The story behind Tigra GST
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Tigra GST was opened February 2017 by Laetitia Tigra.
She started off with ballet at a young age at the 'Royale Ballet School Jose Nicola', but soon after also started training and competing in athletics.
At the age of 11 she was dancing front row and was selected to travel to Japan to perform, but the director had asked her to quit athletics, as it was hindering her flexibility progress.
She had to make a choice and chose athletics.
In the first year after she broke record after record, became the youngest to train in the Flemish selection team for long jump and ended up in the Belgian top 10 all time in the 150m.
She made selection after selection for the Belgian championships and continued competing until she turned 18.
She started kickboxing after, but then got into modelling and was asked to stop training.
She won a model competition and worked as a model for 2 years, doing catwalk and editorial work and some videoclips and advertisements.
She first came across pole dancing in a strip club. It was the beginning days of pole and youtube provided only American stripper competitions to learn from, but it was love at first sight.
There was just something magic, sexy and thrilling about it.
She then studied Massage Therapy and graduated in 9 different types of massage of which Shiatsu and Sports massage.
She continued studying and gained a diploma in sports therapy in which she did an internship with football club PSV Eindhoven and with Sam Verslegers, osteopath of tennis player Kim Clijsters and ended up working full time as a massage therapist for a year.
The first pole dance studios started appearing and one youtube video made her pack her bags and fly to Australia to go and train at Bobbi's Pole Studio.
What was supposed to be 3 months, turned into 3 years.
She went back to ballet for those 3 years and she studied to be a personal trainer.
She competed in pole dance competitions and won 3rd and first place in Bobbi's Amateur night.
Many injuries followed though and there were periods of major set backs.
This is when a friend recommended a stretch seminar with Kit Laughlin. Stretch guru and the author of 'Overcome Neck and Back Pain' and 'Strechting & flexibility'.
Her reason for enrolling was to increase her flexibility for pole dancing, but it ended up fixing her injuries and gave insights that even sports therapy hadn't.
She ended up getting certified as 'Stretch Therapist' and 'Stretch Teacher'.
She attended a stretch seminar and 2 weeks of Stretch Therapy classes at the Australian University of Canberra.
She worked for a year as a Stretch Therapist in Sydney, before moving to London.
In the second year in Sydney she was invited by Kit Laughlin to attend a seminar by US Junior Gymnastics Coach Christopher Sommer in Canberra. He was the author of 'Building the Gymnastic Body' at the time.
It was the most challenging 3 days ever, as the GymnasticBodies online courses were only in the making and the weekend consisted of going over every single exercise of all the foundations at that point.
The detail and the knowledge behind the progressions, was something she had never come across before.
She went on to attend 4 more GymnasticBodies seminars in the years after. (London (UK), Stroud (UK), Stroud (UK), Rhode Island (US)) She also attended 2 weeks of classes at the GymnasticBodies master affiliate 'Awaken GymnasticBodies' in Denver (US).
After moving to London she started teaching Gymnastics Strength Training and stretch classes at 'Crossfit London' and she covered Gymnastic Conditioning, Mad Skills and Contortion classes at Gymbox.
She also started teaching pole dancing at 'Pole People'.
But she wanted to do things differently and none of these places gave her the freedom to teach exactly how she wanted to.
Her heart was in GymnasticBodies and classic style pole dance.
So she stopped all other jobs and started renting a small dance studio at Limehouse to start teaching pole for herself.
And then after 3 possible spaces not happening in the end, she found the current space and started Tigra GST.
A place where all her previous experiences came together is a new way of training in London.
