Daria’s journey back to pole dancing after a devastating shoulder tear

When Daria Svalova, 32, first walked into a pole dance studio six years ago, she wasn’t looking for a life-changing passion. She just wanted a hobby to break up the monotony of lockdown. What she found was something deeper: strength, confidence, artistry — and a passion for pole dancing she didn’t know would become a real love.

“I identify as a pole dancer,” she says now. “It has nothing to do with my day-to-day profession, but it’s part of who I am.”

Daria, an entrepreneur who has set up her own self-portrait photography studio, you self-portrait studio, first began pole dancing in Russia, before moving to London in October 2020 where she continued classes at Aerialactive and The Ealing Pole Studio.

But in December 2023, everything she’d built came crashing down — quite literally — during a single move that pushed her body beyond its limit. The date is burned into her memory: December 7.

She explains, “During that training session, I just over-trained. I am a naturally cautious person, and I know that pole dancing can be dangerous – you are doing upside moves. I was doing the ‘Ayesha’ move — an advanced inverted hold where the body is extended horizontally away from the pole, supported mostly by arm strength.

Think of it like a pole-based handstand split out sideways. I did this move a dozen times that week, but the last one was one too many — I felt an acute pain in my lower shoulder and carefully returned to the floor. I didn’t think I’d torn anything — I’d been so careful — a couple of weeks and I’d be fine. I even wrote to the owner of Aerialactive asking her to freeze my class pack until January; surely, I’d be alright by then.”

Daria says, “I want to stress that the instructor, Alex, is brilliant, and she couldn’t have prevented my injury.”

At first, it was dismissed as a common rotator cuff injury. But something didn’t add up. “I got better, but I still couldn’t perform some simple tasks, like throwing a blanket — let alone going to a pole dance class.” she says. Month after month, her shoulder refused to heal.

Months of rest and specific physiotherapy and exercises didn’t solve the issue. By the summer of 2024, a year later, the answer was clear: exercises alone couldn’t heal it. A scan revealed the truth – it wasn’t inflammation but a tear in her supraspinatus tendon and she needed surgery.

Surgeon, Professor Kochhar explains “Most young people with small tears recover well with good physio, but perhaps because this was what we call traumatic, i.e. Daria suffered an acute injury with the “pop” (when she probably ripped the tendon), this was less likely to heal.”

“I created three small holes in her shoulder to access the tendon, I identified the small tear and used small instruments to stimulate the torn tendon to heal, while preserving the rest of the rotator cuff. The tendon then started the healing process, while post-operative physiotherapy guided her to a full recovery”.

Daria explains, “The first month was very painful and I stopped taking painkillers after three days of the surgery in January 2025, but the most uncomfortable part was that I had to sleep on my back for quite a while. And even now, there is barely any pain, but I can still feel it in certain positions.”

But rehabilitation wasn’t just physical. It was emotional. Her first session back on the pole after two years was far from the triumphant return she’d imagined.

“I lost everything I’d worked so hard for,” she says. “My strength. My tolerance for dizziness. My confidence has all gone and I’m having to start over and build up again.

I knew I wanted to be alone, and I knew it would be quite emotional, and it was. I cried heavily. Before the injury I was fearless — now I don’t feel secure. I still have the skill but not the strength.”

Daria, who moved a couple of months ago to East London, is now trying other studios out but says, “I don’t have my ‘home’ studio yet.”

Throughout her recovery, Daria relied heavily on her London Clinic physiotherapist, Rochelle Francois, to help build up her strength and help her see what she could and couldn’t do and to remind her of her progress.

Daria explains, “I hated physio. HATED IT. I had to do these tiny, exercises for an hour every day for months. I felt anxious doing them because I knew with my typical “forget about fear, pain and tiredness — do it again, and then 10 times more” attitude, I could’ve easily injured myself again. I had to learn how to listen to my body — something I’d never done before.”
Rochelle kept me sane.

Daria says, “A couple of times, I was crying while doing them. Rochelle was brilliant. I felt safe with her; she was very supportive. She didn’t know much about pole dancing, but she really tried to understand it to prepare my body properly. Now I can say that she did it very successfully.”

She would remind me of my progress. She kept telling me, “You are not weak. You are strong!”.  For Daria, those words matter.

Rochelle says, “It was important to find out her personal goals and how she felt emotionally when she used to exercise on the pole, to truly understand her and therefore encourage her in the right way.”

Rochelle added, “Daria was a pleasure to treat. She listened meticulously to all the advice that I gave her during her rehabilitation. She returned to each physio session having progressed with objective shoulder strength and grip strength testing, due to her consistency and passion to carry out her exercise programme on a regular basis.

As her shoulder recovered, she was willing to push herself to try more complex exercises, movements and positions that initially she was fearful to do.”

Happy to be back doing her pole fitness, Daria says “I never imagined a triumphant return. I feared that I’d lost all my strength. Actually, my strength ended up way better than I’d expected after I have built back my strength, piece by piece, muscle by tiny muscle.”

Watch Daria’s progress returning to pole fitness here.

Find out more about Therapies at The London Clinic.