Preventative Measures

One of the most important aspects of injury rehabilitation is injury prevention. It may sound cheesy to you, but taking care of your body is one of the most important things you can do in pole dancing. Below, we’ve compiled a short list of preventative measures you can take so you can avoid tendonitis in the first place.

Use More of Your Body

With certain daily motions, we tend to force a lot of pressure on our joints, whether we’re getting something out of the fridge, driving, or putting on a seatbelt. It’s important to get into the habit of using the rest of our body as well.

For example, you don’t want to lift something heavy with your back because it puts too much strain on the spine. Instead, you lift with your “legs” – the glutes.

In this instance, tendonitis occurs when we place a lot of stress on the tendons in our bodies.

This applies to pole dancing as well. If you are doing a lot of one-handed spins or inverted moves that require split grip such as Butterfly or Handspring, then you run the risk of putting a lot of pressure on your elbow and shoulder joints if you cave your chest in or under-utilize your shoulder muscles, back, and lats.

Additionally, these moves all require the push/pull method to lessen the strain, and it’s not uncommon for that technique to get lost in the woodwork.

Not sure what the push/pull method is? Check out Split Grip in our Ultimate Guide to Grips and Holds.

By moving points of stress and movement from joints to muscles, we are better utilizing our body in a way it is meant to be used. This lessens the chance of a joint injury in the future and helps develop small, supporting muscles. Well-balanced habits make a well-balanced body.

Mix Up Your Routine

Many tendon injuries are developed because we do something repetitively.

Perhaps you’re a fan of low flow spins, so you tend to only do that type of spin.

Maybe you can’t get enough of that one move you learned several weeks ago so you try it over and over again.

Perhaps you’re an instructor and follow the same set of movements day in, day out without doing your own moves.

In any case, these are all repetitive movements that can potentially lead to tendonitis. The tendon is overused, and it needs some time to cool down, so try something different for a change.

Mix up your routine – if you typically do spins, try working on some leg hold moves. Remi sit needs some love, too.

Our muscles need variety, and by mixing up your routine, you can provide that variety. This is another reason why it’s important to step out of your comfort zone occasionally, trying something outside your style.

Remember to Warm Up and Cool Down

Warming up is important, and it can prevent injuries while you dance. It is, however, very easy to forget or excuse a warm up while you are poling at home or if you jump into the middle of class.

Repetitive motion can come from your warm up and aggravate your tendons further; creating a new warm up also helps renew your enthusiasm for the movement, giving you a better warm up. You can even curate a warm up rotation to cycle through.

Likewise, cool down stretches and routines typically get ignored entirely. Cooling down can help prevent muscle soreness and stiffness, as well as slow your heart rate and breathing to baseline, and regulate blood flow.

Cool down stretches will also help increase your range of motion over time. The newfound flexibility will ease tension in your joints and increase blood flow.

Verify Proper Technique

In an ideal world, we all have proper technique 100% of the time without any mistakes. We’ve run through our mental checklist without missing a thing, and we understand everything we need to know about the position our body is in at all times.

That is almost never the case, however.

We’re not machines calculating every single instance in a nanosecond. We’re people who love to pole dance.

There’s a lot of dynamic movement involved, and sometimes it can be easy to miss a beat or forget a technical aspect of our form. We get fatigued without realizing it. We think we’re doing something completely different than what our body is doing.

Check up on yourself.

Don’t just practice a move until you achieve it, refine the technique behind it. Verify if you have proper technique, whether that confirmation comes in the form of a spotter, a video camera, or mirrors. Seeing yourself from the outside is critical to pole dancing for your own health, not just aesthetics.

Listen to Your Body

If you experience pain when you perform a certain movement, ease up or stop. We understand that Superman sucks, and shoulder mounts can be uncomfortable at first. There’s a difference between that kind of discomfort and “something is wrong” pain. Listening to your body and gaining the experience and practice in understanding those subtle cues is important in any physical exercise.

Continue Recommended Exercises

After you’ve gone through an injury, especially when tendons are involved, it can put you at a predisposition for re-injury in the future[7]. It is advisable to continue the rehab exercises after your body is healed so you can continue to develop the muscles around the affected area, keeping it flexible and healthy.

Your physical therapist may recommend slight adjustments to your exercise regimen depending on how well the injury healed, how fast you recovered, and the current state of the injury.