Pole dancing can be traced back more than two thousand years, to sports that were originally only participated in by men, including: Mallakhamb, an Indian sport, which utilizes the same principles of endurance and strength as pole, but uses a wooden pole which has a large wooden ball at the top. Chinese pole also has a male dominated history, using two poles, on which men would perform “gravity defying tricks” as they would leap from pole to pole, at approximately twenty feet in the air. In the 1920’s, traveling circuses and side shows would utilize pole dancing with a pole in the middle of a tent which was combined with burlesque dance aspects, but did not move into erotic or strip tease territory until the 1980’s^. In the 1990’s, Fawnia Mondey Dietrich began teaching pole dance as an art and fitness. In the last twenty years, pole dancing classes have emerged as a popular form of recreational fitness as well as a competitive sport. Pole dance is a form of performance art that is a combination of dance and gymnastics. It involves dancing and performing acrobatic tricks with a vertical pole and is an increasingly popular form of fitness and dance, currently practiced in both gym and dance studio environments. A wide range of amateur and professional competitions are held all over the world. Pole artists continue to try and change the general public's  perception of pole dance and to promote it as a non-sexual form of dance and acrobatics, as well as a form of fitness. Pole dance requires  ​