Pole With Pride

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Pole With Pride is a fun, sociable, beginner-friendly pole fitness activity run through MMU LGBTQ+ Society

Never touched a pole before? Excellent. Can’t climb one? Even better. Think you’re not strong enough, flexible enough, coordinated enough, or generally built for this sort of thing? Good news: that is exactly why you come to class.

Nobody walks through the door already knowing what they’re doing. Strength is built. Confidence is built. Coordination improves. And somewhere along the way, you may discover you can do something that previously looked completely ridiculous and impossible.

Pole With Pride is about learning a new skill, getting stronger, expressing yourself, meeting people and — critically — actually doing something rather than sitting around wondering whether you should have tried.

You work at your own pace, celebrate your own progress and occasionally stare at the pole as though it has personally betrayed you.

 

So come along. Try something different. Have a laugh.

Worst case? You tried pole fit. Best case? You find out you’re annoyingly good at it.

 

Now, here’s the deal. Pole With Pride is an inclusive class run for MMU LGBTQ+ Society members — they get first dibs, because that’s how membership works.

We do keep a small number of spaces open to non-members, because nobody likes a closed door when there’s room on the other side of it.

Members pay the lower member ticket price. Non-members pay a little more. Simple, fair, nobody needs a flowchart.

Spaces are deliberately limited, though, so if you want in? Don’t spend three days thinking about it and then act personally betrayed when somebody else books the pole first. 

 

You come to pole. Charity wins too.

And now for the best bit, the part you might really like. 

Every ticket does a little more than get you into class.

Member ticket: £1.00 from the ticket price is set aside for a charitable cause.
Non-member ticket: £1.50 from the ticket price is set aside for a charitable cause.

But we’re not finished.

For every single ticket purchased, your instructor personally pledges an additional £1.00 donation.

So every member booking generates £2.00 for charity, and every non-member booking generates £2.50.

You get a pole fitness class. You get stronger. You hopefully have a ridiculous amount of fun. And somebody else benefits because you turned up.

Now that is a pretty good deal.

 

The Instructor

Meet your instructor: Ben, the MMU LGBTQ+ Society's Treasurer and Wellbeing & Inclusion Officer for MMU LGBTQ+ Society. Ben is an XPERT Level 1 & 2 qualified and insured pole instructor, and has been involved in pole for more than 13 years. Pole has given Ben an enormous amount in that time: Challenge, strength, confidence, and self-expression. Pole With Pride is the opportunity to keep sharing that passion and bring something unique into the LGBTQ+ Society.

And the idea behind Pole With Pride is pretty damn simple: Give people something to actually do together. Come in. Learn something. Get moving. Build strength. Build confidence. Meet people. Express yourself. Think you’re not strong enough? Good. We found something to build. Not flexible enough? Fine. We work on it. No coordination? Oh, fantastic. Now we’ve got a project.

You are not supposed to arrive already good at pole. That would make having an instructor a pretty stupid business model. Ben also wants this to be something that gives the Society a bit of its own identity. Because there are plenty of university LGBTQ+ societies doing the usual socials and activities and can begin to resemble one another rather quickly. There is nothing wrong with any of that, of course, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But it’s pretty damn cool to be able to say: “Yeah, ours does pole.”

Pole With Pride is for the people taking part, so the sessions should be at times that actually work for them. Ben obviously still has to be available — turns out instructors stubbornly refuse to teach while physically absent — but the class isn’t being built around somebody’s personal calendar and everybody else told to deal with it.

So show up. Give it a shot. Learn something. Have a laugh. Ben will keep sharing the thing he loves, the Society gets something genuinely distinctive, and maybe you discover something you never expected to enjoy. If people want it, it grows. Everybody wins. 

 

Questions?

Cool. Apparently the website hit 10,000 characters and decided that was enough human interaction for one day.

So if you want to know something about Pole With Pride — class structure, what to wear, whether you need experience, spotting, consent, tickets, accessibility, whatever — email Ben.

Member, non-member, beginner, returning pole person, nervous wreck — doesn’t matter.

Don’t guess. Don’t panic. 

Ask the guy teaching it. Problem solved.

 

THE WEBSITE MAY HAVE RUN OUT OF CHARACTERS. BEN HAS NOT.