Pole vs aerial: what US studios actually teach

The building you think of as a pole studio usually is not only a pole studio. Of the 1,139 US venues in our directory as of 24 September 2026, 778 teach pole and 361 do not. Among the 778 that do, 625 teach at least one other discipline and only 153 teach pole and nothing else.

What they add is not necessarily aerial. The most common companions are lyra, flexibility, twerk and dance, and chair and exotic work, in that order.

That is worth knowing before you book. "Aerial studio" and "pole studio" are marketing labels, not descriptions of a schedule, and the schedule is the thing you actually want.

Quick answers

Do all pole studios teach aerial too? No, and it is closer to half than most people expect. Of the 778 US listings that teach pole, 388 also list at least one aerial discipline and 390 list none.

What is the most commonly taught discipline? Pole, on 798 listings across our whole directory. Lyra or hoop is second at 489, silks third at 472.

Are there studios that teach aerial and no pole? Yes, 361 of our 1,139 US venues. Silks is the most common thing they teach, on 239 of them.

Why do your discipline counts add up to more than your studio count? Because a studio teaching pole and silks is counted once in each. The counts are rows per discipline, not a division of studios into groups.

What is the rarest discipline in the directory? Aerial yoga, listed by 69 studios, well behind trapeze at 181.

What gets taught, by the numbers

These are counts of listings per discipline across the whole directory, which is 1,168 rows including 29 in Vietnam.

Discipline	Listings
Pole	798
Lyra / hoop	489
Silks	472
Hammock / sling	382
Flexibility	363
Dance / twerk	282
Other aerial	262
Chair / exotic	256
Trapeze	181
Aerial yoga	69

These figures sum to far more than 1,168, and that is by design. A studio teaching pole, silks and flexibility is counted in all three rows. There is no way to read a market share out of this table, and any sentence that treats these as slices of a pie is wrong. What the table shows is how often each discipline appears on a schedule.

The thing that surprised us

Nearly a third of the venues in a directory that began as a pole directory do not teach pole.

That is not an accident of data entry. Until 8 August 2026 we listed pole venues only, and an aerial-only studio was recorded as a rejection. We widened the scope that day, deliberately, and the 361 aerial-only venues are the result. Silks shows up on 239 of them, lyra on 178, hammock or sling on 179, trapeze on 120.

The reason for the change was simple. People kept asking us where to take a silks class, and answering "we only do pole" was useless to them while also being slightly dishonest about what the buildings in our own listings were doing. Just under half of the venues that teach pole, 388 of 778, already teach at least one aerial discipline too. Drawing a line through the middle of those timetables served nobody.

Pole and aerial are not the same skill

Worth saying plainly, because the shared buildings make it easy to assume otherwise.

Pole is a vertical apparatus with a fixed grip surface, and most of the early learning is about skin contact and friction. What you wear, how warm the room is and how much lotion you did not put on that morning all matter, which is why pole classes ask for shorts.

Silks, hammock and lyra are suspended fabric and metal. Grip comes from wraps, hooks and hand strength rather than from skin friction, and the early problems are different: fabric burn, grip endurance, and a lot of upside-down orientation work. Aerial classes often want you covered rather than bare.

So a studio teaching both is running two quite different beginner curricula in the same room, usually with different instructors. That is normal and it is fine. It just means "I go to an aerial studio" tells you less than people think.

How to read a schedule before you book

Three things the directory cannot tell you that the studio's own timetable can.

Whether the discipline runs at beginner level. A venue can list trapeze truthfully because it runs one advanced trapeze class a month. Our listings record what a studio teaches, not what it teaches this week at a level you can join.

Whether the classes are on at a time you can attend. The most common practical failure for beginners is not choosing the wrong discipline, it is choosing a studio whose beginner slot is Tuesday at 11am.

Whether the intro offer covers the discipline you want. Plenty of intro deals are pole-only at venues that also teach aerial, which is worth checking before you buy one.

Every listing on the site links to the studio's own site and booking channel for exactly this reason. We tell you what exists. The studio tells you what is running.

Where these numbers come from

Every count here was counted from our own studio dataset on 19 September 2026, not estimated, and the same dataset feeds the directory and our statistics page, which always show the current numbers. If you are reading this later, those pages are the fresher count.

Discipline tags record what a studio's own site says it teaches. Where a studio's schedule and its marketing copy disagree, we record the schedule, and where we could not confirm either, the listing says so rather than guessing.