by Michelle Rankin

Hula Hoop is a registered trademark of Wham-O, Inc. so for the purposes of this article, we’ll simply use the words hoop and hooping, which I feel fairly confident that no one owns.

As usual, I’m not an expert; just the girl that volunteered to write the article and my qualification this time is that I absolutely love my hooping hobby. I use it as a quick break when I’ve been in my head working on a project too long, hooping helps return me to my body and grounds me, and I use it as a hip loosening fertility exercise. As a Mayan Abdominal Massage Therapist, I incorporate hooping as a warm up to loosen hips and lower backs as well as the hearts and minds of my clients.

In fact, I was introduced to grown up hooping at my Mayan Abdominal Massage training. A beautiful girl named Chaya brought two hoops and reunited many of us with our childhood hooping hobby. I was such a hooper as a child that my mom kept my pink peppermint smelling hoop all these years for memory sake. The thing that concerns me is that it still smells like peppermint after some 30 years but that aside, I’m glad she kept it. On numerous occasions I’ve picked up my old hoop and given it a whirl only to find figured that my adult curves excluded me from my childhood passion so you can imagine my excitement when I saw adult sized hoops swinging round the wastes of curvy adult women just like me. We all hooped late into the night every night of our training and I left determined to make my own hoop. The moral of the story is that adults can’t hoop with kids sized hoops. After a quick Google search and the help of my engineering husband, we’ve been hooping all summer long.

In this article, we’ll explore a little about the history of hooping, and then I’ll share a simple recipe for creating your own hoop. My friend Chaya gave me a piece of advice that I’ll pass along because it made me laugh for hours until I caught back up with her for an explanation. She said, “There’s one thing I’ve learned about making hoops, and that is you can’t make a Hula Hoop and toast at the same time”. Even though that really won’t matter much to this raw food-eating group, you’ve been warned. The reason, it turns out, is that you use a hair dryer to heat up the plastic for the hoop and I guess hair dryers and toasters running on the same circuit probably would blow your breaker. If you’ve eschewed your hair dryer for the au naturale raw food look, don’t despair; I think you can also use hot water; probably even while making toast.

History

Hoops used for exercise and fun go way back to ancient Greeks and likely even predate written records. You can find quite a bit of history on Wikipedia and also HERE where I’ve taken the following excerpt from modern history:

The toy known as the Hula Hoop was born out of the brainstorm of two American toy inventors who learned about an Australian practice. Arthur “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr heard that Australian children used rings made of bamboo for exercise. They produced a plastic hoop in 1958 and promoted it around the Los Angeles, California, area by going to playgrounds, demonstrating the hoop to the kids, and giving away Hula Hoops. Their playground-to-playground salesmanship produced the biggest toy fad the United States has ever witnessed. In four months, over 25 million Hula Hoops were sold in the United States for $1.98 each; worldwide, over 100 million were sold in 1958 alone. In Japan, the hoop was banned, and the Soviet Union described it as evidence of the decadence of American culture. At the peak of its popularity, Wham-O, Inc. produced 20,000 hoops per day; it is estimated that the plastic tubing for all the Hula Hoops sold would stretch around the world more than five times.

Hopefully all American families have theirs hanging on their garage wall like mine, instead of in the landfill. I did read that there is very little waste and that damaged hoops are recycled at the factory. I suppose it isn’t cost effective to have a wasteful manufacturing process anyway.

A quick spin around our local Fred Meyer department store today proved both that ingenious marketing can keep the simplest of toys on the market for 50 years and that the simplest of toys can provide enough fun to remain on the market for 50 years. There are some other entertaining marketing efforts by Wham-O that you can investigate yourself if you’re interested in that sort of thing. In the meanwhile, this article is meandering to some really cool facts. Thanks Wikipedia for telling me that the following impressive world records exist:

• For duration, the current record is held by Roxann Rose of the USA, who went 90 hours between 2 April and 6 April 1987.

• The record for the most hoops twirled simultaneously is 105, set by Jin Linlin, on October 28, 2007.

• The largest hoop successfully twirled was 13.88 meters (45.55 ft) in circumference, by Ashrita Furman of the USA (September, 2005).
• The record for simultaneous hula-hooping for 2 minutes is for 2,290 participants at Chung Cheng Stadium in Kaohsiung (Taiwan) on 28 October 2000.
• In 2000, Roman Schedler spun a 53-pound tractor tire for 71 seconds at the 5th Saxonia Record Festival in Bregenz, Austria.
• In April 2008, Team Hooprama hula hooped the Music City Half-Marathon (13.1 miles) to raise awareness for Hooping for Hope.

If you actually read those bullet points, instead of glossing over them like I would have done and you’re now curious what Hooping for Hope is, I looked it up and learned from their website: Hooping for Hope™ provides Hooprama hoop fitness programs in Nashville, Tennessee to breast cancer survivors free of charge. Hooping for Hope™ enhances the lives of breast cancer survivors by offering no-cost hoop fitness classes and hoops to promote and support healing and to encourage hope and laughter while reclaiming the body, mind and spirit.

Waayyyyy Cool and if those people can perform those impressive feats, surely you can spin one lightweight hoop in your backyard for a little exercise. We’ll get to the how to section in just a minute. First lets look at why you might want to build yourself a hoop.

• First, it is really fun. Hooping for Hope summed that up pretty well in their mission statement above. Check out this video if you want a little inspiration on how cool you can look hooping at the next raw food festival. &feature=player_embedded
• You can set your hoop on fire and add it to your Poi routine.
• You’ll burn about 200 calories in just a half hour. If it worked for the ancient Greeks, it ought to work for us.
• Hooping increases blood flow to your whole body. I’ve found that regular hooping increases energy and wards off my afternoon munchies.
• Hooping burns calories and fat right off your midriff.

Need I say more?

How to Build Your Hoop

You’ll need to make a trip to your local home supply store.

The supply list includes:

• 1” diameter 100 PSI or ¾” diameter 160 PSI underground sprinkler tubing. It comes in long rolls for about $17USD and is plainly labeled by diameter and PSI strength. PSI stands for pounds per square inch and I’m sorry, I didn’t easily find a conversion for metric. At my Home Depot, 100 PSI was the thinnest plastic and 160 PSI was the next step up. The only technicality here is that if you go with a smaller diameter pipe, you need a little thicker plastic so it will stay rigid and they get more expensive and heavier (think bruised hips) the larger the PSI. You will have enough to make a number of hoops from one roll.
• A blow dryer or access to hot water.
• A cutting device. We used a hack saw and box knife to trim up the cut job. If you don’t have an old hack saw laying around, spring for a Ratcheting PVC cutter while you’re at the hardware store.
• A plastic tubing connecter (one per hoop) matching the diameter of the tubing you purchased. If you bought 1” tubing, buy a 1” connector. They are located right next to the tubing.
• A tape measure.
• Some colorful electrical tape. If you want to go hog wild, check out http://www.identi-tape.com/. If not, you’ll have plenty of choices at your hardware store.
• (Optional) something noisy like beans or bells to put inside and annoy your neighbors.

Larger hoops rotate slower and are actually easier for beginners so I suggest building a 45 inch or 1.14 meter diameter hoop, which equates to about 141 inches or 3.6 meters in length. Add a few inches/centimeters for more voluptuous figures, subtract for those who are curvaceously challenged. Don’t worry too much about the math, the idea is that when stand your hoop up in front of you, it will come up to somewhere between your chest and your belly button.

1. Measure out your hoop length.
2. Cut your hoop to length.
3. Heat up the ends of your tubing (one side at a time) and insert your connector. Use either hot water or a hair dryer. Stick the noise makers in before you heat and attach the second side if you want a noisy hoop.
4. Decorate to your heart’s content. Your hoop will have an easier time staying on your body if you add tape, rather than leaving it smooth so add black tape if you want it black.

How to Use Your Hoop

Even my 60 year old slightly rounded daddy can hula hoop. He came for a massage and I convinced him to give the hoop a whirl. He insisted that he tried as a kid and never could get it to go. I promised him he could do it with my adult sized hoop and to his surprise, and actually mine, after about 2 minutes, he was hooping like a pro.

From Hooping.org: Hold the hoop against your back. You can start it a little above your waist. Then, push the hoop around your waist, and shift your weight back and forth on your feet to keep the hoop moving. Easier said than done? Having trouble “keeping it up”? Here are some more tips: Many people try to move their hips in a circle with the hoop. This actually makes hooping much harder. Try this: put one foot in front of the other and just shift your weight back and forth from foot to foot. It’s less of a circular hip motion and more of just a rocking or pumping motion. In terms of which direction to hoop in, try ’em both! You’ll know right away which one is right for you. I’ve found that right-handed people generally hoop counter-clockwise, while lefties go clockwise, but many people are exceptions to this rule. Most of all: be patient! It can take a while to get the hang of it – don’t give up.

Having told you how wonderful hooping is, I want to share that my research uncovered that it appears avid hooping can lead to some bruising and other overuse type injuries – especially on the arms. If you experience any body issues while hooping, please refer to hooping.org and/or a bodywork professional for assistance with your technique. Injury seems likely mainly as you begin to develop more advanced moves but I wanted to warn you and give advice on that so you don’t panic if you end up with a bruised arm from swinging a giant hoop on it.