Anushka Asthana and Tom Reilly 

Who needs the gym?

Fed up with steep membership fees and monotonous step classes, women are turning to more exotic ways to keep fit. Anushka Asthana and Tom Reilly report.
  
  


Angela Gates works for an architect's firm in Hammersmith, west London. Like most of her peers she wants to keep fit, but she is bored with step aerobics and feeling lonely in the gym and has spent years paying for health club membership she has hardly used. However, the 28-year-old has now found a less conventional way of maintaining a high level of fitness.

'I started pole dancing to gain some confidence, but I loved it so carried on. It makes you incredibly fit. I have got biceps I had never seen before and can do press-ups. You have to tighten your muscles like in Pilates - especially when you go upside down on the pole. I have calf muscles from kicking and my stomach has improved loads.'

It's Tuesday evening in Trafik nightclub in London's fashionable Old Street area. Long before the clubbers show up, 12 women, mostly in their twenties and including a nurse, a student and an advertising executive, arrive for their weekly work-out.

Their two-and-a-half hour lesson starts with a rigorous warm-up of stretching, sit-ups and press-ups. Then the girls take it in turns to have a go on the two poles. They learn to swing around it forwards, backwards and in different positions. They suspend themselves off it and, with a bit of help, climb up it. At the end of the six-week beginners' course with Polestars, a pole-dancing school, most can hitch themselves up and hang upside down. It is the ultimate girly session, with a lot of laughing, cheering and constant encouragement. It is as much a social event as an exercise class.

Gates loves it so much that she has invested £170 in her own pole for her Notting Hill studio. 'My girlfriends all want to come round and try it out. It is a craze because it is a bit saucy and a bit taboo.'

Alongside her, waiting her turn on one of the poles, is Nadine Nicholas. 'I don't want to be a professional pole dancer,' she says. 'It is not sexual, it is like being at a gym. People talk about pole fear and at first I was nervous, but once we get on to the pole they can't get us off.'

Bored with the treadmill, intimidated by gyms and fed up with step classes, Gates and Nicholas are part of the growing number of women turning to more entertaining ways of keeping fit. Pole dancing is being stripped of its sleazy image and fast becoming the exercise of choice for many women. It is part of a proliferation of activities, traditionally not regarded as exercise, that have become central to fitness regimes. Belly dancing, trapeze and boxing are among the other fads hitting the UK.

In the cult of the celebrity, the shift has been helped along by stars swearing by these techniques to maintain their perfectly formed bodies. Kate Moss writhing around a pole in the new White Stripes video, and stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie are all reported devotees of the dance.

'Yoga was less mainstream and then Geri [Halliwell] took it up and it hit the fitness industry by storm. That is what is happening now,' says Denise Page, curriculum manager for YMCA fitness industry training. Page studies trends in the industry. 'We have found a huge increase in these activities because people are realising they don't have to go to the gym to be fit. Pole dancing uses muscular strength and endurance and is good for flexibility. After all, there are only so many step classes you can do.'

Pole-dancing schools are now popping up across the country. One metal company, Metalfast, has even started a sideline in making poles for dancers, and the past six weeks have seen a surge in interest.

The new trend for more exotic forms of exercise is being supported by no less a respectable organisation than Sport England. 'We think it is great that people are thinking of imaginative ways to get involved in exercise,' says Roger Draper, its chief executive. 'As long as it is safe, we are enthusiastic about new ways of getting people off the sofa.'

But exercise is not the only bonus that pole dancing can give women. After six weeks and 15 hours of learning, the girls have a new-found confidence. 'There is such a sense of achievement,' says Raquel Robert, a teacher at Polestars. 'They have done something they never thought they could. Afterwards, they walk a little taller, feel more feminine and are much more confident.'

Suzie Lipscomb is studying history at Oxford University. She also regularly belly-dances and teaches at the university's Middle Eastern Dancing school.

'I saw a girl dancing and thought it looked beautiful, so I signed up for classes,' she says. 'It looks so fluid and it is a very good workout. It works the abs and thighs. Because you enjoy it you can get a real buzz. People always say how feminine they feel.'

At Zehara School of Belly Dance in Manchester, they teach more than 300 women each week and are having to expand to deal with the increasing demand. More and more gyms are starting to provide classes.

A rather more daring fitness trend has been imported from the US, or more specifically New York. Sex and the City started the clamouring for trapeze classes after millions watched Carrie sailing across the Manhattan skyline, 40ft above the ground.

According to Rob Colbert, of the Circus Space in London, trapeze has a new niche in the fitness market. 'Traditionally, our classes appealed to people with a background in circus, performance or gymnastics, but now most of our enquiries are from those who have seen it somewhere and want to give it a go. Once you try it you realise that it is not just great fun, but that it gives you a brilliant workout. As well as toning and improving strength, you really increase your flexibility and develop much better posture.'

Even keen fitness fanatics have been won over by the adrenaline rush of performing on a bar, high above the ground. 'I had done dance when I was younger and then tried Pilates, but nothing gives you the same buzz as trapeze. You enter the hall with all the pressures of the world and within minutes you have forgotten all about them and are just having a great workout,' says Kate Hart, a 39-year-old actress who has been coming to classes for over a year.

Richard Hilton had been living in New York and when he returned to the UK decided that people needed more fun at the gym. He opened Gymbox in central London last month. Walking down the staircase into the gym the ceiling is lined with boxing gloves. Treadmills have television screens, the bikes are attached to computer games and at the back is a huge boxing ring. A live DJ provides the music.

Of the 20 people standing in the ring, fists held in front of their face, 14 are women. The studios around the edge of the room house exotic dancing, belly dancing and soon pole dancing. The emphasis is high energy and keeping fit.

'We wanted to entertain people, and the classes have been phenomenal,' says Hilton. 'Women aren't afraid to be feminine, but they can also box - they don't have to conform to what men expect. It is complete equality. It is what women want - we are just the provider.'

Stuart Biddle, professor of exercise and psychology at Loughborough University, says it is only entertaining activities that people will stick to: 'People are far more motivated to do something when they enjoy it. We are all hedonists and seek to do things that give us pleasure. It's that New Year syndrome, where you join a gym, go along for a while and then give up. But if your choice of exercise is fun, then you will have far more chance of keeping going when other factors, like time, get in the way.'

Nadine Nicholas began pole dancing because she wanted to 'learn how to spin down the pole upside down'. She finished her beginners' course this week and now cannot wait to carry on. 'I am going to a club now so I can watch how to do more tricks - it is incredibly good fun.'

 

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