I'd smile and be proud.

Last weekend I participated in the Ontario Pole Fitness Championships in Milton. I was one of eight women in the Amateur division and, although I didn't place, the whole experience was unforgettable and completely inspirational. The atmosphere was full of excitement and camaraderie. Even though everyone was there to compete, we were also there to support each other and share in something for which we all have this incredible passion.

The makeup, the hair, the costumes, and everyone stretching and warming up as the air in the Teatro Centre hums with excited, nervous energy. It's almost electric. The clock creeps closer and closer to seven and I calm my mind; slow deep breaths fill my lungs as I close my eyes and meditate. Some of the girls are laughing and joking. Some are touching up hair, taping their costumes and affixing false eyelashes. The audience buzzes in the ballroom where the performances are to take place. I'm second to perform. I'm warm. I'm ready. I'm up.

I felt pretty good about how my routine went. I lost my centre a little bit on the spinning pole, but I made it through confidently and with a smile on my face. Looking at my score cards now, that was one of the things the judges liked most. They were also impressed by my lines and pointed toes (all those ballet and jazz years paid off). Overall, I'm happy with how I performed and proud of myself for participating in the first place. I came out of it with a renewed drive to be the best I can be, as well as a new community of pole friends. Seeing the talent of these women inspires me to come back next year and the year after and indefinitely after that. A sincere and heartfelt thank you goes out to all the performers, organizers, and volunteers from August 17th, not to mention my friends and family who came out to support me. My congratulations to the ladies in each category who placed and won, but also to the ones who didn't. Everyone performed and carried themselves with professionalism, grace, and positivity that is not always seen in the competitive world. You are all my inspiration. See you all again soon!

Could I take the heat?

This post is a little bit overdue (it's been a while, so I really need to get myself back into making regular blog entries).

I recently submitted an application to the Canadian Pole Fitness Association in hopes of competing in the Ontario regional competition. There were 13 applicants in my category (Amateur) and on Monday the finalists were announced. And I'm one of them!

In order to apply, each competitor had to submit a video no longer than 2 minutes, being sure to include the mandatory moves for their category. Amateurs were required to include a climb of choice, helicopter, front chair to reverse hook spin, extended butterfly (or special K, as some of you know it), and a sit to hand on bottom (also known as layout or plank variation). None of these moves are particularly difficult, but trying to focus on including them all and making them look good was distracting and when I finally recorded and submitted my video, I wasn't really convinced it would be good enough. Luckily I was wrong, and now I'm super excited to participate in my first ever competition.

The Ontario Pole Fitness Championships take place on August 17th in Milton, and if I do well and come out on top then I'll be moving on to the Canadian Pole Fitness Championships held at the Great Canadian Pole Expo in October. The Expo runs October 5th and 6th in Mississauga, Ontario. As well as the competition, the Expo will have a variety of vendors, workshops and seminars. I plan on making the absolute most of that weekend (even if I'm not competing). I'm super excited to perform, learn, meet new people and simply enjoy being surrounded by the sport I love.

For those of you who are interested, here's my video from my application. (Check out the other videos on my channel while you're at it.)
Audition for Ontario Qualifier 2013

People might get the wrong idea.

This one may get some mixed reactions, but I'm just going to dive head first into this issue.

I realize that not everyone has the same attitude toward pole dance as I do, and I try to appreciate that people are entitled to their own opinions. However, I find it very frustrating when I hear about or see people judging the sport without having any comprehension of what it is or what's involved. No, we're not strippers. We're not godless trollops or high school dropouts with daddy issues, and we're not selling our bodies or integrity by practicing or performing our art.* So let me break it down a bit.

Pole dance, pole fitness, aerial pole, whatever you want to call it, is a sport. Just like gymnastics, just like ballet, just like hockey. It takes an equal amount of strength, if not more, than most widely recognized sports (and definitely more than sports like golf). Pole dancing uses every muscle group in your body, from your fingers, wrists and arms, through your back, torso and core, right down to your feet. Pole athletes end up with bruises, strains, torn muscles, broken bones, and an assortment of other injuries, just like other athletes. If you go into a strip club, you're going to see something completely different (I'm talking worlds apart) from what you would see in a pole studio. Pole dancers practice in rather scant clothing, but so do gymnasts, swimmers, wrestlers, beach volleyball players, and so on and so on. Every sport's uniform is designed to accommodate what the athlete is doing with their body. Pole dancers use their skin to grip the pole. If that skin is covered, a dancer can't grip and therefore can't perform the tricks that make this such an impressive sport. Personally, I don't wear the seven inch heels that some pole dancers love, but there are reasons behind the shoes too. High heels help to work the leg muscles and keep a dancer's body weight forward (so they don't rock back on their heels). They also elongate the leg and force dancers to work on their balance, similar to a ballerina on pointe shoes. It takes skill and practice to be able to dance in shoes like these, so don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

It's not just the ignorance and misunderstanding that gets me though. I so often meet beginner students who, as much as they love the class, are afraid or embarrassed that people might find out they do pole dance. Props to them for coming out and giving it a try, but if the women in the class still view it as something racy or indecent, then why should the rest of the world think differently? The biggest step in changing society's image of pole dance is for people to stop being embarrassed by it. There's nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about! There's nothing to hide!

Heels wouldn't be unheard of.

This week was the final week of our first set of Pole Fit sessions. To mix things up and give the ladies a bit more of a challenge, I invited them all to bring a pair of high heel shoes. They were a bit nervous, I think, but most of them gave it a try.

Now, I've been doing this for a while, and I'm pretty proud of my pole skills. I'm not an expert by any means, but I know what I'm doing and I have every intention of continuing to work my way up to an elite level. That being said, it's been well over a year since I last practiced in heels. Granted, I should've done a few spins with my shoes on before all my beginners showed up, but what's the fun in that? I told them to take it slow because doing their spins in heels for the first time would feel different, and I reassured them that the likelihood was high that I might even be the first to fall on my face and/or ass.

I have a pair of shoes that I bought in Australia to use for the very first beginner course that I took, and I love these shoes. They're just plain grey, but they're comfortable (considering the height) and I just love the way they make my legs look when I practice with them on. The problem with these shoes is that they're about half a size too big, so once my feet start to sweat, I slip and slide around in them like Mario on a banana peel. I really wish that I could get the exact same ones, but in a smaller size. They even have a padded back so they've never given me that wicked blister on my heel.

Luckily, I brought a spare pair of heels to the studio; a better fit, but also slightly lower. I always dance up on my toes anyway, so the heels of my shoes weren't even touching the floor. It was a lot of fun and a good change to do a few classes in heels. I really should practice in heels more often, but I think I'll have to get a nice high pair that fit properly.

You'd think I'd be used to bruises.

The last couple weeks have been a bit slack as far as my pole practice goes. Last week was March Break, so classes at Mariposa Dance Company were cancelled. I did have my advanced class on Wednesday night, and it was a great training sesh (we've added an extra half hour of stretching to the end of class), but it was the only solid workout I did for the week. Then this week Monday's class ended up being cancelled; the ladies in that class all work together and ended up having a scheduling conflict at the last minute. Tuesday's classes didn't run either, but they were postponed ahead of time.

A bit of back story (and by "a bit" I mean "years and years condensed into a somewhat reasonably sized paragraph or two"): When I was about 10 or 11, I started having fainting spells which I would follow up with a lovely seizure. It's not like they happened all the time; maybe once or twice a year. I could feel them coming on for about 15 minutes beforehand and was right as rain within a half hour after, and the seizures would only last about 20 seconds. It wasn't really a big deal until I had an episode during my flight from Toronto to Regina for a week-long dance workshop. Trust me when I say having a seizure on an airplane is not fun. Glass half full, I got to be first off the plane when we landed.

In high school I was tested for epilepsy, but that wasn't it. Then for about five years I was faint-free. Unfortunately, this past summer I relapsed (for lack of a better word). My family doctor referred me to a cardiologist who then referred me to another cardiologist. Since the fall, I've had an electrocardiogram, two stress tests, two echocardiograms, a cardiac MRI, and most recently an electrophysiology study.

Okay, so this post is a bit of an unrelated tangent from my blog's central theme, but it's been a while since my last post and just because I can't pole at the moment doesn't mean I can't write about it (kind of).

The EP study was the reason classes were postponed Tuesday night. My procedure was scheduled at the Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket. They told me to check in by 11am, so my mom and I arrived around 10:15 and the nurse got me all set up with an IV, filled out forms for my chart, etc. We then proceeded to wait in Visitors' Waiting for hours and hours and hours until they finally called me in. Of course, they only called me into the patient waiting room, where I then waited for another hour or so. I made it into the procedure room around 4pm. The test itself went well, but because it went so late, Dr. Verma (my cardiologist) was heading home before all the post-procedure ECGs were finished being run and I ended up being held overnight. I don't mind all the medical tests (although they drive me to extreme frustration when nothing comes back conclusively), but I do not like spending the night in the hospital. In the end, it was a good thing they kept me; an hour or so after my mom left, I got nauseous and threw up, which caused the incision point to start bleeding (femoral artery, so not the best place from which to bleed), and a few hours after that it started bleeding a second time. 

After all that, there were still no conclusive results, so Dr. Verma got me set up for a tilt table test in a couple weeks. I guess we'll see where things go from there.

Attempting to bring this back around to the pole theme, I had to miss my Wednesday class this week. not that I really felt like going anyway. My leg is stiff and sore, I'm still exhausted and I have a bruise the size of my hand at the top of my thigh. The last time I had a bruise this size was after Tylar twisted me into my first superman. And that experience was a lot more fun! I like to consider my bruises trophies of hard work and new tricks, but this one is only a trophy of involuntary patience* and one hell of a cardiac mystery.

*Just an interesting little tidbit: the word "patient" originates from the Latin word for "suffering". Learning this fact, however, does nothing to clarify whether it was first used as in "someone seeking medical aid" or as in "having to wait for an obscene amount of time".

I'd be rock solid, baby!

When it comes to sports, there comes a point when natural ability becomes null and void. Sure, some people have an aptitude for [insert sport here] in the beginning; they're the ones who skyrocket on the learning curve. But eventually everyone reaches that point in their training when they can't depend on that raw talent anymore and they have to begin really working for it.

In the past, I'll admit, I reached that point with various activities and gradually lost interest or motivation and they simply disappeared from my life. In most of these cases, I whole-heartedly regret this. I've now reached that point in my pole training. While for the past two years everything has come fairly easily (not to say I haven't worked my ass off, but the aptitude I mentioned before certainly carried me far), I've been finding that recently my tricks aren't progressing like I want them to. I've hit a plateau.

And so my focus has shifted. Where before I was constantly pushing for new and more challenging tricks, now I'm determined to build my strength and flexibility in order to improve the tricks I have. It's very much about attitude. I have to do away with my frustrations and channel my energy instead in a direction of pure and solid strength, away from the pole. New tricks will come, but not until I have the muscles to facilitate them. Even in the few short weeks that Pole Fit has been running at Mariposa Dance Company, I'm already feeling stronger. The fact that those are all beginner classes is beside the point. We do conditioning exercises and work on technique just as much as in the advanced classes at Spinbuddies. Yes, the exercises are easier, but they still build strength and doing them five or six times a week makes a noticeable difference.

For example, in tonight's advanced class down in Newmarket, I was working on the same tricks I've been hacking away at for weeks, months, months and months, but I felt really strong doing them, which allowed me to push just that little bit further. I still can't hold my Iron X, but every week it gets closer, more solid, more controlled, and that's what I'm going for right now. Nothing worth getting comes in a day.

So a note and shout-out to all my MDC Pole Fit ladies: in the short amount of time you've been under my "care and guidance" I've already seen improvement. Some of you make it in leaps and bounds, some of you tiptoe your way along, but you're all doing better and you're all getting stronger. I'm so proud of you and I'm excited every single week to teach and train you all.

I'd live in a forest.

Pole Fit at Mariposa Dance Company kicked off this week. On Saturday, Corinna (the studio owner) and I assembled all the X-Stages. We have six for the studio with 45mm chrome poles, plus my personal brass pole (I call him Paul). We have a rack that all the stages sit into when they're not being used so that we don't have to set them up from scratch before and take them apart after classes. We got all the stages onto the rack so that we could test-run setting them all up and figure out the easiest and fastest way to get everything ready for class. It only took us about five minutes to get all the stages spread around the room, which was faster than we expected. We were a little concerned about set-up time before class because of how many poles there are to set up and the weight of each X-Stage. We managed to develop a system though, so between the two of us, we can get everything ready within about 10 minutes, including checking each pole to make sure they're all secure. It was definitely neat to see them all in the studio... like a forest of poles.

Tuesday was our first night of classes, beginning at 7:30. We had three classes in a row. Being my first time teaching, I was nervous, but things seemed to go off without a hitch and all the ladies enjoyed their classes. We had a fun night, laughing, working out and doing some basic pole moves. For week one, I introduced some conditioning exercises that we'll be working on for the next two months, as well as the simplest skills and spins for beginners. Over the next few weeks of the course, we'll be building our repertoire of spins as well as starting some combinations and choreography.

Besides the Tuesday classes, we have one on Friday nights and one Saturday afternoons. Unfortunately, Simcoe County has just been slammed by a snow storm, so Mariposa's dance classes for tonight, including Pole Fit, have been cancelled due to the weather and road conditions. Our Friday ladies will be a week behind the other four classes, but that's just how it'll have to be. The roads are practically impassable. Oh winter. Oh Canada.

I'd have to start somewhere.

I want to preface this by saying, I'm not being racist with the title of my blog. Just read... you'll see.

My name is Libby Ives and I'm a pole dancer. I first discovered pole dance and pole fitness two years ago in Queensland, Australia. The Gold Coast was my home away from home. I was a student at Griffith University, and every day on my walk to campus, I would pass by Pole Blitz, a studio on the corner of Currumburra and Corporation roads in Ashmore. With "body manufacturing" staring back at me in sizable letters, it was hard not to be intrigued. I began taking classes in February 2011 and was instantly hooked.

For the following nine months I took classes nearly every day. I was addicted to the challenge of mastering new tricks and the endorphins of a solid workout. Not to mention the environment within the studio. Everyone was so positive and supportive of one another. Classes of 10-15 people would include everyone from beginners to advanced students, yet no one ever seemed to feel left out or left behind when it came to learning.

Sadly, after bonding with this snug Pole Blitz family, my uni was over and off back to Canada I went. After being down under for a total of 17 months, settling back into Canadian life took a while (to be honest, a lot of the time I still don't feel settled). It took several months before I found a pole studio to continue my training: Spinbuddies in Newmarket, Ontario.

For anyone who has ever changed studios (dance, yoga, pole, what-have-you) or gyms, you know that not every place runs things the same way and different instructors can have very different approaches. Spinbuddies was different than what I was used to, but somehow it still worked and I fit like a missing puzzle piece into a class of some very talented advanced students. The class was a set group from week to week, which most of my Aussie classes weren't. Plus I was (and unfortunately still am) only taking one class per week; a huge step down from my previous training regimen. But the studio is a half hour drive from where I live in Barrie, Ontario, whereas Pole Blitz was less than a five minute walk away. I guess we make do with what we can and we adapt to compensate for the differences.

I've been at Spinbuddies for about eight months now and it's been incredible to see both myself and my classmates grow as athletes and performers. I also have the added excitement of preparing to start my own classes as an instructor. Beginning February 4th, I will be running beginner classes in Orillia, at Mariposa Dance Company. Becoming the one at the front of the class is both thrilling and nerve-racking, but I'm considering it a giant step in the right direction when it comes to my future career.