By Lisa D

You’ve watched the tutorial six times. You understand the grip points, where your hands go, how your weight moves in the transition. You feel like you know what you’re doing, but it’s not working. And you’re getting just a little frustrated with the whole process. Or maybe a lot frustrated.

Should you watch the tute again for the seventh time but slower, as though the missing information might be hiding between two frames? Should you try the same things you’ve already been trying, but more, harder, faster? Are you not strong enough, bendy enough, or proportioned correctly for the move to work? What is it??

Here is a novel possibility: you might just need someone else’s eyes on it.

When you’re learning pole on your own, you’re playing the role of student and instructor simultaneously – often while upside down, with a knee in your ear and your pain tolerance taking a beating. And you think you understand what’s happening in the tute onscreen (flawless bitch instructor flawlessly doing the stupid flawless move), but if you did, well, then you’d be doing the move, wouldn’t you, and not skinning yourself alive over 300 failed attempts.

Those of us who train online can get weirdly attached to figuring things out by ourselves, almost as though asking for help calls our own skills into question or means we haven’t tried hard enough. But it should go without saying that everybody, from the pole greats to the freshest newbie, needs help on the pole sometimes, and a professional instructor just might spot something you haven’t noticed in that move you’ve been struggling with. A hand that needs shifting. A moment where your weight isn’t well placed. A setup that’s making the next part harder than it needs to be.

Or they might explain the same movement you’ve been focussing on in a completely different way, and suddenly your brain goes, “Oh, that’s what that means!!”

Troubleshooting is a skill instructors spend years developing, and they are trained to diagnose movement as it’s occurring, meaning that when you’re stuck upside down in pretzel formation, they’ll often have the answer you need then and there to keep you on the pole and keep the move progressing, rather than you having to un-pretzel, get down, and watch the video again.

Now, I’m not saying everyone needs to be learning from a live instructor in order to progress. Tutorials are a great way to learn, and on-demand video is what we’ve built PoleSphere around. Buuuuut sometimes, when you’re struggling with a trick or a movement and you’ve watched the tute carefully, tried thoughtfully and given it a proper go, the next useful step might simply be having someone there in real time and saying “Hey, can you help me with this?”

That’s why we’ve created PoleSphere Live Studio, coming in November. Live online classes all month, with real-time access to your instructors as you train.

Across 4 weeks, 29 live online sessions and 7 incredible instructors, there’ll be opportunities to ask the question while it’s fresh, hear a different explanation and bring a little more conversation into your learning. Come give it a go!

Head here to learn more about PoleSphere Live Studio