Shane Godliman Interview | Fear, Flips and Finding your own style | Episode #002

This is Episode #2 of the new Off The Pole Podcast, featuring flips master and fellow podcaster Mr Shane Godliman!

Shane travels around the UK teaching workshops and is known for his dynamic style on the pole and getting people who are scared of flips (like me) to give them a go!

Really hope you guys enjoy the 2nd episode in the podcast series – you can subscribe to our pole podcast on iTunes to keep updated with all the latest episodes and it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review!

Hit play above or read the transcript below. You can also check out the video version at the Off The Pole Youtube channel.

Sarah: Welcome, Shane. Thanks for coming on my podcast.

Shane: Thanks for having me.

Sarah: Just for the people who might not know who you are. Madness if they don’t know who you are…but maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, a bit about your background?

Shane: Yeah. Okay. I’m Shane, and I’m 26. I’ve been poling for about four years now, I think. I started, I guess, getting into pole was quite random for me. I was doing a lot of personal training. My background was I started off personal training. I got into calisthenics and was teaching a lot of handstands and gymnastic strength based stuff and this, that, and the other. I was doing a PT session with a girl who wanted to learn about handstands, and she said, “Oh. You should come down to pole, you should come to this place. You’ll love it. You’ll love the instructor.”, this and that, which was Trixters in Bradford. I went up there to an open session, and just had a little play and did a couple spins and that was it.

Sarah: And you were probably irritatingly good at it…

Shane: A little bit.

Sarah: Everyone was giving you evil eyes?

Shane: I think I caught a few evil eyes, but I’d already been doing … I was trying to learn a flag already so I kind of had a rubbish Iron-X kind of already down and stuff. But you know me, I stick to what I’m good at.

Sarah: Don’t we all!. Don’t we all…Okay. Cool. So how have you found it since then? Have you found that your tricks have changed? Have you found that your development has changed? Did you start going to class or did you teach yourself? Sort of a mix?

Shane: Yeah. When I started, it was more of like an open session vibe. I haven’t spent a lot of time in classes per se. I’ve done workshops, and I’ve done … you know, you go to jams and people help you out. Go to open sessions and there’s people kind of shadowing as it were. It’s kind of a mix of a lot of things in terms of how I’ve learned. I don’t know if my style has changed. I guess coming in I didn’t know what my style was. I think that’s what drew me to pole was it seemed like there was scope for me to kind of learn a lot more about, kind of who I was and the way I wanted to move and stuff. It just seemed a little bit more versatile. At the time, I was doing a lot more street workout stuff, and it got a bit stagnant for me. It seemed like everyone was doing the same thing the same way without really much care for how it went down, whereas, with pole, it was a lot different. Yeah, I think I’ve just been kind of exploring, to be honest, in terms of my style.

I was very inspired by the Russians and stuff when I started. Obviously coming in everyone was kind of like, watch Felix Cane and Sarah Scott. And was like, I can’t do any of that stuff. Sorry.

Sarah: You can do everything I can do! I post something and you’re just like, “Oh yeah, and I can do it with straight legs and straight arms. Add a flip on the end.”

I’m like,