Bend It Like Kate

Despite Kate’s worries, she had a smooth recovery postpartum, which she believes is as a result of continuing to train during her pregnancy. “I did (and still do) Pilates almost every day which gives me the foundation I need to be able to pole dance, teach and even lift my body upside down,” she explains, adding that this is not reflective of anyone else’s pregnancy or even her future ones. “I could have another pregnancy and have a completely different recovery or birth. You never know how lucky you’re going to be.”

While, at first glance, Kate’s story sounds rosy, pregnant professional athletes are often treated poorly and she isn’t exempt. In December last year, the Canadian newspaper the National Post reported on the resentment Olympic athletes felt in learning that pregnancy is often categorised as an ‘injury’ in their contracts. In a New York Times article in mid-2019, several US runners took part in a video where they accused one of the world’s biggest sporting brands of discriminating against female athletes. In the video, six-time national champion Alysia Montaño said that, when she told Nike that she was pregnant, representatives said they would stop paying her and pause her sponsorship contract.

Even outside of pregnancy, like any sport, pole fitness requires an athlete’s body to stay in top form. Kate had an injury in 2017 that made her job more challenging. “I’ve got a family history of shoulder problems,” she says. She had a full rotator cuff repair, a surgery used to mend a tear in one of the tendons that links your upper arm bone to particular muscles. “I carried on working because when you’re self-employed, you just do what you’ve got to do,” she says. She also found the injury painful even after surgery. “I travelled with an assistant who would demonstrate and teach my classes for me. I didn’t perform until I was three months post-op and I was mainly dancing, not doing tricks because shoulder surgery has a really slow recovery time.”

The clothing line specifically came out of necessity as pole dancers often have trouble finding appropriate sportswear for their specific needs. “I used to buy things on eBay. There weren’t really pole brands or pole shorts when I started so we’d just wear big pants,” she says, laughing before going on to explain that the best designers of fitness gear are often involved in the sport they’re making it for. “I’d worn so many different pieces for pole, so I had some ideas of how I could make functional clothing,” she says. Her main goal was creating items that would keep pole dancers uninjured, warm and comfortable throughout performances. “We grip the metal equipment using our skin so we have to have different points of contact to be safe while performing moves, for example.”