“I feel like a child playing at a playground. Weightless, effortless.”
She's 70 years old and a 9-time world champion in pole dancing.
She's 70 years old and a 9-time world champion in pole dancing.
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00:00When I do pole, I feel ecstatic.
00:14I feel like I'm a child playing in a playground, like weightless, effortless, and it just brings
00:21great joy to my heart.
00:23My signature move is a passe iron flag, which is a kind of a spinoff of the iron X, and
00:31it requires a lot of core, and it requires a lot of discipline to be able to do it, because
00:42your body basically is perpendicular to the ground.
00:46My mother had osteoporosis very seriously, and both of my sisters, who are both younger,
00:55had a test that said that they had the beginning, so I figured, okay, I think I'm in pretty
01:03decent shape, but I am not loading my bones, and they're not mineralizing.
01:08So I have to do something to build my bones, so I looked on the internet, and that is when
01:14I found pole.
01:15I fell in love with it, because it gave me such joy, and it was a way of expressing
01:22myself and being creative.
01:33The stage is a platform for me to tell an empowering story, and all of my stories that
01:39I share, the choreography is around transformation, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, or
01:48a chrysalis becoming a butterfly, and that's really what we're all going through, not just
01:55as a nation, but as a planet right now.
02:08This is where I practice.
02:09I use these two poles.
02:11They are competition poles, competition floor.
02:18Pole does require a lot of core and upper body strength.
02:26I would say that the pole itself is really all I do.
02:31The only time that I do weights is if I'm traveling, and there's no pole, there's no
02:37place to street pole.
02:39You develop flexibility, and you develop strength.
02:47In gymnastics, competing on hard floors before the spring floors basically destroyed the
02:52cartilage in my hip, and it started going downhill at about 61, and two years ago, I
03:00had both of them replaced.
03:03I was fortunate enough to still win world championships with my hips going downhill
03:08because most of it is upper body, and I wasn't required to be able to walk.
03:16Sometimes I had to take a cane or a wheelchair at the airport before getting on the plane,
03:24and go into a championship, and nobody would have known that I was injured so seriously
03:31because the pole kind of accommodated my injuries.
03:44I would like people to watch this video and realize that if I could do it at my age of
03:5170, that they could do it, and to find their passion, to find what makes their soul sing.
04:00The pole's not for everybody.
04:01Some people have written me emails and said, because of you, I'm now walking five miles
04:06a day, or I'm back to doing yoga.
04:10They have found their path, and I tell everybody, reach inside yourself.
04:15There is a gift that you have within yourself that if you find it, and you develop it, there's
04:23nothing greater than finding that gift and sharing it with the world.