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Michaela Jones, pole fitness instructor and manager of The P Spot Fitness Studio, joined Roland Martin on NewsOne Now for this week’s installment of Fit!Live!Win! to explain how pole dancing can not only be fun, but help you stay fit.

Jones, who has been “on the pole” for 10 years, explained the idea behind this unique workout.

“If you can find an enjoyable, beneficial approach to fitness, then the person is going to do it for a long term,” she said.

“You can run on a treadmill, you can take a walk, you can work out with dumbbells and barbells, but that stuff is painstaking on the mind. When it’s cold outside and you’re tired, you’re not going to get up and get motivated to go lift a dumbbell or a barbell.”

“However, every girl wants to swing on the pole,” she said jokingly.

According to Jones, a Georgetown graduate, participants in her 45-minute pole fitness class burn between 400 – 600 calories per class. She also touted the challenging nature of the exercise/dance routine saying, “The fitness of it is being able to maintain your own body weight on this vertical structure.”

“I even have personal trainers that come in that are used to doing traditional push-ups and pull-ups, but they cannot mount the pole — why? It’s a total different requirement of muscles,” she said.

Jones, who opened one of the first pole dancing studios in Washington D.C., credits the surge in popularity and increase in social acceptability in pole dancing to media mogul Oprah Winfrey. After Oprah had a guest on her show to “put the stamp on it,” Jones said, “it made it OK.”

Watch Roland Martin and pole fitness instructor Michaela Jones discuss how pole dancing can help you get fit and stay fit in the video clip above.

Be sure to watch “NewsOne Now” with Roland Martin, weekdays at 9 a.m. EST on TV One.

Subscribe to the “NewsOne Now” Audio Podcast on iTunes.

Fit!Live!Win! The Benefits Of Pole Fitness Explained  was originally published on newsone.com