3 Science-Backed Tips for Better Pole Freestyle
Dr. Rosy Boa shares a previously unavailable talk outlining three research-based areas to help pole freestyling feel easier and more natural: a mastery mindset, moving to music, and reducing self-consciousness. Drawing on improvisation research (largely from jazz and musical improvisation), she explains that improvisation relies on generating and selecting familiar movement options, so dancers are more likely to access skills they can execute successfully about 90% of the time; mastery approaches are also linked to less perfectionism and better body appreciation. She then summarizes entrainment research showing dance training improves rhythmic synchronization, and that music with strong, predictable beats, some complexity, familiarity, and slower tempo is easier to move to, while metrically complex or unfamiliar music is harder. Finally, she notes that watching oneself (mirrors, filming, self-view on Zoom) increases self-consciousness and can worsen body image, so for flow she recommends avoiding visual self-monitoring and reflecting via journaling and feedback.
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Chapters:
00:00 Welcome and Episode Setup
01:28 What You’ll Learn Today
03:18 Mastery Mindset for Freestyle
07:14 Moving to Music Entrainment
12:20 Pick Music That Helps Flow
13:21 Ditch Mirrors to Lose Self Focus
15:11 Three Tips and Wrap Up
15:55 Thanks and How to Connect
Citations
Levin, R. (2009). Improvising Mozart. Musical improvisation: Art, education, and society, 143-149.
Bloom, Benjamin S. (March 1968). "Learning for Mastery" (PDF). UCLA - CSEIP - Evaluation Comment. Vol. 1.
Andrzejewski, C. E., Wilson, A. M., & Henry, D. J. (2013). Considering motivation, goals, and mastery orientation in dance technique. Research in Dance Education, 14(2), 162-175.
Cary, G. (2023). Dancing like Everyone’s Watching: The Impact of Competition-Contingent Self-Worth and Belonging on Dancers’ Mental Well-Being (Doctoral dissertation).
Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., & Parsons, L. M. (2006). The neural basis of human dance. Cerebral cortex, 16(8), 1157-1167.
Washburn, A., DeMarco, M., de Vries, S., Ariyabuddhiphongs, K., Schmidt, R. C., Richardson, M. J., & Riley, M. A. (2014). Dancers entrain more effectively than non-dancers to another actor’s movements. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 800.
Madison, G., Gouyon, F., Ullén, F., & Hörnström, K. (2011). Modeling the tendency for music to induce movement in humans: first correlations with low-level audio descriptors across music genres.
Weineck, K., Wen, O. X., & Henry, M. J. (2022). Neural synchronization is strongest to the spectral flux of slow music and depends on familiarity and beat salience. Elife, 11, e75515.
Nakamura J, Csikszentmihályi M (20 December 2001). "Flow Theory and Research". In Snyder CR, Lopez SJ (eds.). Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 195–206. ISBN 978-0-19-803094-2. Retrieved 20 November 2013.
Radell, S. A., Mandradjieff, M. P., Adame, D. D., & Cole, S. P. (2020). Impact of mirrors on body image of beginning modern and ballet students. Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 24(3), 126-134.
Transcript:
Hello, welcome to Science of Slink, the Evidence-based Pole Podcast with me and your host, Dr. Rosy Boa, uh, of Slink Through Strength, the online Pole Dance Studio. This week's episode is actually a talk I gave a while ago, and I realized when I went to try and find a link of it to, to send to somebody.
'cause we were talking about. Some of the research that I discussed in here that it doesn't actually exist in a findable way on the internet. So I am changing that by sharing it with y'all. Uh, so we're gonna get into, uh, three sort of veins of research, each of which, uh, I give you one concrete takeaway thing that you can take from that research, apply to your freestyle practice, and hopefully have it feel better.
Uh, that based on our existing evidence seems like it should probably help. Hopefully it does. You'll have to let me know. Uh, but before we get into that, you know what time it is. I gotta say thank you to my members. Y'all are fantastic. You genuinely make this possible and I'm so appreciative of you. And also my members already know this, but there's gonna be a little schedule change up coming into the studio, uh, moving things to times that are better for more people. So keep an eye out for that. If you'd like to learn more about that, get on my newsletter.
I'll put a sign up link for the newsletter down below and if you'd like to, uh, get a little bit of a sense of a vibe, what it's like to actually take classes with me I actually have a free sample class. I'm also gonna link to that down there in a newsletter.
But you are not here for the intro. You're here for the science. I know you, you pole nerd save. Welcome to the club. So without any further ado, let's get into it.
All right. I hope you're ready to get real nerdy. So my name is Dr. Rosy Boa. You may know me from online, the internet. I have an online pole studio called Slink Through Strength. I'm a huge nerd. And today we're going to talk about some specific things that you can take from a couple of different areas of research and apply right away to help your pole freestyle feel better.
Because for me, when I'm talking about flow, what I mean in this context is pole freestyling to music and being in a psychological state where things just feel very easy and natural and you're not self conscious and really drawing on that sort of positive psychology literature about flow state.
I'm going to talk about three sort of distinct areas of research that I think are relevant to us as pole dancers and pole freestylers and give you some concrete tips you can take back.
The other thing is we are going to talk a little bit about the science.
So I am, I am a nerd. The doctorate is in research. I'm not, I'm not a medical doctor. I cannot help you with that.
So we're definitely going to talk about the science. I want you to leave here a Yeah, well, some cool fun facts and some things that you can try, but also having some sort of pointers towards areas in the research that you can continue to travel down that, that rabbit hole if it's something that that appeals to you because I'm a big science enjoyer.
So let's talk about the three sort of areas of research that I want to talk about today, and these are more or less divided along these lines.
So the first is a mastery mindset, and this really has to do with learning and improvisation. We'll talk about that in a second. Moving to the music, I'm going to talk a little bit about the musicology research, about moving to music and then also a little bit about self consciousness and literal reflect reflections as well.
So, that's what we're going to talk about, and for each of these things, you're going to come away with a specific to do to put on your to do list.
So Mastery Mindset. There has been some work done on improvisation. Most of the work that's been done on improvisation has been on music and specifically jazz improvisation.
There is a lot less work on dance improvisation and movement improvisation. There is some particularly with clinical applications for folks with Parkinson's in particular but it's not a huge area of study. So this sort of general cognitive process of improvisation is not necessarily happening at the level of conscious choice but it is something that's sort of going on, you know, in the background of your your brain and that's A, you're generating possibilities right, you know The colors in your paint box, if you will thinking in terms of pole, you know what movements you can do, you know what movements you can do today, you know, okay, the pole's too slippery, the pole's not slippery enough, all that sort of stuff.
So you're generating possibilities, and then you're selecting among them. And again, this is not necessarily happening that, ah, I could do a ballerina or a superman. It's that these are things that your body is familiar with, and you are sort of, Selecting amongst in a sort of an automated way and then of course you do the thing.
And this, this framework is actually from a study about improvising Mozart in musical improvisation. It has some interesting tips for specifically teaching musical improvisation a lot of which boils down to practice your scales and practice your, like, your little motifs so you have, like, chunks you can put together.
And I would say in terms of pole, that's pretty much it. Do your conditioning, you know, work on the technical stuff, build your technical abilities. So you have more, more things to reach for as you are freestyling. But the thing is. you're not going to sort of generate possibilities and reach for them in this automatic way if it's not something that you feel really comfortable doing, right?
So it's not something you've mastered. And so mastery I'll talk about it a little bit on the next slide, but I would say if you can't do it successfully 90 percent of the time, and you know that you can't do it successfully 90 percent of the time, it's much less likely that your body's going to reach for it in the middle of a freestyle session.
So if you want to be able to improvise, if you want to be able to, you know, loop in all of these different types of movement and have a larger vocabulary, which is not something you need, but it is something I know a lot of people want, then I would really recommend when you are working on your technical training, working from a mastery mindset rather than a, you know, checking boxes on a checklist sort of mindset.
So this concept comes from the educational literature and it started with kids teaching kids so specifically Benjamin Bloom's work in the 60s and the, the idea is, you know, things happen in an ordered way and you don't move on until to thing B until you are really positive that you can do thing A.
So you have mastered thing A, then you move on to thing B. And you may have been familiar with this in particularly online test taking, right, where you have to get like 90 percent on the test to go on to the next thing. That's what they're trying to get at. They're trying to get you to the point where you can't just, you haven't just memorized some things that you can spit out really quick and then you forget.
You really have an understanding of what it is that you're doing. In dance pedagogy, so teaching dance, That's what I do. This is a great paper, by the way. Mastery approaches have a stronger association with improvisation than sort of goal based approaches, right? Like, it's more important that you know that you can do things you know, for your mental ability to reach for them in the middle of improvising, than if you are doing a specific choreography you know, the, the realm of options is much narrower. So working towards mastery and having this approach towards your pole training can really help you unlock those movements in your improvisation. It's also associated with less perfectionism which is not great for mental health as a dancer, as a mover and also better appreciation of your body.
Overall we've got this picture of if you want to be improvising, if you want like movements to just show up, they should be movements that you are really, really comfortable in and are positive for yourself that you are able to do successfully almost always.
Now we're going to talk about music. I, I know I, I make slides like an academic because guess what? You'll never guess. Yeah.
Let's talk about entrainment. So entrainment is a really wide collection of things that have the same name in different disciplines. And generally it means that some things are moving together rhythmically.
Very general, that's what entrainment is. And when we're thinking about dance, there's a lot going on in our brains when we are dancing, whether that's choreography or whether that is improvisation. Entrainment is one of the factors, I want to be clear, it's not the only factor, right? The cognition of dance is understudied, in my opinion, as someone who's really interested in it.
But very, very complex. But entrainment is one of these factors, and it's one of the factors that's been particularly well studied, both in dance and in music, which I'll talk about in just a second. So a really good example of entrainment is if you are walking next There are some other factors here.
For example, if you like them more, you're more likely to do this. Generally, you will end up walking at the same pace, with the same foot, or, you know, sort of contra tempo, front back. So, for example, here in this photo, you can see these two people have the same step pace, right? Like, they're both stepping forward with the same foot at the same time.
So that's entrainment, like, between people, but there's also entrainment within your body, right? So in general, your limbs like to be doing the same thing. A great example of this you can do for yourself, a little experiment, is if you have your fingers and you do them Like this, right? So one is up while the other is down.
And then you go faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. Eeeeee! It's getting there! Okay, eventually they will begin to entrain, right? So instead of being sort of like half a phase out of sync, they will be in sync. And in general, this is just, it takes less cognitive resources.
So it's a, it's an efficiency measure. The same reason why it's really hard to do arm circles with your arms in the opposite direction. Generally, our bodies like to entrain to other things in our bodies. but not just to things in our bodies and not just to people, but also to signals in the world around us and to acoustical signals in particular like music.
So there's this really interesting study from 2006 where they did, like, a lot of imaging on dancers who were listening to music. And one of the things that they found is just dancing or just listening to music together did not re result in as much activation of this part of the vein, the anterior vermix, that sort of.
ear ish driven the, in the bottom part there which is associated with motor movement. It's associated with rhythmic movement. It's associated with fine motor control, like for your hands was far greater when they were dancing to music or thinking about dancing to music. So this combination of music and dancing together creates additional entrainment, creates additional sort of like rhythmic synchronization in our bodies.
And it's something you can train. Dance training makes you better at entrainment. Pretty straightforwardly. And the more you do, the better you get, right? So you know, you'll hear people talk about like, oh, I have no rhythm. I can't dance to the beat. You can. You just need to be trained. If it's something that you really struggle with, it's probably because you haven't had a lot of experience with it.
And if you get that experience. you'll get better, right? But that said not all music is equally easy to move to. I do want to pick out some of the sort of lines here of specifically what are some of the musical qualities that are associated with greater entrainment.
So some of the, the things that are most associated with having an easier time to entrain are really notable beats, right? So salient, we might say, things that are really easy to notice that there's like a repetitive, strong beat structure. You're, you dance, you've listened to dance music, you ever notice how dance music has beats that you can predict that are really easy to hear and that music that's not designed for dancing sometimes doesn't have those and it's really hard to dance to?
Yeah, here's some evidence to back you up. Yes, dotable beat structures do lead to greater entrainment and therefore sort of an easier time of moving to the music. Also a little bit One beat event every so often, but additional things in between those beat events. So you have sort of extra things to grab on to with your movement.
And this this particular study, the Madison et al. from 2011, they were looking at different genres and sort of ranking them, and what they found was that West African music specifically was very easy for movers to entrain to, whereas jazz was the hardest for movers to entrain to.
Some other things that may lead to greater neural entrainment, and I want to make sure that you understand that there's a difference between these things. Physical entrainment, body entrainment is movement in your body to music. Neural entrainment is entrainment in your brain, basically your brainwaves to some sort of acoustic signal.
And, This study, again I'm trying to pick out studies where we're looking at specific musical quality, has found that if you are more familiar with the music and the more there was a beat to the music, the greater the degree of neural entrainment. Now I do not necessarily want to suggest that there's a one to one relationship between neural and, embodied entrainment but I think that they're probably related. I feel comfortable saying that. Again, we got more, more evidence that stronger beats, a little bit easier. So what does this mean for you, the dancer? So two sort of ways of approaching this. One is, if you want to have an easier time moving, you want to dance to music. You want to dance to music that has a strong, predictable beat, but also has some other stuff, some other complexity happening.
You want to dance to music that you're familiar with and that is slightly slower. On the other hand, if you want to challenge yourself, if you want to, you know, have a harder time, have music that's not helping you quite as much to find that flow state you can dance to music that's more metrically complex.
So things like polyrhythms metric modulation, right, like a, like a time signature change in the middle of music that will introduce some additional complexities. And music that's unfamiliar. Especially if it's from a genre that you're not very familiar with, so. Also, if you're familiar with Bob Burgers, there's a, there's a scene where, where Gene, who's one of the characters, replaces the dancer's music with polyrhythmic synth jazz.
Polyrhythmic synth jazz, no one can dance to that. Yes, according to research, it's probably a little bit harder to dance to for most people, but if you're familiar with the song definitely something that you could. All right. And finally, there is completely separate thrust of research again this idea of losing the sense of self consciousness of being someone who is observing yourself when you move.
And I would say that this is one of the sort of core qualities that's identified in flow states. This is based on research by, among other people Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He started working on it in the 70s and a lot of people have picked it up since, and in positive psychology, you've probably heard of flow state before. Loss of self consciousness is really important for achieving this. The challenge here is that a lot of us dance, in front of mirrors, a lot of us film ourselves, and a lot of us watch ourselves on Zoom calls when we're dancing.
And watching yourself while dancing is associated with more self conciousness, and in some studies, worse body image. So Sally Randall has done a lot of work on this. I think this 2020 paper in the journal Advanced Medicine and Science is a really good example.
But But I'm not saying mirrors don't have a place. I am not saying that watching yourself and filming yourself doesn't have a place. I think especially from like a sports training background and like approach, yes, very important can help you improve your technique. But if what you're doing is trying to find flow, if what you're doing is trying to improvise, having that visual feedback I don't think is going to be helpful.
In terms of concrete things that you can do, try not to dance and look at yourself at the same time if you're trying to find this flow state, right? Cover your mirrors, remove your mirrors, turn off your self view and all my classes so you don't see yourself don't film yourself and if you're like, but how do I know who I went?
I think that the most important thing is how did it feel to you? So journaling, I think, is great and spend some time reflecting on what worked, what didn't, what did you like, what did you not like. And also, of course, you've got feedback from other dancers and instructors that can really help you create a better understanding of how your movement felt to other people, which may or may not be important to you.
With that in mind, here are three specific tips that you can take and apply today. First of all, dance to a song you know well that has a noticeable beat, right? So, you know, put your favorites on shuffle, shuffle them, and pick one that has like a strong beat that you can like count to or snap to.
If you're working on flow, stick to moves you have mastered. Don't try to do that like cutting edge thing that you're just starting to work on. If it shows up naturally without you pushing for it, that's fine, but try to stick to things that you are already very confident that you can do. And also don't include a camera or mirrors in your sort of flow experiment. Putting these things together I think will make it much easier for you to find improvisational play and confidence and feel good.
All right. Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you took away some little tips. Uh, if you wanna dance with me, you know where the link is.
And also if you would like to leave a review, uh, or a rating of the podcast, I very much appreciate those. I realize I haven't mentioned that, uh, in a while, but those of you who have left reviews, I read them. I appreciate them. Or I think you can also leave comments on a lot of the individual episodes, if there's something you wanna chat or if I mention something and you're like, Rosy. I wanna, I wanna hear more about that or like, do you have a citation for that? I'm always happy to talk about that. So thank you so much for joining me. I hope you're doing well and I will speak with you very soon. Bye.
