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| About me and my pole |
About the author
I am a 34 year old African American female. I have given birth to four children but I don’t necessarily want to look like I have. I have managed to stay fit over the years fairly naturally, by controlling my intake of calories versus the output of energy. I worked for years as a gentlemen’s club pole dancer off and on and I even taught a class for beginners briefly toward the end of my club career. In 2006 I retired to devote more time and attention to acquiring my AA degree in Information Technology.
Around the time that I retired from club dancing, apparently my metabolism underwent that change that everyone had warned me about back when I could eat whatever I wanted and at times had trouble gaining weight when I inadvertently lost a few pounds. In a short two year span I gained just over 30 pounds to rest at a high of over 150 from 118. Now initially I was trying to flesh out my frame a bit because I had lost some weight due to a stressful situation and dietary changes. I wanted to gain 5-7 pounds, but after I gained around 12 I just stopped weighing myself. Although I knew that I was putting on some weight, I carried most of it well, and the extra was under or behind me so I failed to note how much weight I had really put on, until one day I weighed myself and was shocked to find that I was over 150 lbs and well on the way to 160.
Long story short I decided that this was unacceptable. So first I went the routes that most women take, dieting, minimal stress and minimal impact exercises like walking. Then on to aerobics, which was a passion of mine in my teens and early twenties in the late eighties and early nineties. It took less than 2 weeks for the boredom that had come on after years back then, to creep in and rob me of the enjoyment of the activity. Through all of this my boyfriend remained both supportive and quiet. He had heard me say several times that I wouldn’t have this problem if I was still pole dancing. My bf had never been exposed to pole dancing as when he last went to a strip club there weren’t any poles or pole dancers. So I started showing him videos of what I was talking about on YouTube and some other vid sharing sites. He agreed it was beautiful and certainly looked like a strenuous enough activity to help me with losing the weight. The problem was that with both of us operating different home based businesses out of our living room with the accompanying equipment and storage there was no room for a pole anywhere in my house. However we have a huge yard, and as providence would have it, some patriot who had previously owned the house had sunk a flag pole stand into a block of concrete out in our yard.
One Saturday morning I woke up to find my wonderful boyfriend pounding a brand new pole down into the flagpole stand. He then made me a stage and left me to the work that I had been wanting to do. In the first week I lost 5 pounds. Over the next month and a half I had lost over half of the weight that I had wanted to take off 14 to 15 lbs. Then disaster! Showing off for a friend I pulled a muscle in my hip and couldn’t work out for about two and a half weeks. Then just after I restarted my workouts I was trying to learn a new trick and pulled a muscle in my shoulder. I couldn’t move for a week in any direction in any way without bolts of pain shooting up my back, neck and shoulder. I then exacerbated the injury by trying to go back to working out as usual before it had really begun to heal. In the frustration of the forced inactivity I began to quickly put the weight back on, which encouraged me to assume more healing than actually occurred twice and end up flat on my back again in pain. It was an exercise in patience and listening to my body and muscles. That time period was also an object lesson in the importance of stretching out well before working out, warming the muscles down afterward, and taking greater care to not exacerbate an injury trying to hold onto or pull out a failed trick, or once having injured oneself, in patiently and slowly rehabbing the muscle or joint rather than just demanding performance from the injured limb.
I am back on my feet, back on my pole, and working out on a fairly regular basis, though I have had to work around the weather conditions in North Palm Springs, California, which are winds up to 50 mph with gusts often up to 65 and 70 mph, and an endless summer that usually begins in April and ends in late November with regular temperatures averaging 115 for almost the entire months of June, July, August, and September. A lot of the time now I have to go out there at night if I wish to practice for any length of time. I am also grateful that I don’t have to work around torrential rains and pocket storms as it normally rains in this area about twice a year if that. That keeps my pole nice and dry and shiny with no rust or oxidation building up on it. I recently evened out the ground under my pole and my boyfriend rebuilt my stage with a little more structural engineering than just placing the boards flat on the ground and life is good. I am back to losing pounds and inches. I am not back to where I was in 200y but I am also not back where I was when I started working out in late April of 09, I have progressed enough to see the physical results of my labors and I am not in the least bored with anything except my music sometimes. With 30 gigs of music on my hard drive though I think I am going to be just fine.
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