the pole industry, though no less full of drama and controversy. 

So how does this help you? Well structuring your training like a pole dancer from over a decade ago, with some of our modern knowledge, is what's going to help you find your flow, and I am going to help you, with regular blogs taking you through the process step by step.

My online platform will also be providing you with everything you need to know plus exercises to help you improve your flow, along with a Polerina series by ballet instructor Loretta who is going to help you point your toes and get nice lines. 

You can be a magical flow unicorn too!