Cincinnati's Original · Est. 20 Years Ago

She Failed Gym Class.
Then She Built This.

The story behind PoleKittens Fitness.

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V wasn't built for fitness. Her sister was the athlete. V was a nerdy art kid. She failed PE.

In her thirties, the weight caught up with her. Two hundred pounds on a five-foot-three frame. That's when someone asked if she was pregnant — the third time. She decided to do something about it.

She started walking. She studied nutrition. And in an online support group with women around the world, someone mentioned pole dancing classes. It sounded incredible. There was just one problem: pole dancing didn't exist in Ohio yet.

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YouTube hadn't been invented yet. No tutorials, no pole videos, no one to ask. So V bought the only two instructional DVDs she could find, taught herself, and dragged her husband to strip clubs to learn from the dancers who actually knew. She paid for their time, tipped well, and asked real questions about technique. They were artists, and she treated them like it. After a while, dancers started asking her for advice on tricks.

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She lost eighty pounds. Kept it off for twenty years. She knew it would work for other people. So she put two poles in the empty space above her husband's business and started teaching friends. It grew. She built her own program — combining what she learned from dancers and circus people with her own philosophy about how pole should be taught. Two poles became nine. The studio moved to Vine Street. Nearly twenty years later, it's still here.

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V's philosophy is simple: pole came from strip clubs
and it's meant to be sexy.
It's meant to be done in ridiculous shoes.

And it's been working — on real women, in this studio, for nearly twenty years.

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PoleKittens is the place V wished had existed when she started.

Now it's here for you.

Want the full story?

Head to the V Spot

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