Mid-Day Anniversary | Fly like Aarifa: Meet the woman who brought pole fitness to Mumbai
News | Published on August 3rd, 2026 by kash
The pole fitness teacher is prompting everyone to get on the pole, test your core, and bring sexy back
Once you have done a class with Aarifa Bhinderwala, somehow everything seems possible. It’s a pole fitness class that will change your perception of what’s possible. How is that? For me, a curvy 44-year-old, the classes came by when I was feeling as if I had lost that spark. You know, when you don’t connect with your body anymore, and somehow, well, you stop feeling beautiful.
And so, recently, after a few consistent classes, when I could actually lift myself up, climb a pole and float a bit above the ground, I finally felt one with my body again. That’s why Bhinderwala’s Pole Burnt classes are the most popular pole fitness classes in town. Bhinderwala came across pole while she was visiting her sister in Australia.
“I went for a class out of curiosity and wanting to explore something new in a new city. I fell in love with the feeling of defying gravity and the sense of stillness that spinning on the pole gave me. I wanted to take this back home and wanted people in my country to experience this. And thus I pioneered pole fitness in India and worked on the challenges that come with introducing something completely new and creating a new field that didn’t exist before. I’ve never been into sports or dance and didn’t have a degree in business. All the strength I’ve built has been on the pole and grew it into a business by learning on the field,” she tells us.
What I also love about the classes, which have become a non-negotiable now for me every week, is that it’s graced with all types of bodies. If you think you have to look like a model and be at peak fitness to do the pole, you are wrong. You need to be consistent and enthusiastic. The class is filled with the tall, short, curvy, athletic, skinny – and everyone supports the other. I have seen and heard the class fill with claps every time a fellow pole lover accomplishes a move.
