Stronger Shoulders for Pole Dance
Dr. Rosy Boa explains why pole dancers need strong, stable shoulders for hanging, spinning, climbing, and inverted work, outlining shoulder anatomy and key movement demands. She reviews general strength patterns used in pole—horizontal and vertical push/pull—and emphasizes the importance of isometric straight-arm hanging strength. For overhead stability, she highlights conditioning the rotator cuff via external rotation to keep the humeral head securely positioned during arm flexion, offering a simple external rotation drill. She also stresses scapular upward rotation for full overhead range and stability and concludes that shoulder mobility requires stability training to pole safely and long-term.
Learn more about the Science of Slink membership & join now: https://scienceofslink.com/
The book I reference (HIGHLY recommend!):
Emily Scherb, D. P. T. (2018). Applied anatomy of aerial arts: an illustrated guide to strength, flexibility, training, and injury prevention. North Atlantic Books.
https://www.thecircusdoc.com/book/
Chapters:
00:00 Why Shoulders Matter
01:51 Shoulder Anatomy Basics
03:55 Push Pull Patterns
05:44 Vertical Strength Demands
07:22 Hanging Isometrics
08:44 Rotator Cuff Focus
11:36 Scapular Upward Rotation
15:51 Key Takeaways
16:27 Mobility Needs Stability
17:48 Wrap Up And Resources
Transcript:
📍 Pole dancer, I know you know we need strong shoulders to do pole, right? We're doing things where we are hanging from our hands, and that places a lot of stress and requires a lot of strength and stability in our shoulders. And today, we're gonna talk about what that looks like, what sort of demands that places on our body, and how we can prepare for those demands to build our physical capacity so we can learn all the cool technical stuff we wanna learn.
So hello. Welcome to Science of Slink, the Evidence-Based Pole Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Rosie Boa. Uh, and today, getting into shoulders. Very excited about it. But before we do that, you know what time it is.
I gotta shout out my Science of Slink members. Y'all are fantastic. You make this podcast possible. You make the studio possible. And I'm also just, like, I'm really proud of you all for taking time to move your bodies and find joy in movement and, you know, take care of yourselves. It's hard. I know it's hard, and I appreciate you.
If you are interested in joining us and my members, uh, scientistlink.com, you can get all the deets. Uh, and I offer sliding scale processing, so if you've got more resources, you can chuck in a little bit more. If you're a little bit more financially constrained, you can get a little bit more support. Uh, I really think pole can be for everybody, uh, and if you enjoy freestyle and nerdy shit whoa, do I have the online pole studio for you.
And also just a sidebar, members in the membership area, uh, I've actually just uploaded two, uh, very focused shoulder conditioning workouts. So one is a strength workout that's half an hour, uh, and the other is a mobility workout that's half an hour. So if you're having trouble getting your, you know, your arm straight up overhead, uh, that second one's gonna be really, really helpful for you, and that's just in your membership area. If you're having trouble time finding it, uh, reach out and I will, I will make sure that you get the link for that. So Uh, where I'm gonna apply a bunch of the stuff that I'm about to talk about.
So let's get into shoulders, what they are, what they do. So shoulders is this bit, right?
It is where our arm attaches to our trunk. What is the job of the shoulder? Well, it is to move the arm, right? All of the muscles across the shoulder joints in various ways help to create movement there, and there are a lot of them. Shoulders are very complex biological mechanisms. And also, uh, especially when we are hanging from our arms, uh, it's the job of the shoulders, right, so to move them, uh, but also to connect them, right?
The, the shoulder joint itself, right, we have the clavicle right here if you are watching, uh, right? It's that, that collarbone you'll also hear it called. Uh, we have the humerus, which is the big arm bone, uh, the top arm bone. Uh, and then we also have the scapula, which is the shoulder blade, which is on the back of the body, right, uh, and sort of moves around over the ribs.
And that whole mechanism is only attached to the rest of the skeleton right here in the sternoclavicular joint, right? So where the collarbone meets meets the sternum. If you have the term heart spoon to mean the sort of like dip at the bottom of the throat right there, that's the sternoclavicular joint.
That is our bone connection all the way from the pinky down to the rest of the body. Also, there's a, quote-unquote, joint, right? The, the scapula I mentioned is just sort of moving around on the back. Uh, and you'll hear that, uh, referred to as the scapulothoracic joint. It's floating. So that's just the connection between the scapula, the back of the, the scapula, the shoulder blade, uh, and then, the posterior thoracic wall, right? The, uh, the back of the rib.
So basically what I want you to get from all of this is that there are sort of three major bony structures. Uh, obviously we have tendons and ligaments connecting them together, and then we also have a lot of muscles, and most of the actual connection, you know, most of the stuff that actually is, like, holding your arm onto the rest of your body are muscles.
So when we're talking about building strength and we're talking about building muscular strength in the shoulder, what are some of the general movement patterns that we work on?
So if you're just looking at sort of general fitness advice, uh, general personal training advice, uh, often you'll hear about divisions between push/pull and then divisions between horizontal and vertical. So horizontal push and then pull, uh, would be taking your hands And moving them towards pull or away from your chest.
And we do use both of these movements in pole. Uh, so pushing, horizontal pushing, uh, perhaps most obviously something like a, a push-up. So if you're working on doing, you know, caterpillar body wave push-ups, that's gonna use that, uh, movement pattern. If you're working on, uh, you know, pushing away from the pole for like a reverse climb, that's gonna use that movement pattern. Uh, or even for something like a jasmine where we're taking our body and we're moving it back, we're pushing into the pole. That's that horizontal push. Uh, and that is, uh, pecs, right? The chest muscles and the triceps are sort of the main movers there. Uh, so we do need that in pole.
We also need a lot of horizontal pull. And probably the main place that a horizontal pull shows up in pole is stronghold, particularly as we work on inverting because as we begin to tilt back, gravity is going to affect us greater we need to have more ability to stabilize ourselves and continue to hold and endure in that horizontal pulling motion. Um, and that's gonna be the middle traps, the rhomboids, sort of like middle of the back, behind the shoulder blades kind of muscles, uh, a little bit of the deltoids. Uh, and these can be really worked in sort of a more traditional fi- fitness setting, uh, with things like rows or flies with your arms out.
So horizontal pushing, horizontal pulling, we do need it in pole, we do use it in pole. Um, but for most of the stuff that we are doing in pole, it is more common to have vertical movements. So vertical push, vertical pull, right? So this is arms moving up and down, overhead. Obviously pull would be down, push would be up, uh, if that's the direction of force.
So vertical push, this is our handstands, right? Anything where we are pushing our, uh, our body weight up, and we do a lot of sort of handstand-y shapes in pole, of course. Uh, and this is gonna work things like your upper traps, right? The shoulder mount massage muscle you might know it as. Uh, deltoids, triceps.
Handstands are sort of the, the main thing that we are using those for in pole, but they do show up in some other places as well.
And then the pull, right? This is pull-ups, and this is something that's going to show up a lot in pole. Perhaps sort of like the, the pinnacle of this would be an, an arms only climb, a pantera climb, a hand-over-hand climb, uh, where you're climbing with just the pole. That is maximum horizontal pulling. I shouldn't say maximum. Uh, that is a big ask of vertical pulling. Uh, and this is where the lats come in. So the, the thing that the lats do, right, the lats attach to, to the humerus, this big arm bone, and then they go all the way back down to the back. And so when those things shorten, they get pulled together.
It brings our arms behind us. Into extension if we're being anatomical about it, and it also internally rotates because of the attachment point for that. So the lats depending on the specific thing you're working on, if you're working on pull-ups, should be sort of the main movers. So these big back muscles, we do need them, we do use them.
So that's pushing and that's pulling, right? So those are movements. But we can also think about rather than a, you know, concentric or eccentric contraction, we can also find an isometric contraction, which is where we don't move through the joint, and this is gonna be hanging. So what we are doing there is we are doing an isometric hold, right? Uh, and we are holding weight in this overhead hanging position.
And this is gonna be things like spins. This is gonna be things like climbs. Uh, this is gonna even be things like, uh, you know, bracket grip, right? Like your Aisha or, you know, upright bracket grip, whatever you're working on. Um, when we are not bending the elbows, we are not pushing or we're not pulling and we're stabilizing this is an isometric hold. And when we're doing that with straight arms, it's actually pretty different from trying to bend your arms and bring yourself up in a pull-up. So let's talk about that because this is the thing that, especially if you're doing just sort of like a general fitness program outside of pole, you're probably not gonna get a whole ton of this depending on the programming, but we do need it a lot for pole.
And what we need is we need to build up the muscles that help us securely hold the humerus, right? This big arm bone, in place in the joint while we have our arms up overhead and especially once we start to add force. Uh, so this is also helpful for handstands, right? Because we have our arms overhead and we are adding force. Uh, but it's gonna feel a little bit different 'cause the direction of gravity is different, right?
So I mentioned not the lats. The lats are not necessarily our friends here. What are the muscles that are actually helping to hold our humerus in, you know, in the glenoid process nice and snug? And these are the rotator cuffs. So I'm gonna show you a...
if you're watching now, I'm gonna show you a, um, a figure from Applied Anatomy of Aerial Arts by, uh, Emily Scherb, the circus doctor who's been on the podcast before. Um, this is a fantastic resource. I would highly recommend this book.
So the things that are actually holding the humerus, right, this bone attached to your body that we're gonna really wanna focus on are the rotator cuffs. So here we've got the subscapularis, which we're looking for the back here. So this is going to be behind the shoulder blade. This is gonna be closer to your spine.
And then on top, We've got the supraspinatus. We've got the infraspinatus, and we've got the teres minor.
We do not have to individually try to condition each of these muscles. What we can do is we condition the movement that we want them to help support when our arms are overhead, and that is external rotation. Why do we want to do that? Again, reading from the book, uh, "the external rotators rotate the shoulder outward and stabilize the head of the humerus during flexion, right? So the head of the humerus is sort of the, the bumpy part of the bone, uh, that we want to be inside our joint capsule, right?
And as we lift our arm, we want it to not just pivot, but also slide. 'Cause if it just pivots, like so, we are gonna end up with a little gap there. And if we would like to have strong, stable, smooth motion, uh, we'd like to actually have our joints, uh, seated quite closely together. We would like to avoid subluxing if possible.
Uh, so it also needs to slide as it rotates, and our external rotators, help us do that so we want to condition them. So if any of y'all who've taken classes with me have been like, "Wow, Rosy, you have a lot of external rotation drills in your shoulder conditioning," yes, that is on purpose. Um, and one that you can do really easily, uh, is just to bring your arms out to the side, externally rotate, right?
So if I just started with my hands facing straight forward I'm gonna think about my bicep the Popeye muscle, rotating backwards, trying to face the wall behind me, while at the same time, I reach out like I'm trying to tickle the wall with my fingers, and just find that sensation of work around the shoulder blade.
Relax, externally rotate. Relax, externally rotate. And just try doing five to 10 of those per side to see if you can find that sensation of work in all of those little muscles that attach, uh, to the, uh, the scapula and then come around the shoulder. And if you're doing it well, they're small muscles, they tend to warm up pretty quickly, you might even be able to feel warmth in the shoulder joint after you've done this.
So it's a great thing. You can just add it to your warmup, checking in with that external rotation.
The other thing that we want to do is we actually want our scapula, right, those shoulder blades on the back, to rotate a little bit.
And specifically, we want the outer, the bottom edge, the pointy edge, to move to the sides of our bodies. We're looking for upward rotation here. And the reason that we wanna do this is because that's where a lot of our range of motion comes from. So just rotating, you know, uh, the, the humerus is gonna get us about two-thirds of the way there.
And then the extra third, that last third, so we can have our arms straight up overhead, which we need to do if we're trying to do like an Ayesha, for example, uh, or a handstand, uh, or even just a s- a spin, is gonna be from that rotation of the scapula.
And, uh, perhaps you can see from this force diagram if you are looking
You could see that this is actually, uh, several different muscles that are attached to different places on the body working together to create rotational movement, because if you remember from the other Exercise Science 101 videos that I've done, muscles have two bony attachments. All they can do is contract those two bony attachments and release, right? They can only create movement in a single dimension. So if you wanna get movement in multiple dimensions, you need to have multiple muscles working together, right?
So it, it might be helpful to think about this. If you were trying to rotate a plate and you had, uh, you know, one of those sticky hands, and all you could do is sort of like stick the hand on it, and then pull.
In order to actually get rotation from the plate, you'd need to have several sticky hands working together, right? So force coupling, right? You're trying to get three things to work together.
Uh, and the specific three things that are trying to work together to get that upward rotation of the scapula, which gets us that extra... uh, which gets us that, rest of our range of movement, so we do want it, is the are the upper traps, which most pole dancers I found tend to have fairly well developed.
Also anyone who does like this who shrugs their shoulders up, uh, quite a bit generally tends to be pretty good in the upper traps. The middle traps traps are the trapezius muscle, uh, which are on the back like this. Uh, the middle traps, and then, uh, the serratus anterior, which are sort of finger-shaped muscles that come, uh, around sort of the side boob area which for most people of the sort of things in that, in that triplet...
So we want these things to be like, friends, right? We want... You know, if we were thinking about oxen, they should be in the same zygote. They should be fairly, fairly well matched. So if we work on conditioning the serratus anterior, uh, that can help us find that movement of the scapula on the back a little bit better, increase our range of motion, give us more ease, and also more stability, right, more strength and endurance, so we can do it for longer.
So we can hold our weight for longer. So we can hold a longer handstand, so we can spin for longer, so we can climb more. So we can get an extra couple spins or climbs in our dance.
How do we work on those? Uh, so again, conditioning the serratus anterior can be very helpful. Those of y'all who've taken class with me know that we do serratus push-ups.
We do serratus saws as part of our warmup to help prepare our body for getting on the pole.
So those are the things that in addition to, you know, push/pull, horizontal/vertical. Those are great, right? We should do these. I'm not saying don't work on pull-ups.
It's gonna be helpful. Uh, you know, general upper body strength. We do so much, and so much, like, interesting different things in pole, and we make so many odd demands of our bodies at so many different angles and tempos. It's good to, to build strength in general. But in particular for pole, we do wanna work on building that external rotation, and we also wanna work on building upward rotation of the scapula, uh, and adding those in
And I would definitely condition them, right? I would work on building strength through them, and you can absolutely do that with body weight, especially if you're a recreational poler, right? And what you've got at home is a body and not, like, a weight rack and a full gym. Uh, and if you have that, fantastic. I don't. I don't have that. Uh, but if you do, yeah, like, obviously make use of it. But you can absolutely d- you know, condition these with body weight exercises to make pole feel a little bit easier, uh, make it a little bit more accessible for you.
And I would also work on them as part of the warmup. So I mentioned doing those serratus saws, those serratus pushups as part of the warmup, working on external rotation as part of the warmup. And for those of y'all who've worked with me, perhaps at this point you're like, "Ah, this is why Rosy is having us do all these things to help us support our shoulders in this overhead position."
So building stronger shoulders for pole, what do we need to do?
General shoulder strengthening is gonna be fine. It's gonna be helpful. I'm not saying don't do it. But specifically for pole, we're working on flexion, arms up overhead. Uh, we're working on external rotation in flexion, which particularly if you have quite tight lats, which a lot of pole dancers tend to can be a big mobility requirement, so definitely something to work on.
Uh, and then we're also working on that upward rotation of the scapula so that we can move easily through a full range of motion, 180 degrees, hold our weight, feel nice and supported, nice and strong, and hopefully keep poling for a long time to come. Uh, and I'll just leave you with one final thought.
Shoulders are very, very mobile, right? Think about what your shoulder can do versus what your leg can do. Uh, the, the capabilities that we are afforded by our shoulder joints are really really phenomenal, right? Or even, you know, if you have a cat or a dog, imagine them trying to do something with the same range of motion that a human can do, right?
Imagine a cat trying to scratch behind their neck with a front paw, right? It's awkward for them, but we, you know, that's nothing for us as humans because we have so much mobility, which is fantastic. But, um, and you may have heard this saying before, with mobility comes the responsibility of stability because we can go lots of places, but in order to go to the places that we want to go in our movement, we need to make sure that we are building the strength in our muscles to support us, especially when we're doing something on the more sort of extreme range of, uh, you know, modern, sedentary, uh, developed Western human movement patterns, like hanging from our arms.
Most people do not do that in their day-to-day lives. So if we want to do it, we got to prepare our bodies by doing all the stuff that I just talked about.
Uh, hopefully this has given you a little bit of a better understanding of shoulder joint, shoulder movement, what I'm thinking about when I'm putting together classes and training y'all, and you can be like, "Ah, yeah, I see. Okay. All these things are sort of working together."
If you are interested in learning more and you really enjoy the anatomy it is not pole specific, but, ooh, uh, Applied Anatomy of Aerial Art by Emily Sherb is a fantastic reference.
I would highly recommend it. Uh, I'll put a link to that in the down there.
So that's gonna be it for today's episode. I hope you learned something. I hope you got some shoulder thoughts, and I hope you are excited to condition, or at the very least, warm up appropriately for pole.
Uh, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye.
