Is Your Pole Conditioning Actually moving you toward your goals?

I recently started a series on Instagram called “Is This Actually Good Pole Conditioning?” because I often see pole athletes work incredibly hard at exercises that may not actually be moving the needle toward their overall goals.

This is admittedly super frustrating to me, because I know that pole athletes are willing to work. People spend years practicing skills, doing conditioning, adding strength training, mobility, rehabbing old injuries and trying to figure out what will finally get them to the next level. They’re eager to get stronger so they can learn harder skills and feel more capable on the pole.

In my mind, we should direct that effort toward things that actually move them forward, and I don’t think that’s a controversial take! I don’t think any of us have the time or energy to waste on exercises that aren’t progressing us in the ways we need.

The pole industry has a bit of a habit of calling something “conditioning” because it looks like a skill, happens on a pole, or simply feels really challenging. Most of these exercises probably have some benefit. I’m not arguing that they’re universally useless. What matters is whether the exercise provides the right stimulus to produce the adaptation you actually want. If it doesn’t, then you can work incredibly hard and still spend your time training something that isn’t moving you toward your goal.

A simple example outside of pole is the squat. Squats are an excellent exercise. They can build lower-body strength, improve force production, and have plenty of applications in athletic training.

If your goal is to get better at pull-ups, though, doing more squats isn't a particularly effective way to get there. That doesn't make squats a bad exercise. It means the adaptation you're getting from squatting isn't the adaptation you're primarily looking for.

The same principle applies to pole. An exercise can be perfectly good while still being a poor choice for developing a particular skill or quality.

That’s where I think we can start asking better questions about programming.

What are we actually trying to train?

When I choose an exercise for an athlete, I first want to know what adaptation I’m trying to create. That might be maximal strength, strength endurance, power, mobility, tissue capacity, cardiovascular fitness, or the ability to produce and control force in a particular position.

The exercise I choose needs to provide an appropriate stimulus for that adaptation.

This sounds incredibly obvious when we put it that way, but I think it gets lost when we start with the exercise instead of the goal. We see an exercise that looks like a pole skill, someone calls it “conditioning,” and we accept that it must therefore be preparing us for that skill.

Looking at the actual demands of the skill can tell us much more.

Take the shoulder mount example from my third post in this series. A shoulder mount requires active shoulder extension, spinal flexion, and hip flexion as you bring your body up and into the straddle position. There are also demands related to grip, pole contact, coordination, and producing force in those positions.

A marching shoulder mount bridge is a perfectly legitimate exercise for other purposes. It can train the posterior chain, hip extension, spinal extension, and the ability to maintain a loaded position. There’s nothing wrong with this exercise in the general sense.

Those just aren’t the primary demands of the shoulder mount. So while the marching shoulder mount bridge is a fine exercise on its own, it’s not a good exercise in the context of preparing someone for a shoulder mount.

If someone is using the bridge specifically to prepare for a shoulder mount, I would rather find a way to regress the shoulder mount itself. You can reduce the range of motion, shorten levers, change the starting position, or add assistance to make the movement more accessible.

You’re not replacing the skill with a completely different exercise. You’re making the actual skill easier to perform while still practicing the important parts of it.

What is the bottleneck?

Another thing I think we often miss in pole programming is identifying the actual bottleneck.

An exercise can train a relevant quality and still not be the best use of an athlete’s time if that quality isn’t what’s currently limiting their progress.

Take the shoulder mount again. Someone might argue that the shoulder mount bridge is useful because it gets a beginner accustomed to the pressure of the pole on their shoulder and upper back.

I can see the logic there. The question I would ask is whether that discomfort is actually the thing preventing the athlete from performing the shoulder mount.

If it is, then why not use a shoulder mount or regression that also trains the relevant demands of the skill? You can address the contact pressure and work on the actual movement at the same time. Two birds, one stone. Why wouldn’t we?

But if the athlete does not yet have the strength or mobility to produce the shoulder extension, spinal flexion, and hip flexion required for the skill, spending a significant amount of training time on contact-pressure tolerance isn’t addressing the primary limitation. It’s not a productive use of that person’s time and energy. We have bigger fish to fry.

There will always be more things we could train. Good programming requires us to figure out which things are actually worth prioritizing.

The most relevant adaptation isn’t always the most important adaptation. The bottleneck matters.

“But it’s for beginners.”

This is one of the arguments that comes up repeatedly in the comments, and I get it.

Beginners need appropriate regressions. Not everyone can perform the full version of a skill right away, and good coaching requires us to meet people at their current ability level.

But “beginner” doesn’t mean we need to use a completely different stimulus just because the actual skill is difficult. Looking back at the pull-up example, just because a full bodyweight pull-up is hard, doesn’t mean I’m going to give a beginner a squat instead. They need a regression, not a completely different exercise that doesn’t meaningfully progress them toward a pull-up.

A beginner might need less range of motion, less load, more assistance, a different leverage position, or a slower version of the movement. Those are all ways of scaling the demand while retaining the qualities we’re actually trying to develop.

There will always be some difference between a regression and the full skill. That’s expected. The question is whether the regression is still giving us a useful version of the stimulus we’re after.

This matters because beginners have limited training time and recovery capacity too. If we’re spending that time on an exercise, I want to have a good reason for choosing it, otherwise students will continue spinning their wheels, and that really sucks.

Hard work is not the same thing as useful work

This is particularly relevant to pole because pole athletes are exceptionally good at working hard.

An exercise can make you sweat, make your muscles burn, elevate your heart rate, and leave you completely exhausted. Those sensations tell you that you did something difficult. They don’t tell you exactly what you adapted to.

That distinction is important.

A really challenging exercise can still be a poor choice for a particular goal. You can spend ten minutes absolutely destroying yourself and come away with relatively little development of the quality you actually needed.

Sometimes the best exercise for a pole athlete doesn't look like pole.

There are plenty of qualities that are easier to develop with traditional strength training.

If I want to improve an athlete’s ability to produce force through shoulder extension, I can progressively load that movement in the gym. If I want to develop stronger hip flexion from an extended position, I can choose an exercise that actually challenges that range and progressively increase the demand.

That can be much more useful than trying to make every exercise resemble a pole skill.

Specificity doesn’t mean that every exercise you do must resemble a pole skill. Training specificity means understanding what you’re trying to develop and choosing the most appropriate way to develop it.

Sometimes that means practicing the actual skill, or a scaled version, or training a component of the skill separately with a much more loadable exercise.

Good programming can use all three.

An exercise can have a place without being the best choice

This is probably where some of the disagreement around this series comes from.

I have no problem with someone saying, “I use this exercise because it helps my students understand the position,” or “I like this as a warm-up,” or “I use this for mobility.”

Those are different claims from saying that an exercise is effective conditioning for developing a particular skill or quality.

Context matters.

An exercise can be useful for familiarization without being particularly useful for strength development. It can be a good way to warm-up without being the best way to build capacity. It can have some value while still being a relatively inefficient use of an athlete’s training time.

I don’t think we need to label exercises as universally good or bad.

I want us to be more specific about good for what?

That’s the point of this series

I know this kind of discussion can feel unnecessarily critical. There are plenty of coaches who use these exercises because that’s what they were taught, because they’ve worked for their students, or because they have a practical place in the way they teach. I’m not interested in shaming anyone for that. I’m interested in whether we can get better at questioning our assumptions and updating our programming when we find a more effective way to accomplish the same goal.

I see how badly pole athletes want to progress. They’re willing to work incredibly hard, and I want that work to actually take them somewhere.

So when you’re choosing an exercise, I want you to think about what you’re actually asking it to accomplish. If you’re using it to get stronger, what kind of strength are you developing? If you’re using it to prepare for a skill, what demands of that skill are you actually preparing? If you’re using it for conditioning, what adaptation are you trying to create, and is the exercise creating unnecessary fatigue somewhere else?

A good exercise isn’t automatically a good exercise for every goal.

That’s ultimately what this series is about: being more intentional with our training so that the work we’re willing to put in actually gives us something useful in return.