I’ve been pole dancing for almost 8 years. I started with my sister, back in the day when it was still quite “taboo I.” I was hooked from the start. I love pole dancing: the advanced tricks, the beginner spins, the exotic floorwork, and all the emotions you can show through dancing. This passion led me to begin teaching 5 years ago.

During my 8 years I’ve taken a few breaks, most of which were the unfortunate result of an injury. Although injuries often occur with sports or dance, I could definitely have been training smarter. That said, my most recent break was my longest and most interesting, because I had a baby!

My partner and I were very excited to find out that we were expecting a small human in June of 2017. I had a million emotions ( all of which were amplified by pregnancy hormones which can be truly terrifying!) While trying to navigate how my life was going to change. Pole dancing and aerial training were a huge part of my life and I knew that pregnancy would have a huge impact on my ability to train. I started researching pole dancing in pregnancy on Mr. Google but unfortunately there was not a lot of helpful information out there at the time. My doctor have me the old “you can continue doing what you were doing before pregnancy” speech, but I don’t think she understood exactly what I had been up to.

Initially, I continued training as I normally had with a few minor changes (I tried to make sure I drank more water and had a readily available supply of ginger ale and soda crackers for the nausea). I taught pole until I was about 5 months along, and kept training on my own and taking classes beyond that.

Once I got closer to 6/7 months along my body really started to tell me I needed to change what I was doing. Pole dancing requires a lot of core strength. I could see when I was training that I was losing the ability to engage my core properly and that freaked me out! I didn’t want to do any long-term damage that could be avoided. At that point I still couldn’t find any helpful, consistent information, so I quit pole dancing and switched to different forms of conditioning and cardio training. During this time, I wasn’t sure if I was going to come back to pole/aerials at all after my baby was born. I thought I would just see how things were going after. It had been a part of me for so long but with so much changing I wasn’t sure where things would go in the future.

All was well and good up until the birth of my wonderful, funny, adorable, stubborn little man!

I will never forget standing up for the first time after my son was born, I FELT LIKE A NOODLE! I knew that I would lose core strength but feeling it once the big ball of baby was gone was unreal. I was terrified that I would never be able to do ANYTHING ever again, let alone get back to advanced pole training.

Stay Tuned for Part 2!

-Megan

Training After Having A Baby - Megan's Story (Part 1)