The Poler Dizzies Series 2b: Adrenal response to Pole POWER!

🧬 The Biological Facts:

How Fear Flips Into Performance Power

Here is what is happening. You are holding your BREATH - for a reason! Yes fear is the trigger.

But your body is BRILLIANT! Look how brilliantly the "Freeze" effect helps POLERS!

1. The Evolutionary "Freeze" Response 🦎

• The Biological Fact: While everyone talks about "fight-or-flight," the full evolutionary spectrum is actually fight, flight, or freeze. In the wild, predators track prey using movement and sound. Holding your breath instantly makes a mammal completely silent (eliminating heavy respiration) and perfectly still, helping them blend into the background [Roelofs, 2017].

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: It acts as an action-preparatory launchpad. When a high-up drop or an unfamiliar move or a head-down pose triggers a flash of fear, this involuntary pause acts as an action-preparatory launchpad. Rather than paralyzing you, it gathers explosive neural energy in your body. When you learn to consciously use it, it primes your neuromuscular pathways so you can execute the transition with maximum power and intentional muscle recruitment. (POWER!)

2. Heightening Your Senses 🐆

• The Biological Fact: When you stop breathing, your internal physiological "noise" drops significantly. Without the distraction of your own chest moving or air rushing through your nose, your brain treats this as an opportunity to dedicate 100% of its processing power to hyper-vigilance, allowing you to plan your next move [Lojeryd et al., 2017].

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: It accelerates your spatial awareness and visual orientation. When you are in a 3-point hold or completely inverted in an advanced trick (like a Brass Monkey) and a wave of panic sets in, halting your breath clears your sensory bandwidth. This allows you to instantly map where your body is in mid-air, visually locate the pole, and accurately place your grip points despite being completely disoriented. (And yes, this level of awareness takes practice... on both sides!.. Sorry, I had to say it! 😜) (POWER!)

3. Intense Muscle Tension 😬💪

• The Biological Fact: Fear causes an immediate surge of adrenaline, which rapidly locks up your muscles to prepare for impact. This deeply affects your respiratory muscles—including your thoracic diaphragm, chest, neck, and abdominals—mechanically restricting your normal breathing cycle and forcing a breath hold [Pijpers et al., 2005].

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: When channeled correctly, this lock creates instantaneous core bracing and skin-to-pole friction. This deep stabilization of your abdominal walls and chest protects your spine during intense extensions and forces your skin to press harder into the metal, giving you a tighter, much safer mechanical grip. We just have to learn to use that tension intentionally, whether we are working on the floor or hanging 12 feet in the air. (POWER!)

4. Anticipation and Focus 🧠🔥

• The Biological Fact: Breath-holding naturally happens during moments of extreme anticipation. Your brain temporarily pauses regular metabolic processes for a split second to dedicate all its cognitive resources toward calculating what is about to happen next [Delapille et al., 2001 / Fincham et al., 2023].

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: When trained, it optimizes your micro-timing and movement precision. When anticipating a difficult dynamic catch or a sudden drop, suppressing the automatic urge to breathe frees up massive cognitive focus. This hyper-concentration unlocks an inner awareness called proprioception—a deep, almost mathematical sense of where your body is in space. This is the secret behind those advanced polers on social media who make insane drops look effortless. They aren't magical; they've just had 7 to 10 years of active training to master this focus POWER! They learned HOW to breath and WHEN.

The Tricks you WILL LEARN!

1. Brain and Vascular Stabilization 💪🩸📈

• The Biological Fact: Learning to APPLY the breathing correctly to the TRIGGER - Deep abdominal breathing actively stimulates the vagus nerve, which regulates your cardiovascular system, lowers autonomic stress, and stabilizes blood pressure. By regulating vascular resistance, it keeps your blood vessels optimally open and dilated, maximizing oxygen delivery directly to the brain [Jerath et al., 2006].

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: It keeps you completely calm and clear-headed mid-air. Keeping your blood vessels properly open ensures you avoid all those types of "poler dizzies". It prevents the split-second drops in cerebral blood flow that cause you to miss the exact muscle engagements keeping you safely on the pole—whether you are relying on four contact points or down to just two!

2. Fueling Explosive Muscle Power 👊 🧨

• The Biological Fact: Diaphragmatic breathing significantly optimizes your body's cardiorespiratory gas exchange and blood oxygenation. Furthermore, the downward movement of the diaphragm triggers a mechanical co-contraction of the deep abdominal walls, lumbar spine, and pelvis, stabilizing your center of gravity [Hamasaki, 2020 / Kim & Lee, 2013]. When we PRACTICE this daily- we are more likely to do it ON THE POLE!

• The Pole Fitness Benefit: Opening up your respiratory pathways ensures that every single muscle in your body has an immediate supply of the oxygen and metabolic "food" (glucose) it needs. This optimized nutrient delivery creates the instantaneous cellular energy required for your muscles to execute highly explosive, dynamic movements. This is the exact fuel your body needs whether you are celebrating learning your very first basic climb, mastering a back hook spin, or training all the way up to an advanced Fonji!

So the next time your body pulls something on you instead of getting frustrated. Thank her and BREATH!

It takes time to learn all the valuable lessons pole has to offer. The learning curve seems so steep sometimes but, for me, pole regrew me from the ground up. Cell by cell, brain cells opened, confidence opened and working with a great coach who knew so many wonderful ways to block my nasty nelly thoughts with facts saved my life and my love of pole blossomed!

Fear is good, can be pretty funny on the recieving end honestly. How many 64 yr olds get to report they only get DIZZY when upside down spinning clockwise on a stainless steel pole? I'm guessing maybe 3 tops!

Read on to the Breathing exercises and HOW WOMEN SABOTAGE their breathing from a young age. Yes - they did studies on THAT...of course they did! They named it "the hourglass-syndrome" in 2021!

Here: Part 2 c: The Suck-it-in Sabotage & Breathing Practice!

If you don't know your triggers so you can notice when you need to use correct breathing specificaly - check out Confession of a Dizzy Poler! for some ideas and hints!

Be sure to check out my old dizzy examples on Fb & IG for this series!

📚 Academic & Medical Reference List: full series

Delapille, P., Verin, E., Tourny-Chollet, C., & Pasquis, P. (2001). Ventilatory responses to hypercapnia in trained breath-holders. Europe Journal of Applied Physiology, 86(2), 137–141. https://doi.org/10.1007/s004210100519

Doria, N., & Numer, M. (2022). Dancing in a culture of disordered eating: A feminist poststructural analysis of body and body image among young girls in the world of dance. PLOS ONE, 17(1), e0247651. [1] DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0247651 -GREAT PAPER ON "THE MALE GAZE EFFECT" peer-reviewed academic article detailing body surveillance, abdominal formatting, and aesthetic physical control as womens reaction.

Fincham, G. W., Strauss, C., Montero-Marin, J., & Cavanagh, K. (2023). The interconnected pathways of chemoreceptor drive, threat arousal, and respiratory control. Psychophysiology, 60(4), e14211. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14211

Hamasaki, H. (2020). Effects of diaphragmatic breathing on health: A narrative review. Medicines, 7(10), 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/medicines7100065

Jerath, R., Edry, J. W., Barnes, V. A., & Jerath, V. (2006). Physiology of long pranayamic breathing: Neural and mechanisms may make it a unique tool for health. Medical Hypotheses, 67(3), 566–571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2006.02.042

Kim, E., & Lee, H. (2013). The effects of deep abdominal breathing exercises on respiratory muscles and lumbar stability. Journal of Physical Therapy Science, 25(11), 1433–1435. https://doi.org/10.1589/jpts.25.1433

Kim, J. H., & Lee, S. Y. (2023). Effects of abdominal bracing versus abdominal hollowing on muscular activation and thickness during trunk stabilization tasks. Medical Science Monitor, 29, e941254. DOI:10.12659/MSM.941254

Lojeryd, S., Andersson, E., & Melin, M. (2017). Cardiovascular and respiratory adjustments during acute stress in competitive sports. Journal of Sports Science & Medicine, 16(4), 455–462. (Open-access medical journal index link) https://www.jssm.org/jssm-16-455.jhtml

Pijpers, J. R., Oudejans, R. R., Holsheimer, F., & Bakker, F. C. (2005). Anxiety-induced changes in movement behaviour during the execution of a complex motor task. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 6(1), 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2003.10.001

Puhl, R. M., Himmelstein, S. M., & Speight, J. (2022). Weight stigma and diabetes stigma: Implications for weight-related health behaviors in adults. Clinical Diabetes, 40(1), 51–64. DOI:10.2337/cd20-0071

Roelofs, K. (2017). Freeze for action: Neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 11, 76. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00076