Hair Whips that Feel Good

Hair whips shouldn’t be a (literal!) pain in the neck, and in this episode we’ll break down how keep your neck feeling as good as possible as you explore whipping your hair. We’ll talk about safety and warning signs, have a brief into to neck anatomy and talk about about how to prepare the neck for hairwhips, both day-of warmups and longer-term strength and conditioning. 

Chapters:

03:11 Neck Safety Red Flags

05:06 Neck Muscle Basics

08:15 More Than Movement

10:51 Warm Ups

19:59 Vestibular Training

21:22 Technique And Hair Tips

23:09 Wrap Up And Takeaways

Transcript: 

Hello, pole nerd, and welcome back to Science of Slink, the evidence-based pole podcast. With me, your host, Dr. Rosy Boa. Big old caveat, star, asterisk, gonna be important this time: not a medical doctor. None of this is medical advice. Uh, I'm speaking in my capacity as a pole teacher and a personal trainer and someone who wants you to move better and feel better in your body.

So with that said, those of you who have danced with me before or have seen me perform know I am a big fucking hair whipper. I very much enjoy moving it around, using it as part of my dance, basically using it as an apparatus, just like the floor or the pole or heels in order to express myself, uh, and just have fun.

You know, it's just a nice time. I enjoy it very much. It's something that I've always really been drawn to. And something that really surprised me talking with other pole dancers is how often people would be like, "Oh yeah, I love hair whips, and then my neck's always sore the next day, right? Ha ha, we've all had that experience." And, uh, this being sort of a common refrain of people are like, "Oh yeah, that's just the way it is." Now, it is common for folks to experience neck pain the day after doing a bunch of hair whips. It is not normal. You should not be doing this. If you are adequately preparing yourself, right, before you do the movement, if you are executing the movement in a way that works for you, uh, and if you are more long-term making sure that you have the physical capacity to do this, which is, you know, it's a pretty strenuous thing. We'll talk about some of the, uh, musculoskeletal stuff. We'll talk about some of the vestibular stuff coming up. It's a lot to ask of your body, but if you are properly prepared for the movement, it should not be causing lasting pain. And if it is, that's actually kind of something that I'd be worried about, you might want to talk with a medical doctor about.

Uh, so today we're gonna talk about, what's going on. What's up with the neck? The neck is really complicated. I'm not gonna get super deep into anatomy, but I want you to have sort of a general idea of what's going on some of the things the neck does. And it's not just move your skull around.

That is one of the big things, but there's a lot going on there, actually. It's pretty complex. Uh, and again, how to prepare yourself right before you know you're gonna do a bunch of hair whips to help protect your neck, uh, and then longer term, what you can do to help support yourself in that movement and feel nice and have a good time, and have really longevity and sustainability in your movement, 'cause that's what I'm about. I want us to all be doing this in, 30, 40 years, uh, and still moving our bodies and still having a nice time.

And before I get into it, I just wanna shout out my members. You know I love y'all. You make this possible. And members, you already know this, coming up this Saturday, June 13th, 2026, our monthly member specialty workshop is going to be about hair whips.

Uh, and if you're listening in the future and you're like, "Oh, I want to join the membership and learn about hair whips," don't worry about it. The recording will be in the member area. You can check it out. We're gonna do a deep dive, so y'all prepare yourselves, uh, and get hyped because I, I love teaching hair whips.

I love helping folks feel good in them. I just think they're so much fun. Really looking forward to hanging out with y'all on Saturday and doing some hair whipping. Uh, and of course, if you're interested in joining the membership, you can check it out on my website. Uh, I think also scienceofslink.com should take you right to the membership, uh, area so you can get more information if you're interested. Love to have you join us if you pole at home. Might be for you.

So with that, let's get into the details. The first thing that I do wanna absolutely call out, you know, big warning signs, air traffic control little glowing cones, et cetera, um, is that necks have a lot of really important stuff in them, right?

Perhaps most obviously our spinal column, right? Uh, lots of really important nerves lots of very delicate nerves, uh, lots of big blood vessels. Your brain is perhaps obviously on the far side of your neck from your heart, so making sure the blood gets through is super, super important.

So when we are working with the neck, it's really important to make sure that we are being very mindful. Some things to watch out for that are warning signs that I'd be like, "Mm, stop what you're doing, talk to your doctor." Any, any pain that gets worse with movement, any pain that gets worse the next day, definitely a reason to talk to your doctor. Um, if you're getting muscle spasms, if you're getting numbness or tingling you know, and that might be in the neck itself, in the arms, in the fingers.

Um, if you're noticing sudden decreased range of motion and stiffness, uh, radiating pain, so like pain that starts in your neck and sort of moves out, uh, sudden headache, anything like that I would talk to a doctor. Stop what you're doing and, you know, seek out a medical professional 'cause those could be symptoms of something more serious. Uh, and even if they aren't wouldn't you rather know and just be able to be like, "Oh, yeah, okay, chill, it's all fine" rather than worrying about it? So, uh, as a caveat, if stuff comes up with your neck, take it seriously.

And definitely goes true and goes doubly true for anything where there's any impact. Uh, if you haven't listened to the podcast episode we did with the concussions researcher about the impact of concussions, um, which is obviously more of a, a brain injury than neck injury, but they are related to each other, and sometimes you can get, you know, whiplash that'll cause a concussion. So maybe go take a listen to that and, uh, know what your action plan is, uh, if there should be some sort of injury around you, you- yours or someone else's. So that's yeah, that's me being Mama Rosy. I'll get off my soapbox.

So let's talk a little bit more about the neck. So there's a lot of muscles in the neck. There's around 30, uh, and we can classify them into broadly three groups. So we have the anterior muscles. So anterior just means front part in fancy, fancy anatomy speak, right?

And these generally connect, uh, the skull to, uh, the sternum or the clavicle, right? You may be familiar with a, like, heart spoon as a... It's not really an anatomical term, uh, but for that little, little dip at the neck at the base of the clavicle. Uh, and these muscles, uh, are, are in the front of the neck.

Usually they help bring the neck forward, right? 'Cause as we remember, muscles contract. The only movement that a muscle can do is it c- can take its two attachment points and move them closer together. It can't push. So if something has an attachment point on, uh, you know, the jaw and the clavicle, it can't push those things further apart. It can only pull them together. Um, and also they rotate the SCM, which comes from basically behind your ear down to your clavicle if you sort of, you know, put a hand behind your ear and a hand on your clavicle and you draw them together, uh, you might even be able to see that muscle popping out on me. That begins to twist, right? Because instead of being, straight up and down, it's to one side, and as it shortens, it brings those things together. So you got one on each side. So those are the anterior muscles.

Uh, and then you also have the lateral muscles, you know, on the side of the neck, and these help to move your neck side to side, perhaps. Obviously, they also can help with the rotation. And then the posterior muscles, and those come from the skull down the back.

So they actually have, uh, attachment points even sometimes to the, to the scapula, to the shoulder blades. So your neck and your shoulder blades are quite connected to each other. Um, and I think, you know, just visually, we tend to think that, like, oh yeah, the neck, you know, starts right at the top of the trapezius and moves up.

Uh, but the trapezius, so the shoulder mount muscle, you know, this big one here that when you're, when you're shoulder mounting, you get a little free massage for it. Yeah, that one. Also part of the neck. So a lot of times, uh, I will notice when I'm moving and when I'm warming up, uh, I'll get some sensation on the front and the side of the necks, but I'll get quite a bit more in the back of the neck, uh, and again, down to even below the shoulder blades, and that is perfectly fine. That's perfectly normal. That's just because those are longer muscles that have attachment points that are further apart.

So those are sort of the, the muscles that we're working with, what they're doing, uh, and because there's so many of them, they're usually working in concert. It's kinda hard to isolate them, and we don't actually really need to, right?

Because what we're thinking about when we're moving our neck, uh, is we are thinking about the type of movements that we are creating and making those feel smooth and good rather than specifically trying to isolate one specific muscle that's gonna help our neck move better. It's, it's, it's a, it's more of a holistic system.

And so I've, I've been talking about moving your head, right? Moving your skull in relation to, you know, your clavicle. Uh, you've got your cervical spine in here. You have a bunch of vertebrae that have your spinal cor- your spinal column in there. Really important. You got a bunch of major blood vessels and arteries going up to the brain and down from the brain, I guess.

But other things are also happening here. So one of the things that your neck is involved with, particularly when you are breathing heavily, is breathing. It can actually help move your upper ribs to help create more space in your lungs.

Ideally, my preference as a trainer is that if you are relaxed, if you are not breathing heavily, uh, your, your neck, these auxiliary respiratory muscles should not be involved.

So if you're just sort of sitting and quietly and breathing, and you have your hands on your neck, you shouldn't feel, you know, your sort of shoulders lifting as you inhale. You should feel them being broad and relaxed and stable through both your inhales and your exhales. But if you're really, like, sucking air, right, if you've been, been doing something aerobic, uh, then perfectly fine, you need the extra capacity. Don't worry about it. But ideally it's not your default mode of breathing.

Um, they also have a lot to do with mouth stuff, right? So speaking, swallowing, chewing. Uh, there's a, a bone in your tongue called the hyoid bone that isn't connected to other bones. It's only connected to muscles. Uh, and of course, a lot of your neck muscles connect to that. And of course, tongue movement is gonna be involved with your neck. Uh, so, uh, sometimes when people are working on sort of more extreme, uh, neck mobilizations, uh, you'll get specific cues for tongue movement, uh, or specific cues for jaw and tongue movement, uh, to help move the attachment points of those muscles and feel a deeper sensation.

I will say I do not train people in contortion, uh, and that's sort of more on the contortion ends of things. But if you are working on, you know, moving through your neck and you, you move your jaw and you notice some change in sensation, especially in the front of your neck, perfectly normal, perfectly fine. That's just 'cause they're, they're attaching to that bone in there.

Also, they help move your shoulders, right? So I mentioned, uh, you know, the levator scapulae neck muscle lifts the scapula. You'd never have guessed for the day. Maybe you would have. Hopefully you would have. I'm being a little bit facetious.

Uh, right? We've got, we've got our trapezius, your upper trapezius in particular. We have the trapezius, which has a ton of attachment points in the skull also in the scapula, also along the spine. So our shoulder movement is going to impact our neck movement. And so our shoulder movement is also going to impact our neck movement, and particularly the position of our scapula on our back is going to help determine how much range of motion, how much ease, how much sensation of stretch and work we feel in our neck

So that's just sort of a, a broad overview of what's going on here. Hopefully you're getting the impression that, like, it's important and complex and there's a lot going on. But the helpful thing is that the things that we need to do to prepare our neck for specific movements, particularly hair whips are pretty straightforward.

So right before you are gonna be doing something, uh, with your neck, specifically hair whips. So these are... Uh, I mean, my hair is up right now, so you can't really see. And also I would take out everything on the desk in front of me if I started really going for it. But- but these are movements where you are moving your head fast enough, uh, that the momentum carries your hair.

It's almost as if this is a visual extension of your spine. And it's really fun. I really like it. I really enjoy it. Uh, I really like seeing other people play with it. Big part of a lot of Middle Eastern and African dance traditions, uh, a big part of drag. It's a part of a lot of dance traditions, and we also do it in pole, of course.

So if you know you're gonna be doing that first of all, I would warm up the neck specifically. And I know a lot of pole teachers will have you do this. If you've ever been like, "Why do we look up and down at the beginning of class or side to side?" Uh, that's to help prepare your neck for the movements. My general recommendation So first of all, overall warm-up, getting your core temperature up, increasing your body temperature, some sort of movement will will help things feel nicer, right?

Uh, another role of the warm up particularly if you're moving through synovial joints like, uh, our vertebrae, is that synovial fluid if you are moving through the joint, actually gets squished around. If you hear people talk about, like, lubricating your joints through mo- movement, this is not, like, a fun metaphor. It is literally what's actually happening, um, and also part of the reason why it's important to keep moving through your joints, you know, as we continue to get older in age in order to maintain a good range of motion and comfort in that range of motion. Uh, and of course, any movement that you're gonna do is gonna help with that.

And also we like to move through the specific movements that we are going to be doing later, uh, slower with more control. I like to think of this as reminding your brain of some of your movement possibilities. Um, there's been some work done on priming, if you're familiar with that concept from psychology, which is basically the idea of that if you give your brain something and then later you give your brain something related, it's easier to go from two related things to one thing to something else that's completely unrelated. Um, and there's some evidence that this applies to movement as well. This is more of a neurological component of warming up. But my recommendation is to gently move through your range of motion. Uh, and s- students who've taken class with me know that I like to cue rounding forward, arching back, moving side to side, lateral flexion, and then also rotation. And we're working with our neck circles as well. And while I'm doing this, I'm trying to evenly distribute this motion throughout as much of my spine as possible. Uh, if I'm just focusing on the cervical spine... Cervical spine is your neck.

Uh, if I'm just focusing on the cervical spine really trying to distribute that as much as possible.

My hypermobile friends, if you've ever been told that a good warmup is to try to touch your ear to your shoulder, and you can't actually touch your ear to your shoulder, I would prefer instead uh, if instead of trying to do that and ending up, you know, creating a lot of movement at one part of your neck and less in others, uh, to think about your neck being very long.

And I like to think about painting things on the ceiling, on the walls of my room, uh, with, you know, an imaginary paintbrush on the top of my head to try and maintain that length, to try and make sure that we're working through the whole neck column. Not only will this feel nicer but also when we go to take our hair down and start doing hair whips, the more of your spine is involved in each movement, the bigger and juicier and sort of flowier your hair movements are going to be. Uh, so it'll, it'll make it look cooler. Not that looking cool is ever necessarily my primary goal for doing anything in pole, but it will make it look cooler. More importantly, it'll make it feel better.

So moving through the neck, all the different directions we wanna do, starting small, getting bigger. My general recommendation is if you're moving, and especially in your warmup, at the beginning, you feel like snap, crackle, punch scrik, squeak, squeaky things, uh, try to make your movements smaller and slower until that goes away.

And then as you begin to warm up through your joints, through your muscles, beginning to make your movements larger and larger, and see if you can't keep a sense of gliding, effortless movement, especially in the neck.

Uh, also, I mentioned our, our shoulders are involved, right? We have scapula attachment points for a lot of our muscles that, that start in the back of our neck. We wanna move our scapula, right? We wanna warm our shoulders. You can do your serratus shrugs, your serratus saws. Whatever your favorite scapular warmup is to, to get in there and move your scapula around on your back, which is going to, uh, help move the muscles that attach your scapula to your spine, uh, is really fantastic to do. Shoulder shrugs, if nothing else, uh, just to get a little bit of, of warmth and movement in there.

One thing that I do not recommend if you are warming up for hair whips specifically is passive assisted stretching. And I know if you're on YouTube and you're like, "I'm looking up a neck workout. I'm looking up something for my neck. Oh, my neck is sore," so much of it is going to be passive assisted stretching. So what I mean by that is moving to an end range of motion and then using outside force to help push yourself further. So, um, anything... You know, the thing where people are, like, bend their neck to one side and then use their hand to pull themselves even further.

Not my preference. So especially holding in a passive assisted stretch acutely, like right after you do that, will reduce the power in that muscle. Not a huge amount, right? I'm not saying like, "Oh, you're gonna turn into a cold rubber band if you do that." Uh, but especially because hair whips are something that requires a lot of power, where a lot of times we are moving quite quickly, we want to be able to generate that force quickly reducing our capacity to do that right before we go in to do stuff is not my preference.

And also, as I mentioned, the neck's delicate. There's a lot of important stuff in there. I personally don't do and don't have my students do passive assisted stretching at all with the neck. Uh, all of the mobilizations that we do are active. So we're moving ourself into our end range, uh, and seeing how that feels.

Caveat, if you're working on contortion, work with a contortion coach. Uh, a lot of these things, if you're working in really extreme ranges of motion your calculus is gonna look a little bit different. Uh, but that's, that's not what I'm here to teach people. So I'm not gonna talk to it. Talk to a contortion coach.

So before you are moving, moving through, before you're gonna hair whip, move through your neck, move through your shoulder blades, get it feeling goopy, and then go into your stuff.

More long-term, how can we do things that are going to support our neck movement and feel an ease and not pain, ideally? I can't promise you that you will never feel pain in pole. If any pole teacher does, they're lying. It's inherently kind of painful. Uh, but ideally we're not feeling sort of long-term neuromuscular, you know, repetitive stress injury, uh, acute injury sort of pain.

And one of the ways that we can help support ourselves to, to reduce the likelihood of that happening is that we can strengthen our neck muscles. So you can absolutely do this, uh, through weight training. Um, however y'all know me I fuck with isometrics. I love an isometric. I prefer isometrics for these. And honestly, you're probably already doing at least some isometrics for strengthening your neck. If you are in a plank, right, and you are looking down, uh, and you are not letting your head fall forward, you're isometrically working the back of your neck to resist against gravity.

But I mentioned, right, we got sort of four things we can do with our neck. We can round forward, we can arch back, we can go to the side, lateral flexion, and we can twist, and we can strengthen all of those things isometrically. And I would highly recommend doing that, um, just for in general in life. It's nice to have a strong neck.

Uh, but especially if you're gonna be putting greater forces on it, uh, you know you're gonna be doing things like hair whips. Adding that in is gonna be really, really helpful for you in the long term to maintain, uh, longevity and ease.

And another thing that strengthening can really help with, because again, you know, if you're working a muscle it helps to bring your attention to that muscle, is building in awareness of neck position. So building your proprioception, your body awareness for your neck specifically and where your neck is, is really helpful, especially when you're beginning to do, you know, bigger, more effortful movements with your neck.

A nice drill to work on building proprioception is, uh... and I, I would film yourself doing this, because you're gonna be doing it with your eyes closed. Try to look to the side, and then look directly forward with your eyes closed. And I actually came, uh, a little bit to the side there. I didn't actually come perfectly directly forward. So I need to do that to help work on building my proprioception.

Um, eye gaze can be really helpful for this. So thinking about where you are looking as you move your neck can help you to be more mindful of your head position, and therefore your neck position.

It may be helpful to add a haptic component here. So a light, light touch on the neck can be a nice way to be like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I got nerves there. I got stuff there that can do stuff." Um, so that might be a, a helpful way to remind your brain that your neck is there and it can do stuff.

Building awareness like this just takes time. It's gonna take a while. Uh, you're gonna have to, like, do things and spend time thinking about it. 

And because I'm talking about hair whips, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, uh, more general vestibular training. Uh, so my students, if you're a member, you already know this, we are just coming to the end of the third month in a three-month cycle.

The first month was all about vestibular training. The second month, all about spin pole, also vestibular training. Third month, we're working on heels, which is a balance thing, which is also vestibular training. So we have been, we've been preparing ourselves to come to the point where we're starting to do hair whips.

Uh, because the vestibular system, inner ear, is in the head. When you start moving the head dramatically, you're gonna get a lot more input, and if you haven't, you know, built up your tolerance to that sort of input, uh, it may be a little bit overwhelming. You might start to get dizzy. If that's you, that's perfectly fine. You can train the vestibular system. You can increase your capacity to tolerate rotational movement. Absolutely, it is possible. Uh, it's just gonna take some time, which is why we've been working on it for two months.

Wink.

So those are some things that we can do to help support ourselves, uh, in hair whips, in moving our neck. We can do isometric strengthening. We can do active mobilization, working into our end range. And then working on building our proprioception, our awareness, our position of our head in space, uh, and also vestibular system training, 'cause if we're starting to move our head in all sorts of directions really quickly, uh, we gotta get that inner ear ready to handle that.

And then more generally, technique stuff. So I mentioned this earlier. I prefer that you get as much of your spine involved in your hair whips as possible, and I prefer that you try to distribute the load as much as possible evenly throughout the spinal column, right? So if I am just moving my neck to move my head, uh, and do my hair whips, I'm gonna have a very short range of motion. I'm gonna have to move much faster to get the same amount of hair movement, uh, as I would if I start to involve my whole spine, right? Moving from my sternum rather than moving from my clavicle is going to give me more space, more time, more ease. So the more of your spine you can involve, the better.

But there's other things that you can also think about, right? Uh, generally the longer, the fluffier, the more, uh, sort of like air resistance your hair is providing the slower you can move and still have movement that sort of follows your spine. The smaller, the shorter, the heavier your hair is, the more sort of quickly you have to move.

And if you're like, "Rosy, I can't change my hair texture," I am not asking you to, but we got wigs. You could absolutely use a wig to do that. Or you could change your hair style, right? It's gonna feel very different to do hair whips with your hair long than it does with a single ponytail, than it does with pigtails, than it does with lots of little braids than it does, you know, with a fro. All of these things are gonna feel different. Uh, and as you manipulate those variables, you'll probably find something that feels better or worse on your neck. Uh, and feel free to, adjust the hair to fit what feels better for you, uh, and, and what you enjoy doing and, and feel free to play with that, right?

I feel like I've dotted on a lot, but top line point, you should not be feeling pain the next day after you are doing hair whips. If you are I would recommend taking a big step down, make sure that you are warming up appropriately. Uh, make sure that you are supporting your hair whip movement with conditioning, uh, with mobilization, with ideally maybe not static passive stretching right before you do it so that you are getting as much support as possible from the neck muscles.

If anything suddenly changes, numbness, tingling, lightheadedness, radiating pain, sharp pain, sudden headache, any of those things, necks got a lot of important stuff in them, good time to talk to a doctor. Better safe than sorry, right?

Bunch of muscles in the neck.

They do a ton of things. It's connected to so many things. You know, we got about, we got about 30 of them. They are also involved in the shoulder blades, involved in the jaw, the tongue, all that stuff works together. It's a pretty complex system. So rather than trying to think about, you know, I want to target each of these muscles specifically, thinking about the different movements that you want to warm up and move through, forward, back, side to side, and then, uh, twisting, and then combining those as well so that you can get some nice fluid movements. But we'll, we'll work on that in the workshop, so don't worry about it.

Trying to make your movements bigger, involving more of your spine, and trying to evenly distribute as much as possible, because of course, you know, different parts of your spine have different amounts of, uh, mobility available to them just at a skeletal level. But as much as possible, trying to distribute the load evenly. Think smooth, think small, think slippery, uh, all those sorts of things. Think slinky perhaps. Perhaps slink through strength because you're doing all your, eh, because you're doing all your, your conditioning exercises, then you feel slinkier because of it.

Take care of yourself. Take care of your neck. If you're getting pain consistently, that's signal, and the signal's telling you, "Hey, something's up," you may want to adjust something, right?

So- that's what I got for you today. Uh, hopefully you have learned some stuff. Hopefully you've got kind of a game plan going forward for how you're gonna take care of your neck, uh, and feel hopefully better in your hair whips. 'Cause again, fun as hell. I love a hair whip. I love to see them, I love to do them, they feel great. Love a hair whip. And hopefully you will too, especially if you start supporting yourself, you give yourself the conditioning, building the capacity you need to find the technique, eh, pyramid pole to find the artistry, which is where you're just out there flipping, uh, and having a great time.

So I hope y'all are doing well, keeping well. Members, I'll see you in the workshop, in the recording if you don't come make it live. And everyone else, I look forward to slinking with you very, very soon, and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye.