It’s a little girl’s fault. She was in the park with a sparkling green hula hoop spinning round and round and it looked, well a bit ridiculous and lots of fun. I had heard that hooping was a good form of exercise. My latest stats search has it at 400-600 calories burned an hour, but that assumes you can keep it going for that long, which is a difficult assumption to make fact.
Still, when a free intro to hooping class was offered I thought I’d try it out, not for the fitness aspect, as I’m still on hiatus, but for the fun aspect. I signed up to satisfy that pure desire of “I want to do that.” So I did that. Or I tried to do that at least.
The hoops are bigger and heavier than the plastic ones for kids, although they can come in any color and sparkle if that’s what you want. And yes, I wanted. The weighted hoops are actually easier to keep up than the plastic ones for children. Of course, talent and endurance is needed as well. But unlike lifting weights where your ability is slowly increased with time, hooping just hits you, and suddenly you’ve got it. Like dancing, you do the moves over and over again until your body feels the rhythm and suddenly you’re flowing instead of jerking. With hooping, the rhythm in your body keeps the hoop where you want it. Of course, once you have hooping in one direction on your waist down you can move on to the other direction, then turning and walking, sidestepping, waist hooping, thigh hooping and off the body hooping. Like dancing, there is no end to moves you can make, no end to letting the rhythm take hold of you.
While the exercise level is great, judging by how sore my muscles were the next day - I think it can be a full body workout once you get some different moves down - it’s the connection with your body that may be the best benefit. You can’t think your way through hooping; it'll come crashing down. Instead, you have to let instinct take over so you can dip your hip suddenly and speed up the pace to not drop the hoop. You can’t analyze, you have to feel your way through. As a writer I spend a lot of my time in my head, and when I’m in pain I am always searching for ways to ignore my body, ways to take my mind off of it by being absorbed by something else. But to really heal, you need to be in your body in order to listen to it. It’s the connection with your body that will let you know how you are really doing and clue you in to what is wrong.
The one caveat I have, is that the hoops are heavy and until you get the moves down a lot of bruising can occur; it falls on your feet, it smacks against your calves or in my case, I wasn’t keeping the hoop even and I bruised my hip where the bone sticks out a bit. A sore hip, though, helps to keep me from favoring that side and keeps the hoop in balance. After a day or two, the bruising started to fade and as I develop more skill the bruising occurs less.
After the intro class, I signed up for more. During the second class, while I was trying to turn in the opposite direction from which the hoop was spinning, I felt a slight ache that let me know that the muscle was breaking down in order to build itself stronger the way muscles do. Hooping may bruise and ache at first but it’s part of the process of getting better - which can be said for life, really, and especially for getting healthier.
The main thing is that while hooping is a good fitness routine and a great way to reconnect with your body, the most important thing is, it’s fun. And as any kid will tell you, that’s what matters most.
No comments:
Post a Comment