“I’m addicted,” said student Melissa DeVito, who has been taking classes from Aboul-hosn for the past two months. “It’s given me more confidence, I’ve lost five pounds, and I’ve got more upper-body strength.”
The class is more about fitness than sex, Aboul-hosn said. High heels help tone the leg muscles. Spinning on the pole improves upper body strength.
Pole dancing has come out of the gentlemen’s clubs and twirled its way into gyms nationwide as a new type of workout.
As many as seven gyms in Costa Mesa alone offer pole dancing classes, said Keith Scheinberg, chief executive of Platinum Stages, a Newport Beach-based company that supplies portable dance poles to nightclubs and homemakers who want to get in shape.
A NEW MARKET FOR A LOCAL BUSINESS
A small, nondescript office space in Newport Beach is home to what claims to be the world’s largest maker of dance poles.
Scheinberg, 31, founded Platinum Stages about seven years ago after drawing a sketch of a portable stage with a built-in pole that didn’t have to be mounted to the ceiling.
He soon had his college buddies convinced to invest in the plan. The company now fills orders for poles from all over the world and has a second warehouse in Europe.
The company cleared $3 million in revenue last year and accommodates the pole needs of about 80% of fitness instructors in Southern California.
“I originally thought it would be something for fraternity houses,” Scheinberg said. “Now it’s more about fitness. It’s becoming more mainstream.”
Scheinberg’s poles have since made appearances on “Oprah” and “The Sopranos.”
“We got into it way before the trend started, and now all of our products fall under a different trend, Pilates and people who exercise,” he said.
