Early 2004 the idea came to me about making the dancepole available as a fitness device to women of all ages and classes. Obviously, the reputation of the pole was the biggest hurdle to take. How could we ever overcome that?

First we needed a name. Pole fitness - that had a nice ring to it. We registered the polefitness. com and .nl domain and got to work. We spend all of 2004 and early 2005 in developing the Pole fitness concept. We wanted to create a fitness program that was a true total body workout, in which the women would train on strength, cardio, flexibility and, not in the least, mental strength.

We had countless meetings with physiotherapists, people of the Universities' sportcenters, personal trainers and medical specialists. Their advise was incorperated in our concept, and early 2005 we were ready to test our program in the fitness industry.

Now the question was, how are we going to get the dancepole into a healthclub, and preferably a prestigiuos one? We phoned an acqaintance working for one of the leading Dutch newspapers, telling her that a healthclub in my hometown of Gouda, was having poledance classes. Poledancing in healthclubs - that was unheard of! (Well, early 2005 it was). We staged a class, with friends, both poledancers and non-poledancers, and the newspaper had a full page story that following sunday, with the headline "Topsport!".

This article caused a massive email flow of girls asking which gym in their vicinity was having these classes. We had to disappoint them, because these lessons weren't taking place anywhere yet, but fortunately 3 healthclubs were among the ones that contacted us. In these 3 (pilot) clubs we tested and adjusted the concept to the program it is to this very day.

Many believed that Pole fitness was going to be one of the brief trends in the fitness industry. However, 4 years after the introduction, we are is still expanding rapidly. The reason for tihs will most likely be, that training Pole fitness is not only fun, it also shows great result! The muscle groups that are trained during the implementation of the pole techniques are arms (pinch force and biceps / triceps), chest muscles, abdomen and back muscles, quadriceps and adductor muscles. These muscle groups are trained in strength and muscular endurance. What makes Pole fitness special is the large training volume, the result of the number of repetitions x intensity x time. In many training programs the concentric movements are most important, In Pole fitness we also have relatively much eccentric movements and there are many static moments. These static moments (the holding of a position) ensure that muscles are trained for seconds, where this is only fractions of seconds, during dynamic movements, which is similar in many respects to training gymnastics. Pole fitness deserves a special place in the scala of fitness training over the past 30 years, not only in terms of 'Training device'. It provides a meaningful contribution to improving the general endurance, trains a large number of muscles in a unilateral way (concentric and eccentric and also static), both in strength and muscular endurance.

Today, early 2009, our group lessons program is given in over 40 clubs, among which 4 universities' sportcenters in the Netherlands. In 2009 we will start looking for female instructors in other countries, that are sportive, enthousiastic and enterprising, to make the fitnesspole available in a true fitness program worldwide.

Denise Mulder
PoleFitness.com

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