The Anatomy of a Basic Pole Inversion

Written by Randi Fentress

The episode breaks down the anatomy and preferred order of actions for a basic pole inversion from a bent-arm stronghold into a controlled, bent-knee upside-down position with hips over chest, emphasizing “hedgehog first” (get small and curled before tilting). Referencing Dr. Emily Scherb’s Applied Anatomy of Aerial Arts, it explains key contributors: lats holding an isometric stronghold, transverse abdominis stabilizing the spine and pelvis, hamstrings and iliopsoas/iliacus lifting and bending the legs, rectus abdominis tucking the pelvis to increase curl and shift weight, and triceps extending the arms to rotate to inversion, followed by opening the chest to stack. It suggests isolating weak links for conditioning, recognizing when issues are coordination/motor learning, using aids (yoga ball, resistance band), training eccentrics/negatives, and breathing to avoid habitual breath-holding; it also notes inversions are optional.

Links and resources:

Referenced episodes:


Citations: 

Hortobagyi T., Katch F. I. (1990). Eccentric and concentric torque-velocity relationships during arm flexion and extension. Influence of strength level. Eur. J. Appl. Physiol. Occup. Physiol. 60 395–401. 

Emily Scherb, D. P. T. (2018). Applied anatomy of aerial arts: an illustrated guide to strength, flexibility, training, and injury prevention. North Atlantic Books. 


Chapters: 

00:00 Inversion Anatomy Overview

00:41 Free Class and Members

01:25 Key Resources and Definitions

02:43 Hedgehog First Cue

03:09 Stronghold Muscles Setup

04:49 Knee Lift Mechanics

05:53 Tuck and Rotate Upside Down

07:49 Stabilizers and Efficiency

09:00 Training Fixes and Drills

11:14 Breathe and Final Wisdom

13:11 Wrap Up and Call to Action 


Transcript: 

  📍 Pole dancer. When I say inverting is a full body movement, I am not kidding around. You use your whole body if you are working on inversions. And today I'm gonna break down what that actually looks like, right? What is the anatomy of a basic pole inversion?

What are we doing? What's working? What's the order that we should be doing things in? Because there is a preferred order that's gonna help you maximize your mechanical efficiency. And once you know all that what can you do about it? How can you use it to train so that your inversions are easier, more effective? You can get them faster if you're still working on it. All that good stuff. So we're gonna really nerd out today about getting upside down. And I am so excited for you to join me.

Uh, speaking of joining me, if you haven't done my free sample class online, it's there. Uh, so sample class really breaks down that moment of coming to the pole and then connecting to it, and moving from, I think for a lot of us, kind of dance brain to technical brain, uh, and how we can create more flow and more smoothness in that transition.

So totally free. It's about 40 minutes. Uh, there'll be a link down in the description for you to go check it out if you are interested. And as always, before we get into it, I wanna shout out my members in Science of Slink. Big kisses to y'all. You're the wind beneath my wings. Uh, so delighted to have you moving with me, and this podcast would very much not be possible without y'all.

So, thank you. All right, let's get into it.

So for a lot of today my reference is gonna be- Uh, Applied Anatomy of Aerial Arts by Dr. Emily Scherb doctor of physical therapy, uh, who has been on the podcast before, Circus Doc online. Absolutely a fantastic resource. She does a lot of continuing education programs.

Uh, if you're not following her, what are you doing? Also, if you're teaching pole or aerial and you don't have this book, get on it. It's good stuff. I'm actually gonna be combining stuff from a couple of different sections, 'cause she doesn't talk about pole specifically as an apparatus, but a lot of the, the vertical, rope, silk stuff does apply to us as well. So, uh, and getting upside down is getting upside down. The mechanics are pretty much the same.

So first of all, when I'm saying basic inversion today, what do I mean? So I mean coming from a stronghold where your elbows are bent, both hands are on the pole, the pole is in your armpit possibly, uh, on your hip, possibly next to your hip, depending on, on whose technique you're using. I like it on the hip so that I have something holding my booty. Uh, but that's my preference. I got a big booty.

And then from that position, bringing up your knees, keeping your knees bent, rolling back to end up with bent knees, upside down, with your hips above your chest. So that's what I mean when I say the basic inversion position, and everything that I talk about today is going to be about that.

If I can give you one tip to think about today, one thing that you take forward with you: hedgehog first. Pill bug, armadillo, whatever you wanna think about, getting roly-poly, small, curled up first and then tilting. That is the number one thing I would like for you to take away from today if what you're working on is this controlled, basic invert shape.

But let's get into, like I promised, a lot more detail. So we are starting in a stronghold position, so our arms are bent. Uh, and we're also starting with our feet off the ground, hovering off the ground. So what are our major muscles here that are involved here?

A really big one is our lat. So I've talked about lats before. I, I actually have a whole episode on it. I'll put it in the, uh, the down there so you can go check it out if you're interested. But what the lats do is they take our arms behind us. And if we're starting with our arms bent and we're holding that position, that is an isometric contraction of the lats.

So they are working to hold us in that position. If you are working on your invert and you find that your arms slowly straighten and you slowly slide down the pole in your stronghold, the lats are gonna be your weak point. That's what I'd go in and work on. So that's the one thing that is already starting to stabilize.

We're also using the transverse abdominis. Which is a very large core muscle. It's kind of like this corsety kind of coverage, uh, but it is also very deep, so it's underneath other muscles, and it helps us to create stability and to keep our spine from moving when we don't want it to move. If we are elevated in the air, if we are creating our own stability, part of that stability has to be keeping our spine from moving, how do we keep our spine from moving? By using our transverse abdominals, which are these very deep, very large muscles that help to stabilize the pelvis in relation to the hips

So that's our starting position. That's our stronghold position.

If you're hearing purring, apologies. There's a kitty in my lap. So we've got our strong, stable, stronghold position. If you cannot hold a stronghold position, start there. The next thing that we're gonna do is we are going to lift our knees until our thighs are roughly parallel with the floor. And we're gonna use two sort of main muscles to do this.

One, if we are bending our legs, which is what I'm talking about, this bent-legged sort of small egg shape position, we're using our hamstrings to do that, to pull our heels in towards our butt.

And the other thing that we're doing is we are using our hip flexors.

We're also using our primary hip flexors, our iliopsoas. And the psoas attaches at your lower back, in the back, and then forward over your hips to the front of your thigh, right? And if you think about those two things being drawn together, what would that do? Well, it would, you know, bring your lower back forward, but would also lift your leg.

And then we also have the iliacus, which attaches at the iliac crest. So if you think about, you know, your hip bones, the sort of like Mickey Mouse ear s- shapes on the side kind of, uh, it attaches to that, and then it comes, again, forward over the pelvis onto your thigh.

So those muscles work to lift our legs. So that's the first thing. Can you lift your legs until your thighs are sort of parallel with the floor?

If you can, the next thing we're gonna do is we are gonna bring our legs further up, but at this point we're gonna have to tuck our pelvis to do that. Uh, and to use this, the primary mover is the rectus.

I think most people sort of are familiar with a six-pack or an eight-pack. That's the rectus. Those are those big muscles in the front. Not super great stabilizers, really good movers, and they are helping our hips curl up to get us, again, into this tiniest little hedgehog pill bug armadillo package possible.

I like to think about getting my knees past the pole behind me, because the more I can shift my weight back, the more mechanical advantage I'm gonna have for the next step, which is to actually go upside down.

So from here, my arms are pulling down. I'm really using my lats. I'm stabilizing my core using my transverse. I've lifted my legs with my iliopsoas. Uh, I'm bending my legs with my hamstrings, and I'm getting a little bit of extra curl, a little bit of extra crunch by tucking my pelvis under, tucking my tailbone under using my rectus. And from here, I'm gonna keep my elbows where they are, so I'm gonna keep that big contraction, that big isometric contraction in my lats, and all I'm gonna do is extend my arms which means that the triceps on the back of the arms here are pretty much the main mover once I have this little packaged position where I'm, everything is as close to or even on the far side of the pole as it can get, and I'm just rotating around that fixed point

And then once I'm actually upside down, right, so I wanna get into a little package to find that rotation. It's really hard to balance in that position once you're upside down, so once I'm there, I like to find a little bit more of a lift of the chest, broadening across the chest, little bit of an arch just with my ribs so that I have an easier time stacking my hips over my head, and that's your inverted position.

Those are all the steps you'd need to break down. Strong hold, lift your legs, lift your legs even more by tucking your hips, and then keeping your elbows where they are against your side, extending your arms

What are the things that are doing a lot of moving here? Our hip flexors and our hamstrings, uh, to bring our legs in. We've got our rectus to tuck our tailbone under, and then we've got our triceps to find that final extension.

But from that first shape to that last shape, you might notice the lats really don't move. They're just sort of holding that same contraction the entire time. Ideally, I sort of glue my arms into my sides, and I keep them in that position the whole time, start to finish.

I'm also stabilizing with my deep core muscles, my transverse abdominal. Folks in my membership, I know we've been talking about this all this month. This is why. It's all linked. It's all part of it. Uh, and we're stabilizing with our transverse abdominal the whole time.

So if you think about your spine like a string of beads, right? And I'm trying to get all the beads to turn upside down and stack on top of each other, if those beads are on a string and wobbling a lot, that's very difficult. If those beads are on, like, a, a piece of dried pasta or something, like a piece of spaghetti or a piece of wire, it's very easy to just rotate that and stack them on top of each other. So that's really what our transverse is doing. It's helping to create and maintain stability in our spine.

And yeah, there's other things going on as well. But those are sort of the primary things that I would focus on if you were working on your inversion.

So with that in mind, what does this mean for you and your inversions? Well, the first thing is these are discrete individual parts, and you can work on them discretely and figure out where it is that you are weak and then work on conditioning that. So in my membership, members you already know this, uh, I have my inversions checklist, which walks you through doing just that and then takes that information and helps you build a personalized conditioning plan.

Again, members, if you haven't checked that out yet, go, go check it out. It's useful. I think you'll like it. It also means if you've broken it down into bits and you, you're meeting those strength requirements for everything, then it is probably not a conditioning issue. It's probably a coordination issue.

It's motor learning. It's a neurological issue, and that means that you should be focusing on that part instead of doing additional strengthening. If you're already strong enough and you're just having a hard time putting the pieces together and figuring out how it goes and finding that brain-body connection, that's a different problem. And if that is your problem, that's a problem that's actually kinda quick to solve. If you were coming in and you already have the strength, you could figure out the neurological part of it even within the span of a single class, which is always fun to have happen to you. I'm sure you've experienced it before.

And if it is a strength training issue, if it is you don't have the capacity to do, you know, a specific thing, getting a little bit of extra support. So this might look like a, a yoga ball under your butt so that you're carrying less weight. It might look like a, a resistance band behind your back around your upper arms. I think PD Sapien shared that a while ago. That's particularly helpful if your weak point is your lats because it's going to help hold them in place.

Another just general training trick that I, I recommend is working on eccentric. So what that means is, uh, getting into a position and then coming down out of it slowly and with control. So if you can invert from a Jasmine, let's say, getting into your Jasmine, coming to that basic tucked position, and then slowly lowering your hips. And the reason that people have you work on negatives, work on eccentrics like that also with shoulder mount or pull-ups, right? Uh, again, if you're all my students, you've, you've probably heard me talking about this before.

You are actually stronger eccentrically. The same muscle can produce more force in a negative than it can coming up into the position, right? So coming down out of your invert, you're actually gonna have access to greater strength than you will going up into it, and if you are really working at the edge of your strength, that can be a really great way to begin to feel that mechanics and build additional strength. So negatives are really, really fantastic for building strength and coordination.

And finally, a little, little final thing to think about. Uh, don't forget to breathe. So I mentioned you're, you're stabilizing the whole time, right? It's a really common compensatory pattern to brace by holding your breath. It is not necessarily wrong to do that. I would strongly recommend against creating a pattern for yourself where every time you want to go upside down, and every time you are upside down, you hold your breath. Uh, we talked about this with, uh, Dr. Tia Ukpe-Wallace, Self-Care Physio, who is a pelvic floor physical therapist and a pole dancer, about why that is such a bad idea from the standpoint of the health of your pelvic floor. But it's also just, if you wanna be able to dance into these movements, if you wanna be able to find flow and fun and freedom and just sort of play in the spaces, real hard to do if you're holding your breath the whole time.

So that's the breakdown of the anatomy of the basic inversion, all the different parts, all the ways they work together, the order that you wanna use them in as you are working on this movement, and then some suggestions, if this is something that you're working towards, if this is something that you're playing with, if you want to build strength in these positions, some ways to do it.

A little final word of wisdom for you. If inversions are not fun for you, if this is not something that you are intrinsically motivated, that you think about working on this and you're like, "Yeah, I want to do this. This is something I'm actively interested to do," you don't have to do it. It's not required. Nothing in pole is required. This is for folks who are like, " I wanna do it. I'm interested. I wanna understand what's going on. You know, if I get it in my brain, it can really help me find the motion." That's how I am. I have to really understand how a movement is before I can actually do it in my body, 'cause I'm a nerd.

Uh, and if you've listened this far, got news for you. You might also be a nerd. Uh, affectionate. But if that's not you and you're like, "Oh, God, I'm listening. This feels like homework. This feels awful. I don't actually wanna do this," don't do it.

You have my blessing. You never need to invert. You never need to get upside down. If there's something in pole that you hate, you don't have to do it, and it doesn't make you any less of a pole dancer. But if this is something you're working on, I hope you found this helpful, maybe enjoyable, you learned some stuff.

Again, I am gonna pitch Emily's book. It's very good. If you are the type of nerd that I am, I think you will enjoy it very much.

Oh, and if you haven't reviewed the podcast, uh, uh, do, do that. Give us some stars. Let me know what you think. I like podcasting, but it does sometimes feel like I'm just r- hollering out into the void. Uh, and it's really nice to know that people are out there listening.

So, uh, that's all I got for you today. I hope you're doing well. I hope you're staying safe. I hope you're taking care of the people around you, and I cannot wait to talk with you again soon. Bye.

Randi Fentress
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