When you begin taking aerial dance classes, you dream of inverting. Inverting is bringing your hips above your head while holding an aerial apparatus in your hands—a way of flipping upside down so you can hook your legs and proceed into other tricks. Unless you are a high-level rock climber, gymnast, or other athlete, you probably won’t be able to invert on your first try. And as you progress in ability, you are only able to do a couple inverts in each training session.
Here is one of my cleanest inverts:
However, in pole dancing, you can get into leg hooks by climbing up the pole and dropping down into them. Climbing takes less upper body strength than inverting; most pole dancers are able to climb before they can invert. When you are still building strength in your shoulders, biceps, triceps, etc, you can use a climbing entrance more times than you can use an invert entrance. After you run out of inverting “steam,” as it were, dropping down allows you to enter moves and flows that are mainly upside down and rely on leg strength.
Here’s me dropping down into a shape that prepares you to enter the jade (the final pike position):
I often have to edit out entrances into shapes because my phone runs out of storage space (a problem I know all dancers have), so the above video isn’t my best drop-down. Trying to find a good video of this entrance was a reminder to myself to upload more complete sequences to my YouTube before editing them to make space on my phone.
For me, being able to drop down into a leg hang, then a jade split, allows me to work on the move I love most, even after I can no longer invert. Trading out climbs for inverts also extends my training session—I can work on more shapes and combinations overall if I limit my inverts. Using the drop-down entrance can make pole more accessible overall.
Dropping down is also a great example of why you need to train both sides. I prefer to climb with a left shin mount, and this leads into a right leg hook (jasmine and/or outside leg hang). If I move into a jade from an outside leg hang on my right leg, I need a flat split with my left leg in front. And that, dear reader, is something I do not currently have. I only have a flat split with my right leg in front, so I have to switch up my climb sequence to get there.
This is the inverting entrance I first learned for the jade split (and, again, I need to upload more of my entrances to the cloud because this was also hard to find on my phone with its limited storage space):
I initially learned this entrance for the jade split because inverts with my right arm on the inside (the right side of my body is the one closest to the pole) naturally lead to an outside leg hang on my left leg. In a private zoom lesson with Elizabeth B-fit, she emphasized the importance of being able to drop down into shapes. So, I started to work on my climbs starting with a right shin mount more frequently. If you can airwalk between climbs, you can drop down into a left leg hook from a left shin mount. However, airwalks are also hugely dependent on upper body strength, so I like to be able to thread the shin mount leg through instead of going into an airwalk.
It took several training sessions before I was able to get into a jade split after dropping down into a left leg hang. This was an exhausting reminder that you should always train both sides.