Devon Hunter

In light of what is happening with Rekers there are a great many conversations out there dominated by people who should shut the fuck up.

“Escorting is a livelihood, not a career.”

Oh, really? Well, look who knows so much.

Let’s take a moment to evaluate whether or not escorting is a career. A career is that work one does for which one is paid, and it is generally supported by personal investment, training, expertise, and networking. I would like to address each of these in turn as a proof that although escorting can be “only” a livelihood, it can also be a full-fledged career.

Personal Investment

As Dolly Parton said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Let me just tell you what I have to pay in order to play the part. Equivocate this to paying for college if you will; however, know that careers generally involve a huge investment on an individual’s part, and adult entertainment is no exception. This is what it costs me to maintain the Devon Hunter brand:

1. Personal training at $40/hour, 2-3 times/week
2. High quality food at $100 - $150/week
3. Products from Aveda (because you may was well eat what you put on your skin) at $150/month
4. Therapeutic massage to break down muscle and remove toxins at $65/hour, 1-2 times/week
5. Supplements such as vitamins and muscle maintenance at $125/month

If you want me to keep looking like I look, it’s going to cost me about $1500/month. At about $18,000/year, that is a college education. This doesn’t include the in-kind spa services that a friend treats me to (I probably got $500 worth of hair coloring, teeth bleaching, and face peeling yesterday). I am investing in my profession, so that I can remain competitive in a glutted market. I have to offer what employers want. Period.

Training

I cannot speak for all escorts, but the best among us study and train. We hire at first, in order to emulate, or associate with high quality escorts who help us avoid pitfalls. We learn a code of conduct. We talk to people who hire escorts to understand the culture of the interactions. We are honed into the equivalent of courtesans in Europe and geisha in Japan. We are artists with a variety of techniques and skills of many types and purposes. I happen to be a very vocal and open escort (concerning my thoughts and my humanity), but you are naïve if you think my experiences differ all that much from any others’. There is a process to becoming an escort. Any tramp can be a two-bit whore who throws his legs in the air for $20 with 10 minutes notice. It take time and skill to be what we are. Art is what makes it look easy.

Expertise

Every career has a set of skills unique to it which require a submission of the self to the technique. It goes without saying that a skilled escort will have honed his expertise for a particular group of clients. I happen to focus on the Boyfriend Experience (BFE). It’s what I like, and it is what I would want for myself. And that makes it easy for me to offer, and it makes it pleasurable for me to give. I would be a terrible fetish escort. I would fail at it. It isn’t my area of expertise. I am very gifted at emotional and personal connections. I am good at it. Other escorts have learned the safety issues and refined practices for whatever it is they do (e.g. S/M, B/D, water sports, extreme play, etc.). They practice their skills and learn the body. We, all of us, learn about people in intimate ways that rival the intricacies of professionals in other fields. And we charge professional fees accordingly. If you want a two-bit fuck, then go pay $20 for one. They are available, and it might be what you need. But… If you want an experience that goes beyond this… Well, you pay for that too.

Networking

Whether it be through advertising, introductions at social events, or any other method of contact, a professional escort has to build and maintain a network. The best escorts see the same clients over and over and over and over. Why? Because we’re professionals! In whatever industry you are in, how much of your sales come from established accounts, and what would happen to you if you were not to maintain those relationships? It should go without saying that professional adult entertainers of all types are highly organized, savvy, and professional people. My rant here doesn’t make me less of a professional, in my opinion. I would equate this entry to making the outside world privy to the break room banter that I would have with any other professional in my industry when something is vexing us.

You have just witnessed what I would say to any escort or exotic dancer when some stupid ass tells me that my profession is “only” a livelihood.

I get asked fairly often what I’ve been doing in the last year or two to get my fitness results. I’ve decided to be very specific, despite the fact that each person has his/her own gender, age, body type, metabolism, race, motivation level, and other host of factors that will affect his/her ability to implement any of this. There is one overarching factor that will help you, no matter what type of exercise regimen you follow: Discipline.

I was going to say “consistence;” however, that is a misnomer. Yes, you have to consistently work for a long time, but you cannot repeat the same formulas over and over. Variety is very important. That can be applied in many ways: How many times a week you workout, time of day, what types of exercises you do, the order of the exercises, whether you focus on the concentric/essentric/isometric phase of exertion, the tempo of repetitions, how much rest you have between sets, whether you do supersets/pyramid/reverse pyramid/circuit/etc, blah blah blah.

Variety is key, because your body is extremely adept at finding the most efficient way to perform effort (i.e. the path of least resistance), and will adapt to repetition by burning fewer calories. If you do the same workout more than about three times in a row, you will see a drastic reduction in effort/caloric burn. Mix it up. Always.

Me Personally

I workout only 2-4 times each week. I workout for only 45-60 minutes for each session. However, when I do exercise it is with a focus on intensity and good form (proper alignment, proper use of breath, appropriate resistance loads). I also do not do the same workout more than once in a week. Plyometrics (explosive training that focuses on jumping/landing, locomotion while implementing resistance of some kind, and skill specific motions like throwing/catching) is very important for me, because I’ve been active so long that anything less demanding simply won’t shock my system.

Breath

What happens if you do not breathe? You die. That’s hyperbole in this instance, but you get the point. Without breath there is nothing else. You must not only breathe, you must do it with the proper coordination, in order to deliver oxygen and remove waste efficiently. Toxins in the body prevent progress - breathing properly and hydrating will help elimenate these substances.

The simple rule of thumb for breathing: Exhale on the exertion, inhale on the return. Often this means that you should exhale on the concentric portion of the repetition (i.e. flexion - decreasing the angle of the joint. e.g. bending your elbow). You would exhale when bending your elbow to do a biceps curl, and inhale as you lower it during the essentric portion of the repetion (i.e. extension - increasing the angle of the joint. e.g. straigtening your elbow). This isn’t always the case: You would inhale to go down in a pushup (when the elbows bend) and exhale to go up. So, exhale when you do more work, inhale when you do less work.

Visualization & Three Dimensional Symmetricality

Get it out of your mind right now that spot training is helpful. If you are saying, “I want to improve my (insert body part here),” you still need to implement the whole body, even while bringing some additional focus to the part in question. Be aware that the cosmetic muscles (i.e. the most superficial: biceps brachii, pectoralis major, gluteus maximus, etc.) are the furthest from the core of the limbs and torso, and although they are the prettiest to look at, they are the least important in terms of efficient development. The deep musculature is closer to the joints, and these invisible muscles are the foundation upon which the superficial muscles are built.

With that in mind, bring your focus to a deeper place within your visualization of what you are doing. Yes, imagining yourself doing an exercise will help your results, but try to think deeper than the muscles you can see. The biceps brachii (the muscle you show people when they say “make a muscle” and you flex your elbow in response) is not the primary flexor of the elbow: The brachialis is, because it is closer to the lever of the joint. When you do upper anterior arm exercises, be sure to keep this fact in mind.

In addition to working on a deeper level, also remember balance. As above, so below. What you do on the front, do on the back. If you do it to the left, do it to the right. You are a three dimensional being. You are a whole entity. It is a very Western concept to chop the body into parts without concern for integration. Eastern philosophies of the body (and the universe in general) focus more on wholes rather than portions. What does this mean for you as an exerciser?

If you do a chest workout, at some point in the next week you also need to do the back. Whether you do it immediately (Chest/Back day) or a day or so later (day 1: push exercises, day 2: pull exercises) doesn’t matter so much as finding the balance at all. Muscles work in pairs: Muscles can only pull, they cannot push. If you do not work both sides of a muscle pair you will create imbalances that will result in lowered results and greater risk of injury. Create balance on all sides of a joint.

An obvious example would be right/left symmetry. Would you only workout your left leg or your right shoulder? No. That would be ridiculous. Bring your left/right awareness into alignment with your front/back and upper/lower symmetry as well. In the movie “The Lady in the Water,” by M. Night Shyamalan (one of my favorite directors of all time), there is a character who works out only one arm. It has narrative significance for that movie, but otherwise it is exactly what it is: bizarre and unbalanced.

This brings us to upper/lower symmetry. It absolutely drives me bonkers crazy to see a huge torso sitting on top of a chicken. How gross. Ridiculous. The legs are just as important as the arms. The butt and hips are just as important as the chest and shoulders. Imbalance in upper/lower symmetry is a fantastic way to not only look like a cartoon character, but to also promote injuries. If your entire lower body is not as well connected to the core as your upper body, you will have an incredible amount of instability and weakness that will eventually lead to the break down of the whole. Whether you enjoy exercising the legs or not, you absolutely must do them: They are the foundation of everything else. You cannot build a cathedral with fancy towers and stain glass windows without a strong foundation to hold it all up.

Cardio tips

If you are going to do cardio (I personally do not, because my particular metabolism would not allow me to maintain mass gains if I were to do cardio on top of the dancing I already do), the first order of business is to make sure you can do it without hurting your joints. If you want to run, and if you run more than about 10 miles in a week, then you should plan to replace your running shoes every 90 days. Speed walking burns almost as many calories, and it puts only a fraction of the strain on your joints. Swimming, if you have access to a pool, is a fantastic form of resistance cardio that doesn’t put as much stress on the body because it is in a “zero gravity” environment.

Your cardio session should not exceed 50 minutes: 5 minutes of gentle warm-up, 40 minutes of oscillating intensities of cardio training, and 5 minutes of moderate/gentle cool-down. The warm-up and cool-down are vital, because they allow your cardiovascular system time to adapt to demands. You should generally avoid doing more than 40 minutes of cardio training, unless you have a particular goal (i.e. run a marathon), because after 40 minutes the body no longer works aerobically. Your cardio workout will switch over to anaerobic activity, and you will start burning protein, rather than carbohydrate and fat. In layman’s terms: After 40 minutes you break down muscle instead of fat.

ABSolutely not

It has been a widely accepted piece of wisdom in the fitness industry for years that sit-ups and crunches alone do nothing to help you attain physical fitness. It’s infuriating that people still get duped into buying gimmicky pieces of crap to get better abs. I think a single crunch burns something like 1/10,000 of a calorie. There are 3,500 calories in pound. So, to lose a pound from doing crunches alone, you would have to do 35,000,000 crunches. Mhm.

Abdominal work is indeed very important. In fact, core strength is one of the single most important factors for attaining and maintaining fitness; however, remember what I said about spot training: It doesn’t work. To strengthen your core (which is not just the abs - it is the abdominals, lower back, hip complex, butt, deep rotators, etc. ad nauseum), you have to implement it while doing everything else. Working out on one foot and then the other, standing on instability surfaces, jumping while performing a repetition - all of these activities force the core to stabilize the entire body. Feats of balance will train your entire core much more effectively than crunches, which train you to have bad posture by over-strengthening the abs and pulling the torso forward.

Your entire workout should be an abdominals/core training session. Every moment of every session you should be doing abs/core. Where possible, use free weights rather than machines: You standing and controlling the weight brings more exertion into play than sitting and sliding on a machine, more calories get burned, and your core works harder. Graduate off of two-dimensional machines as soon as it is safe to do so.

Doing abdominal specific exercise will help define each head of the rectus abdominis (the six-pack muscle), internal, and external obliques but those exercises will not, in and of themselves, give you a six-pack. You already have a six-pack. Everyone does. You simply have to shed that which is obscuring it, and that requires whole body exertion and an improved body composition (i.e. get your lean:fat ratio in better alignment).

Something else to remember: Think deep. The six-pack and obliques are the pretty muscles you can see… Remember that the deep muscles are the important ones. If you do not train the transversus abdominis, you will never have a flat stomach, even if you have a lumpy one. The transversus abdominis is a layer of muscle in your core that works like a muscular sac that is wrapped around your lower trunk. Its job is to stabilize and to hold your intestines in place. To engage it, try to keep your belly button pulled up (without sucking in so deep that you can’t breathe/move) at all times. Have you ever seen someone with a six-pack who still looks pregnant from the side? Or how about a very slim person with no visible subcutaneous fat who still has a potbelly? Both of these are possible examples of a tranversus abdominis that is too weak to hold the intestines up inside the cavity of the torso.

Mass vs Tone

The generalized rule of thumb for building mass versus creating definition is simple: To get big do heavy weight with few reps, and to get cut do light weight with many reps. Let’s get a tad more specific. That might be helpful.

To build mass you will need to ingest about 1 gram of protein/pound of your desired body weight (if you want to weigh 150 pounds, eat about 150 grams of lean protein each day with your whole grains and veggies), and you will need to do sets of 8-10 reps. To increase tone, you still need to eat 1 gram of protein/pound of your desired body weight, but you will need to do sets of 12-15 reps.

To gague whether or not you are working with the correct weight load/resistance you will have to be honest with yourself, and you will have to be willing to adjust alot until you find your target resistance. For gaining mass: reps 1-3 should make you feel energized and powerful, reps 4-6 should require deep exertion but not strain, and reps 7-8 (as well as 9 and 10, if you can do them safely) should exhaust your temporarily. You should genuinely need to rest 60-90 seconds after the set. If you could have kept going, you should’ve used more resistance. To encourage tone: reps 1-5 should require little effort, reps 6-10 should induce a warm sensation in the muscles, and reps 11-15 should fatigue you to the point that you are uncomfortable. You should genuinely need 45-60 seconds of rest after the set. If you could have kept going, you should’ve used more resistance. Generally you should do 3-4 sets of 2-3 exercises per body part in question.

Diet & Rest

Diet is 70% of success. Like it or not, you are what you eat. Exercise itself is 20% of success, and rest is 10%. Respect that.

You should be eating 4-6 smaller, snack-sized meals, rather than 1-3 huge and filling meals. Providing your body with several smaller portions allows the digestive tract to completely break the food down, giving you access to the nutrition in your food, and it also keeps the metabolism high.

Digestion requires energy. By grazing lightly throughout the day on lean protein, whole grain foods, and raw veggies (go easy on the fruit, it has as much caloric density as candy) you keep your body buzzing with activity. You also avoid starvation mode: Eating less frequently confuses your body, which doesn’t know there’s not a famine. It simply knows that it’s hungry and will then hold onto all the fat you eat without using it, so that you can get through the “lean” times. Avoid stuffing yourself - you should feel satisfied without feeling satiated. Drink at least 64 ounces of water each day (the bare minimum to live), and munch often.

In this hectic world it’s hard enough to get five hours of sleep a night, but you need more than that probably. At least if you intend to get fitness results. The body evolved over millions of years, so it really doesn’t give a damn that you have a full itinerary. I’m not going to tell you to get eight hours of sleep a night if you don’t need that much, and if it’s impossible for you to do; however, napping, if possible, is nice. Get as much rest as you can. The body heals itself and grows while you sleep.

Also, avoid working the same muscles on back-to-back days. Exercise tears muscles fibers at the microscopic level. Stitching them back together is what makes them firm and grow. If you break them down repeatedly without giving them time to heal, you will not gain mass and your road towards becoming toned will be longer. For mass building, avoid working the same muscles more than once in 5-7 days, and for tone, avoid working the same muscles more than once in 36-48 hours.

Hello everyone! Wow. I took an entire week off from posting - a few of you have emailed to make sure I’m okay. Yes, all is well - I was on the road alot last week, and wasn’t able to post in that time. But I’m back now, and I have a few ideas up my sleeve.

Tomorrow I will have a posting about Swinging Richards (a good one, don’t worry!), but before I address it, I want to go through the process of explaining better how I got to this point (in terms of what I will tell you later about Swinging Richards).

People remark with some frequency about the level of fitness I have, and sometimes they will even acknowledge how difficult it is to achieve/maintain; however, for the most part I find that people think there is some magic/science that gives me some advantage that they will never have. This is simply not true: For people without metabolic disorders and other health scenarios that preclude fitness, I would venture to say that the lion’s share of people can achieve their goals to whatever measure they are willing to invest in doing so.

I have been working out (not necessarily properly) since I was 15 years old. To quote “Hamlet 2:” “It doesn’t matter how much talent we lack, as long as we have enthusiasm!” I was spinning my wheels for the most part. What you simply must embrace in your fitness adventure is that DIET IS 70% OF SUCCESS. Exercise is 20% and rest is 10% of success. If you do not eat properly, you simply will not achieve visible (and in some cases, practical) gains. While I was anorexic I was doing nothing but putting myself at risk of injury.

So, the results I have achieved are not only recent, but lately they are also sudden. This has been a very long journey (with no end in sight just yet), so what I want this entry to do is bring attention to a fact that most patrons don’t always appreciate, but which most adult entertainers struggle with constantly: Achieving and/or maintaining the look demanded by our profession requires us to have a job to have a job. Fitness, and the various means people use to attain it (or the semblance of it), is an enormous undertaking. When people use the metaphor “carved in stone,” they are right: It is a slow, painstaking process. The rock evolves slowly into the statue, the landscape erodes over eons.

I’m not going to go back to when I was 15. For one, I don’t have digital copies of the pics to do so, and for two, I have experienced enough changes since 2005 to make the point that even three years is sometimes only just barely enough time to get results. I say this not to discourage people on their fitness journey, but to emphasize that patience, consistency, and discipline are the means by which you gain advanced results.

In November, 2006 I was still at the beginning of my total recovery from anorexia. I still weighed only 125 pounds or so, but I wasn’t obsessed with mirrors and calories anymore. I was very lean and cut, but I just couldn’t add any mass. I was still working out too frequently with the same body parts, and not eating anywhere near enough (though more than I had been). This is a picture (click to enlarge) from a theater production I was involved in at the time. You can see that I’m thin and strong, but rather shapeless and out of proportion in some ways. This is a very honest look at how Dysmorphic Disorder (there, I finally said it!) brings a warped sense of priority to some parts of the body, while ignoring others.

By February, 2007 I was trying to gain weight. The problem is that I was doing the workouts by Cathe Freidrich, which (in the series of workouts I was using for the most part) focus on very, very high numbers of reps. You cannot gain muscle if you do high reps with high weight for a long period of time (the muscles don’t get enough of a chance to heal and build). Tone = high reps, low weight. Mass = low weight, high reps. Athletic training = a wide VARIETY of challenges. Match this with the fact that I was living off of protein bars and shakes, and you have a recipe for disaster. I went to the hospital four times in 2007 because of exhaustion, malnutrition, dehydration, and infections. I have never been sick so much or so often as when I was living off of whey protein products. You must have a balanced diet. In addition to illness, I gained fat, not just muscle. By November, 2007 I was up to 165 pounds, but I was sick, lethargic, and hurting. My body frame does not comfortably support that much non-lean weight.

In 2008 I finally started getting on track with what would become the various programs that helped me begin to achieve my fitness goals. January-March, 2008 I improved my diet (with immediate improvements to my health) and went to see a personal trainer. She helped me bring balance to my workouts, and her sessions were so demanding that I had no choice but to eat properly. However, I was still eating too much sugar (in the form of fruit), and although I was getting stronger, I wasn’t getting leaner. The lighting in this picture is flattering - but if you look closely around my abdomen, you will see that I still have a girdle of sorts around my lower abs.

April-June, 2008 I did P90X religiously. It is a fantastic program for those who are already at an intermediate level or higher, in terms of fitness. I saw all sorts of incredible gains in strength and definition. I leaned back down, and I went from doing 10 sets of 20 push-ups and 7 pull-ups to 10 sets of 30-32 push-ups and 18-22 pull-ups. However, there is something you need to know about P90X: Its philosophy is that you need constant variety. That means you also need variety away from P90X. July-September, 2008 I did P90X again, but only sporadically. It was beginning to hurt me. All the calisthenics was creating repetitive injuries. Remember, you need rest, so that you can rebuild. I hit a plateau around September, and that’s when I finally had to go to the gym (something I had always, up to that point, loathed and feared, because of the over-machismo horseshit I’ve always experienced in them).

The new variety of exercises immediately began paying off. October-December, 2008 I was able to allow my body to heal from the P90X, which although amazing, is far, far too intense to maintain without variety for more than 90 days. If you are going to do P90X I would suggest doing it for a rotation, then going away from it for a rotation. By taking a break from the calisthenics and moving to heavier freeweights and machines, I was able to work muscles from angles new to my body. I had never used gyms before with any consistency, because I find them dirty and intimidating places where rude people socialize too much and workout too little. I also was always afraid that people looking at me were thinking, “Who is that little turd, and why is he bothering?” What I find now is that when people watch me, I get the impression it’s because they’re interested in what I’m doing. Switching to the gym allowed me to fill out some more, and to continue improving my body composition (lean mass to fat ratio).

January, 2009 has been pretty low-key. I’ve needed to rest, and I’ve not been allowing guilt to bother me (too much) about taking my time getting back to it after the holidays. However, I’m about to start going back to my trainer again. I’ve done a rotation at the gym by myself, but the exercises weren’t as complicated as what I need to shock my system. I’ll go see Carrie again, because she’s brilliant at plyometric training. When I saw her last year, I was working out only with her. This time I’ll see her, but still go to the gym as well. What has surprised me is that recently, although my working out and caloric intake are both DOWN, I have had a growth spurt and filled out anyway. That’s the power of rest. The pic to the left was taken January 23, 2009. The one on the right was taken January 25, 2009. I hope you will understand now why I said in various posts recently that my pics on this site no longer look like me.

Going forward I think I can finally say that after well over 10 years of working out, I am getting to the point where I am looking the way I’ve always wanted to. I eat what I want, when I want: The anorexia is completely gone. I don’t even have the inkling anymore of thinking that not eating is okay. I’m proud that I’ve done all of this without steroids. I’m still working through the process of being able to look at myself and see me as I am, but I do feel more confident and relaxed in the presence of the Swinging Richards gods. Which brings me back around to why I wrote this long entry: I have some good news to share with you tomorrow.

Perhaps this isn’t the case where you live? But I’m working throughout Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. I can speak only from my own experience…

I know several gorgeous dancers of color. Some are Latino, one is Asian, and the remaining are African American. Most of the Latinos do very well, and so does the Asian. I frequently hear complaints from those who are Black, or some mix thereof. I cannot speak for them or from their perspective, but what I can do is voice frustration for them. (If you are a Black dancer, or if you know one, please consider writing a blog entry for the site on this subject.)

Before I continue, let me say this: If you are one of my beautiful Black brothers in the art, you should consider very carefully the venues you choose. I know career dancers who are Black, and who do very well; however, until we as a culture mature enough to see beauty as it is, you are likely to run into a passive form of racism at predominantly White clubs (”I’m not racist. I’m just not attracted to Black guys.” Ergo, I won’t tip them.). It’s impossible to force people to budge on preference, so you’ll need a strategy in mind for placing yourself amongst people who will appreciate you. As a person of color I’m sure it is frustrating to be fetishized, but as a dancer/business man you have to perform where you can make the most money.

I’m trying to make an ugly truth known to a wider base of patrons. I go into this entry knowing that it is a minefield, especially since I’m from the South. But I am not trying to discourage anyone, and I am not trying to offend anyone (likely, that will happen whether I try or not). What I do want to do is bring attention to the fact that most Black dancers work hard. The sad truth is that it’s because they have to. I’ve seen it first hand far too much - the White dancers who just stand there like (poorly rendered and often arrogant) sculptures and get money literally thrown at them, while the Black dancers putting on a fucking show come off with a tiny fraction of the same… It’s not right.

I am not going to tell people whom they should fantasize about, nor am I going to lecture people about racism. Both tirades would be ridiculous at best. What I can do is remind patrons that everyone has bills to pay, and that everyone is hurt by rejection/invisibility/marginalization. Yes, you as a patron are there to exercise your right to dawdle over the dancers you like. But please consider the entertainment value of what you are seeing. Regardless of which dancers make you hot, are there any that simply command respect just because their skills are amazing? Would it kill you to tip a brotha for being off the chain?

One of the frustrations in this career is that what you make isn’t necessarily connected to how much you work out, whether or not you’re nice, and being a good performer. You are at the mercy of Whim. Whim is the god of moodswings. We aren’t rewarded or compensated on a regular, consistent basis for anything other than the benefiscence of Whim. Speaking as someone who has had bad nights and knows how frustrating they can be, please consider interacting not just with the dancers who make you think “Mmmm!,” but also with those who make you think “Ahhh!”

(Edit: The link to the pics below will show you some amazing female pole artists, but here’s a video as well of an amazing male pole artist. Courtesy of Jennifer - thanks for the link!)

There are a wide variety of pole tricks you can do, depending on the strength of your arms and legs, and the diameter of the pole. A female pole is generally about 1.5-2 inches in diameter, and a male pole is usually more like 3-4 inches. Both have their advantages and challenges: I have small hands, which means on a male pole I can’t do most upper body tricks that require a hand grip, but the thicker pole is more stable and can support more than one person at a time (for more complicated shapes/tricks involving more than one dancer). I can do more upper body work on a female pole, but i often wonder whether i’m going to damage the pole (and several of the lower body shapes feel precarious, but perhaps that’s because I’m accustomed to having a thicker pole between my thighs?).

Why does this entry suddenly feel far more salacious than I’d originally intended?

Anyway, a female patron (a matron?) asked me last night how I perform the trick you see in the picture here (click to enlarge). First, it’s harder on the tree, because it was even thicker than a male pole, but it’s also rough and uneven. Suffice it to say I wouldn’t have done this picture with a pine tree - OW! I don’t know whether there are proper names for the shapes I do, so when I talk about pole tricks, I’ll just call them what they are. This is a crossed ankle pike with no hands.

First make sure the pole isn’t slippery. Ideally you should wipe the pole down with isopropyl alcohol, which will sterilize the surface and then evaporate quickly without leaving behind a residue. Stripping the oils off the pole will enhance your grip by increasing the friction between the metal and your skin. This is great for shapes that require holding or squeezing, but you’ll need to be careful if you intend to do any sliding or spinning, because the friction could give you an abrasion. NOTE: If you get an open sore on your skin at the club I strongly suggest using a sterilizing hand gel immediately, so as to avoid MRSA infections (I had one in April 2007, and I almost lost my right leg at the knee).

Alright, so first you have to mount the pole. Ahem.

This is easiest by putting your arms around the pole and interlacing your fingers. Stand a tad less than arm’s length from the pole, so your palms touch the pole while still being able to slightly bend your elbows. Be sure you weave your fingers together so that the base of the fingers on one hand are touching the base of the fingers on the other hand. You should be able to press the pads of your fingers firmly on the backs of your hands - this is how you control the strength of your grip. This will also create a bowl between your palms that you can meld around the pole. Place your palms on the pole at about the level of your forehead or higher (having your hands above your weight will create the friction you will need when your feet leave the ground).

Pull through your palms as you clamp your fingers down. Simultaneously bend your elbows. If you coordinate this properly you will be pulled forward and up towards your hands. The moment your feet leave the floor you should bring your legs up, one on each side of the pole. Your forearms will probably touch the pole - use them to brace and control your weight. Once your legs are parallel to the floor cross your ankles and squeeze them together as firmly as you can. You will feel pressure in your feet as you attempt pull them away from each other. The more you can pull your feet into each other, the tighter the grip in your thighs will be.

There is a little trick you need to know: Lift your thighs a tad higher than you think is level to the floor. Your skin will grip the pole (provided you’re not one of those annoying oily strippers I’ve blogged about), and you will settle an inch or so. This quick settling process will pull the skin up against the pole and lock you into place. This locking is actually more important than the gripping in your ankles and thighs.

Once your skin has gripped the pole and your ankles are locked, squeeze your inner thighs and let go with your hands. Be sure you are sitting up straight through your torso, so that you make an “L” on the pole. This “L” is what is called a pike. Between the tension in your ankles, thighs, and skin you should be able to appear to levitate on the pole.

Now to dismount the pole… AHEM!

Grip your fingers together again, so that you cup the pole in your palms. Pull yourself up slightly to unlock your skin. Once your hands are supporting you, uncross your ankles, lower your feet, and lower yourself down with control.

You will need to develop a good amount of strength in your biceps/triceps brachii, anterior/medial/posterior heads of the deltoids, pectoralis majors, latissimus dorsi, and the adductors of the thighs. I suggest a variety of pushups and pullups. Once you can do 5-8 sets of 20-30 pushups and 5-8 sets of 12-20 pullups you should have the upper body strength necessary to control the mounting and dismounting of this shape safely. You should be able, on a cable machine, to do the adductor exercise with at least 50-75% of your body weight in each leg. Your goal is 3-5 sets of 8-10 reps. P90X is an amazing home workout regimen that I have done at least 2 or 3 times now.

Note: This trick becomes even more impressive if you have the strength to uncross your ankles. I like playing with individuals watching. I make eye contact, they show that they’re impressed, I give them a coy eyebrow, and then uncross my ankles. It often takes them a second or two to digest why this subtle difference is so impressive, but when people understand it’s like watching a lightbulb turn on.