The Science of Rest for Pole Dancers

Dr. Rosy Boa re-releases a vault episode on rest to coincide with her own offload week from pole, explaining what counts as rest, how often to schedule it, and why pole dancers often neglect it. She defines rest as a reduction in overall load that depends on an individual’s current training and life demands, notes gentle movement can still be rest, and advises avoiding pole-like pulling, leg-lifting, or intense mobility on rest days. General guidance includes at least one rest day per week and a lower-intensity deload week about once a month, with reduced load before major events. She outlines overtraining, citing sports medicine literature, with physical and mental warning signs (worsening soreness, performance decline, injuries, frequent illness, sleep disruption, appetite/weight/period changes, mood shifts, irritability, depression, fatigue). She describes the fitness-fatigue model, emphasizes sickness isn’t rest, recommends 6–8 hours sleep with consistent timing, and concludes that rest is essential for long-term pole health.

Citations:

• Herring, S. A., Ben Kibler, W., Putukian, M., Berkoff, D. J., Bytomski, J., Carson, E., ... & Coppel, D. (2019). Load, overload, and recovery in the athlete: Select issues for the team physician-A consensus statement. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 18(4), 141-148. ⁠https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/Fu…

• The Fitness-Fatigue Model Revisited Implications for Planning Short- and Long-Term Training Chiu, Loren Z.F. MS, CSCS; Barnes, Jacque L. Strength and Conditioning Journal 25(6):p 42-51, December 2003. ⁠https://journals.lww.com/nsca-scj/pag…

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome and Offload Week

01:41 Why Rest Matters in Pole

03:21 What Counts as Rest

06:41 How Often to Rest and Deload

07:59 Overtraining Warning Signs

19:59 Fitness Fatigue Model Explained

22:50 Quick Q and A on Rest

26:19 Key Takeaways and Wrap Up

Transcript: 

📍 Hello and welcome to the Evidence-Based Pole podcast with me, your host, Dr. Rosy Boa. This episode is actually from the vault, uh, but it's one that I refer to quite often. So I thought it would be good to bring it back and it is about rest and the science of rest and how much you need and how often and what actually counts as rest and all that good stuff.

And the reason that I am bringing it back this week is because. I'm resting this week Those of you who are my members you'll know that twice a year roughly. I have, in addition to our monthly deload weeks, uh, an offload week. So we just completely take the time off. I will send my members recordings.

So if you all wanna keep training, if you're taking your offload weeks, another times, absolutely feel free to do that. But for myself, I will not be pole dancing this week. I'm giving my body time to completely rest and relax and recharge so that when we come back in April and we start our, uh, three month training cycle I'll be fresh as a daisy. Hopefully.

I, I am very excited about it. We are going to be working on vestibular system training. We're gonna be doing balance training. We're gonna be doing spin pole training. We're gonna be working on heels.

We are gonna come out of this. So physically stable, uh, I think it's gonna be fantastic. So really looking forward to that.

If you'd like to join us. In my membership, there's usually a link in the down there if I remember to put it there. Otherwise you can check out scienceofslink.com and learn more about it, uh, and also join my other members to whom I am going to take this opportunity to send out a big shout out. Uh, a big thank you. Y'all make the studio possible. You're the reason I'm here. I can do this. Uh, and I appreciate you. I really do. And with no further ado. Let's get into this episode on rest and why it's so important.

This week we are gonna be talking about rest and specifically the science of rest and some of the research that's been done around that. And  what is known in the sports science, exercise science kinesiology sort of space. And unfortunately, I'm gonna say right off the bat, we don't have a lot of research that's been done specifically on rest and pole dancers.

It just hasn't been a whole bunch of researchers done on on pole dance. In particular. So most of what I'm talking today is really gonna be drawing on more general exercise science stuff, stuff that we covered in my, in my personal training certification. And the reason why I think it's super important for pole dancers in particular to think about rest is.

Because to be frank, we don't do a great job of it as a discipline. Pole dancers love to pole. , a lot of studios offer unlimited class packages where you could, if you wanted to take class every single day.  A lot of folks who are doing pole are newer to pole and maybe in that phase of adaptation where like they don't necessarily need regular rest to the degree that they will in a couple of months.

When stuff starts getting a little bit more real. I think it's really important to talk about in the pole space.

So what are we gonna talk about today? Well, first of all, we'll talk about what counts as rest. I also got some really good questions on Instagram that I'm gonna be sprinkling throughout here some answers.

What counts as rest? How often should you rest? What's that gonna look like? And then specifically some, some warning signs to look for that are like, Hey, you need to change what you are doing. You need to incorporate more rest, or, , things are currently bad and will continue to get worse until you do that.

So we're gonna talk a little bit over training. And then at the end there were a couple questions didn't really fit. Well into my outline, so I'm just gonna answer them on their own at the end. So first of all, what counts as rest? When I say rest, what do I mean?

And I think a really common misconception is, oh, I need to. Lay prone, it's a rest day, so I'm not allowed to move. That is absolutely not the case. So one question I got was, what counts as rest?

Does walking or light jogging count? And I would say if that is less than what you are currently doing physically, Yes. If it is on par or more than what you're currently physically doing, then no. So what counts as rest is going to depend on the current load that you are placing your body under, right?

And a reduction of that load. So if you are, say , a competitive polar and you are, , training four hours a day for a competition for you, rest may look like. One hour of training off the pole gentle mobility work. Whereas for someone who is brand new to pole, one hour of mobility work may very much not constitute arrest and may be in fact an increase in in load.

So it depends a little bit on what you're doing, but in general, yeah, walking, light jogging perfectly fine. Whatever movements you need to do throughout your day, also perfectly fine. And that was also me defining rest, which is another question that I had. Just someone wanted to know, like, okay, what do you mean when you say rest?

Cuz sometimes it's a little bit, a little bit confusing. Another question that I got was, how do you incorporate rest along with cross training and going to the gym, which is a really, really good question. So we'll talk a little bit in the next section about how often you should rest, but when we think about rest, It is important to consider, , your overall holistic movement diet is like how I like to refer to it.

 How like, , watching a nature documentary and you're like, this black bear's diet consists entirely of salmon and berries or whatever. , what is in your nature? Documentary description, movement, diet and if  you are doing things that put a lot of load on your body, right?

If you work in a very physical job, if you're on your feet a lot  anything that's gonna be putting your system under stress, you also need to consider with resting, right? So and you may need a rest from, let's say a very physical job. So if you are a roofer, for example very physical job, lots.

Of climbing lots  bending. So for you, a rest day would probably not incorporate, , going to the gym and doing, , the stair master and, and some, some hip hinge lifts. Like I would, I would say that's probably not a great rest from that movement activity. And in general if you're a little bit sore and as you move gently your soreness improves, that is fine.

If you are moving gently and you notice that your soreness. Gets worse or it doesn't go away at that point, I would talk to a doctor or a physical therapist. So low intensity cardio probably fine. But particularly for pole artists, I would say for us, we probably on our rest days want to avoid doing things that are similar to what we do on the pole.

So a lot of. Pulling motions. A lot of, , leg lifting motions, those are really common in pole. If you're working on a specific trip maybe something that involves a lot of back bending, I'd probably not do back bending on your rest day. And the reason is that you wanna give your, your muscles that you've been working a chance to adjust basically and repair themselves and get ready to get back to work.

What brings us to our next question, which is how often should you rest? And this is gonna depend, a lot of these things really depend on you and your movement needs and everything that's going on in your life.

But as a very general rule of thumb, I would recommend one rest. Today per week. So if you are poleing, I would not pull every single day. I would pull maybe six days outta seven and have one day where you're like, okay, I'm just not gonna get on the pole today.

And also thinking in a little bit of a longer term, you. And this gets a little bit more complicated if you have like a specific event that you're preparing for, but in general, you want to shift the intensity of how much you're working. So I would recommend that every, , fourth week or like one week out of a month, you do a little bit less.

So you don't necessarily have to not pull at all, but you are doing pole movements that are maybe a little bit Below where you're working right now. Technically they don't require as much strength. They don't require as much flexibility. They don't require as much power. Again, just to give your system a little bit of time to.

Rejuvenate.

Yeah, and also I mentioned, , if there's specific things coming up. So if you have a show or a competition or a retreat or a con or something where you're gonna have, , a big spike in activity I would decrease your training load going into that so that you have a lot of energy and you're really fresh for the thing that you're going into.

So all of that was sort of very general, but I think it's also very helpful to talk about specific warning signs and how to know when the fact that you are not getting rest is an issue and some things to look about. , oh, okay, this is affecting me and I may be over training. So over overtraining is basically when you just do too much for too long and your body can't adapt.

And in trying to keep up, you're gonna see a lot of. Really unpleasant symptoms. And so a good citation for everything that I'm talking about here. And this will be in the show notes.  I'm not gonna leave you without citations, is load overload and recovery in the athlete. Select issues for the team physician.

A consensus statement in current sports medicine reports. And obviously I am not a physician. This is not medical advice.

Over training. There is a lot of symptoms of over training. It is a big deal. It can really negatively affect pretty much every single aspect of your life. And like I said, this is something that I see with pole dancers, particularly in, let's say the first year or so of people getting into pole dance, where particularly if you're not coming from a movement background, you don't have that cadence of like, exertion, rest, exertion, rest established for yourself, yet you don't necessarily know what that's looking like. , you, you, no one may have told you that this is even a thing that can happen, right? That you can exercise too much. So let's talk about some of the specific things that may be symptoms here. And a lot of these are detailed in the article that I just mentioned.

And some of these are going to be physical, right? So a big one is soreness that gets worse with movement. So I mentioned if you're sore and it gets better as you move, that's probably fine. If it gets worse, as you move, you've probably exerted yourself too much. You're not ready to get back to what you're doing yet again, longer break, longer rest.

And sometimes for over training, you'll see people talk about, , not doing your target activity for. Even up to months, right? You'll see sometimes recommendations are like 12 weeks of not doing, , in this case, pole. So definitely something you wanna avoid. You may notice a plateau or a decline in your performance, right?

So if you've been working on a trick or , a specific climb and you've been making lots and lots of progress, and then suddenly even though nothing has changed in your training, you're not making any additional gains. Or you're actually getting weaker or less flexible. That again, to me, clear sign, you're over training.

If you're getting injured a lot, I mean, ideally you're not getting injured at all. Right? That's, that's the hope. But if you're just sort of getting like small compounding injuries or you're getting the same injury over and over that could be a really good sign that you are, are over training and that you don't have the, the capacity for the training load you're trying to take on right now.

If you're getting frequent infections. So this is an interesting one because your immune system will actually be compromised if you are exerting yourself too much. So if you're like, always have a cold, right? If you, , are constantly getting sick, that is a good indication that probably something is up.

And it could be , immunosuppression as a result of over training. Your sleep may be effective. So this is another big one. If, again, nothing else has changed in your life, but you can't sleep right. Your quality of sleep is worse. You can't, you're, you're waking frequently. Sometimes you may like wake up with a start in the morning.

This is kind of gross, but you may like wake up with a start in the morning and like immediately have to go poop. That's a good, a good symbol that like, there's a lot of stress that your system is under and it's having a hard time adjusting. And that may be due to, to over training. You may have an elevated heart rate right.

 And this is probably something you're more likely going to notice if you if you monitor your heart rate, like use a, a Fitbit or a wearable or something. And I would say if you, if you suddenly notice that you feel your heart racing I would say that's something that I would talk to a medical provider about quickly.

Weight loss, also losing periods. If you, if you do regularly get periods and you start to not get periods, if you start to lose weight, that is a great sign that you might be over training that again, your body just cannot handle what you're asking it of it, and that it's going to continue to get worse over time.

 If you're already over training and you're continuing to train at the same load or even trying to increase the load, which sometimes you'll see cuz people are like, oh, I'm plateauing. I should do more. Again, very bad situation. Not great for your body. And I'm not even halfway through the , physical symptoms, but they're also, , pretty bad mental health symptoms as well, which we'll get to.

And I'm not trying to scare you. I just think that it's really important that you know what these signs are so that you can look out for them in yourself.

So if you are really sore all the time, if you have muscle pain all the time, if soreness doesn't go away, , if you're sore for like days and days after your training, I'd say that's like a good sign that you're doing way too much.

If your blood pressure is just sort of higher throughout the day, a good sign that you might be over training. And this is, again, it's probably something that you're not gonna notice unless you are monitoring it through like a wearable or something, but a good thing to keep, keep an eye on. , tummy troubles, gastrointestinal distress again, could very well be a sign of over training particularly if you're seeing that along with a lot of these other things.

If it takes you longer to recover from a workout of the same intensity, right? So let's say you usually go to a one hour pole class, and then  you're sore the next day, but the day after you're fine and you suddenly notice that it takes you two days. To stop being sore and then three days to stop being sore and your body's just not recovering as quickly.

It's a great sign that, again, there may be over training going on there loss or decrease in appetite, right? If you're really, really stressing your body, you're probably not gonna have as much capacity to like digest food well, so you may just not be hungry. Which again, is a symptom of your, your system, your body being under stress and under enough stress that it's sort of like.

Imagining a spaceship metaphor. This is the point in which they start to like, , jettison modules that are actually really important for like the long term health and success of the people on the space station. But it's like, it's an emergency. They have to, right.

So that's the sort of like how you can think of your body responding to like this level of chronic stress, basically chronic physical stress. So we mentioned injuries, particularly overuse injuries, right? So these are things where like, , oh, my hip is like tweaked. Oh, my shoulder's twingy.

Oh, , my wrists always bother me. Or, oh, my knees always bother me. That just because you are. Consistently finding so much load, you are doing so much that your body cannot adapt to it. And particularly if you're new polar, you're probably gonna notice those more in the joints. Because joints take longer to adapt to new loads than muscles do.

Muscles adapt much more quickly. They get more blood. And possibly, and you will hear people talk about this, and I would say that the research isn't super clear that this is always the case, but if you are concerned that you might be over training, this could be a tool to help you. And that is changes in heart rate variability.

So basically , the time between your, your heartbeats is not completely consistent. There is some variability in that. And there is some research that suggests that you may see a decrease in that variability during over training. Not every study has found this effect, but it's something that you may wanna look for.

And again, if you use a Fitbit, some of them are wearable, some of them will measure them. If your phone has an infrared sensor or a fingerprint sensor, sometimes you can find phone apps that will measure that. So also something that you can look at yourself. And you may have noticed that a lot of these signs are measurable, right?

Particularly things like weight loss, things like sleep volume, things like blood pressure heart rate variability. So there are physiological effects of training too much and not getting enough rest, but there's also emotional changes, and I think this is something that can take a lot of people by surprise.

Because there's, , this is a physical component, but that's not the only component. And these. I am a big fan of movement journaling and journaling in in general, I am it's a little bit of a joke with my friends that I have something like four journals going at any given time that I write in every day.

But it's really helpful for me. And if it's not something that you do consistently, I, I'd recommend it. I actually, if you're in my conditioning club, when you sign up, I sent you a little movement journal. So. Feel free to use that. I'm a, I'm, like I said, a big fan of journaling for keeping track of things like this.

But a couple mood changes you might wanna look for. So if you, , oh, I loved going to pole and like, all of a sudden you dread going to pole class, you dread going and doing the conditioning, You may feel like, I dunno, tightness in your chest.

You may try to come up with excuses to avoid it. That can be a symptom of over training mood changes, including depression. So depression is a symptom of over training. And again, if you've ever worked with a personal trainer, I mean, hopefully , when, when you're checking in and sort of adjusting the the challenge of your workouts, one of the things that they should be asking you about is how's your mood?

How are you feeling? Because if you were suddenly depressed, It could be a symptom of over-training. You may feel less confident, right? You may have more mental blocks about moves, right? So even maybe something that you used to be able to do, no problem, even though you feel like you are about as strong, suddenly you body just won't let you do it.

And , it's a little bit of a protective mechanism. You've got that, . Your body knows even if you don't, that you are under a lot of physical stress, you're under a lot of load. So it may just be stopping you from doing something. Cause it's like, no, it's too dangerous. We don't have the ability fatigue.

So really just like feeling tired and it doesn't go away. And it doesn't get better with sleep so big. I mean, there's a lot of things that can cause fatigue and  chronic fatigue is its own separate thing. But It may be due to over training things like apathy, just like not caring irritability.

Maybe you start snapping at people could be over training. And again, these are things that could also be caused by other things, but really important to look out for, especially if you're also seeing a lot of these other symptoms as well. These physical symptoms. It could be sad, right? Depression, sadness.

The most were like low mood. , you might also see like anger or hostility that like is uncharacteristic for you. You may have a really hard time concentrating. You may get confused more easily. You may need people to repeat things more often. You may just be bored. You may just not care.

And you may just like not be motivated to train. And , that's something that, that I'll talk about with my students is like, if you really, really don't want to do pole especially if it's something that you started doing as a fun activity that you, you really loved, and  that spark is gone, something is wrong.

Something needs to change. And it may just be that you need a break from pole, right? You need to take a month, a couple months off and then, and then come back. And some of my students listening may may recognize themselves in this. But I will tell folks just to not come back for a month. Cuz I am, I am noticing these, these symptoms as we're talking about it.

I'm like, you need to absolutely decrease your physical load in some way. And coming to my classes is the way that I have control over as your, as your trainer. So, Lots of symptoms of over training. And again, this is not to scare you. This is not to be like, never do Paul ever. Maybe obviously like I love Paul.

You love Paul, and I know that particularly if you're sort of in the early stages of over training and you're like, well, I don't have all these symptoms yet. If you just keep pushing through and you just keep, , not taking rest days and not taking deload weeks maybe even like 

once a year, you take a whole month off. If you're not building that into your training schedule, it's not gonna get better. It will get worse, and it will start to negatively affect every single other part of your life. And this is, this is way beyond pull. This is way beyond, , your exercise. This is about your ability to function as a human being.

So Take care of yourself, right? Like as a pole teacher, and hopefully all pole teachers feel this way. I care way more about your health and wellbeing in the long term than I do. ? Oh, you get this next trick. Oh, you go to that specific competition. If you are starting to recognize yourself in some of this discussion take out your calendar and pick some days or some weeks where you're like, okay, I am not gonna do pole here.

I'm not gonna do rock climbing, I'm not gonna do aerial, I'm not gonna do things that are like pole. I'm going to really, genuinely remove this level of stress from my system. Give myself some time to rest and adapt and then come back in. So moving on a little bit about.

Our understanding of this process and why sort of like spaced rest is such a good idea. 

 And I should say I'm not a scholar working in this area, so if anyone has more current knowledge, I'd be happy to hear it. But to my knowledge, probably the most commonly used model for modeling the relationship between exertion and rest is what's called the fitness fatigue model. And a good citation for this is the fitness fatigue model, revisited implications for planning short and long term training by two .

And Barnes in Strength and Conditioning. All that is from 2003. So it's a little bit of an older article. Basically the idea is that as you are, , Working out as you're building strength for pole you are building fitness.

So you're building, , your strength, your flexibility, your balance, your power, all those things we want for pole. We are also building fatigue, right? So you can think about this as being sort of like two cups that are both being filled up. And the issue is you really only want the fitness cup.

You don't want the fatigue cup. And the, the way that rest works is when you rest, you empty out the fatigue cup first. And the fitness cup pretty much stays the way where it is. So you can generally take about three weeks off and see no change in strength. Different studies say different things, but that seems to be sort of like the, the, the length of break that the literature is competing on, where like, you're not gonna see a change in power

You're not gonna see us trained in strength. So don't worry if you're like, I can't take three weeks off a pole. I'll, I'll lose all my gains. You will not, you will keep all your gains. Well, you will lose is the fatigue. So that's the sort of general idea and model. And that these, , These two things have different growth rates, decay rates and particularly when you're doing like really high performance training stuff, you're really trying to like, rest as little as possible, but to get the fatigue down as much as possible so that you can continue to see increases in fitness and again, get that little bit of extra advantage.

So that's sort of the general idea. And I'll put the citation to that in the show notes as well. So we talked about, , My experience, the pole dancers overtrain a lot. What counts as rest? , not doing the thing that you are doing in this case pole and things that are like pole physically how often you should rest.

Again, I generally recommend at least one rest day a week. And  what gentle cardio is. Fine. Movements you do in your life is fine. You don't have to lay there for eight hours unless you want to. And then, , having some variability in your training load and having a period of decreased load.

About once a month, for about a week. It's just my general recommendation. And then we talked about over-training and a lot of the symptoms of over-training. And again, I cannot, I cannot over overemphasize how serious this can be and how much it can negatively affect every single aspect of your life.

So I do want you to take it serious and pay attention to how you're feeling and really advocate for yourself and schedule rest breaks if you start to notice any of these things creeping on in. We talked about the fitness fatigue model and we are gonna end up with a couple of extra questions that didn't really fit into my outline.

So I had a great question. If you are sick and don't pole, does that count? No. So rest is about giving your body time to recover, right? And when you are sick, if your body is fighting off and infection It is working very hard, right? Think about the last time you were sick and how tired you felt and you felt tired cuz there was a lot of exertion going on.

There was a lot of stuff happening. There were big demands being made of your body. So I would say if you are sick and then take a break until you are feeling sort of like back to your baseline and then take an additional break after that, that last little break would count as rest. But just recovering from sickness absolutely doesn't count.

 And again, if you're over training, you're likely to get sick more often, which , sort of a double-edged sword. So if you are treating time that you were sick as rest, you are probably even more likely to overtrain, I would say. Yeah. Another question. How much sleep should you be getting?

So, this is a really fantastic question. Individual sleep needs vary a little bit. , I think general recommendation is six to eight hours. Sleep hygiene is also pretty important, right? So are you sleeping in a dark space as much as possible?

Are you,  able to have really good quality of sleep? Do you have consistent bedtimes and wake up times? And I know that this is not something that is fun to hear, but if you're someone who usually goes to bed at different times during the week and on weekends, As much as possible, I would recommend trying to keep to the same sleep schedule.

Your circadian rhythm doesn't know about weekends, right? Your, your light exposure doesn't know about weekends. So yeah, try to get up and go to bed at roughly the same time every day, and I'd say 68 hours. Some folks need less, some folks need more. I'm definitely one of those. I need eight hours of sleep sort of people.

So another really good question. And also a really fabulous question that I don't really know the answer to. I did some digging around in the, in their literature how does not getting enough rest, rest impact spin tolerance? So spin tolerance is basically can you spin for a long time without getting dizzy?

And particularly at the speeds that we tend to spin and pull, we are sort of in a class with dancers and circus artists. Sorry, not dancers. Dancers don't usually spin that fast. We are in a class with circus artists and figure skaters specifically. And I could not find specific work on spin tolerance.

I think that's a term that like we use in pole. So what I did find was a lot of discussion of vertigo and vertigo. Fatigue and dizziness sort of coincide. And for actually it seems like a lot of a lot of things, fatigue and dizziness show up together. So question mark, I mean, certainly changes in blood pressure may cause lightheadedness, which will make it harder to spin.

Inability to regulate your core temperature is going to particularly be related to more nausea. So, yeah, I cannot find a scientific answer thinking about myself and my body. I. I don't know that I have an answer to that as well, but also I have a very high spin tolerance, so I don't know that I would notice a, a small change.

Right. So just like if you're carrying 50 pounds and somebody adds a pound, you don't really notice it as much as if you're carrying two pounds and somebody adds a pound. So I think someone with less of a spin tolerance might notice more in effect, whichever direction. And I mean, My general guess would be that as you get more fatigued and if you're not getting enough rest, your spin tolerance will get worse.

But I don't have any evidence there. So yeah, if anyone knows of any good information there, I would love to, love to hear it. All right, so that's all that I had for today. And I would say if you take one thing away from this, it is that the rest is just as important as the work. There's. No such thing as laziness.

Laziness is a made up concept. And if you don't rest, your body's gonna make it so that you do have to rest and it's not going to be pleasant for either of you. So yeah, definitely prioritize getting enough rest. And again, if you've ever worked with a personal trainer if you've ever worked for, , with, , a strength and conditioning coach you will probably have heard all of this before and it may be review for you.

So the, the exercise science, the sport science, , very, very clear over training is awful for you. And it's, it's proportional, right? So, So you may, you may be over training at a level where someone who is more conditioned is just like their regular training. So it's really dependent on you.

It's really dependent on your capacity. And probably the best thing that you can do for yourself is, , keep a journal, track how you're feeling, track the physical symptoms and track your emotional symptoms and the sort of the mental health side of things as well. And keep an eye on it and , stay safe.

And a good, healthy rest routine is gonna help you continue to pole and continue to pole effectively long, long, into the future and help you have a really long, healthy, happy pole career. And I think that's what we all want. So thank you so much for joining today. I hope you found this helpful. I hope you learn something and you feel empowered to go, I don't know, maybe take a nap and I will see you next week.

Bye.