The Newest Workout: Hooping or Hoopdance

The easiest exercise to lose weight is paced walking which burns 160 calories in 30 minutes. However, people who are living in the Northern Hemisphere find that it is too cold to complete this exercise outdoor in January. Luckily, there is a fun workout, which can burn 111 calories in 30 minutes indoor, hooping. Hooping or hoop dance is an artistic movement with a hoop.

Hooping has been around for ages. Native American Hoop Dance is a cultural heritage, which is seen in documentary films and live traditional competitions. The hoops are symbols of never-ending circles of life. About 80 dancers participate in the annual competitions at the HeardMuseum in Phoenix, Arizona, that have drawn about 10,000 spectators. The Native American Hoop Dance is performed by a solo dancer with many hoops. Dancer form shapes such as butterfly, eagle, snake, and coyote with hoops to perform the storytelling ritual. Native American Hoop Dance focuses on rapid moves and the constructions of hoop formations around the body of the dancer. In highly structured sequences of moves, the hoops are made to join in such a way that they extended from the body of the dancer to form wings and tails.

Hooping was the craze of the late 1950s. In 1958, the founders of Wham-O toy company, RichardP.Knerr and ArthurK.Melin, traveled to the playgrounds across the Southern California to give away and to demonstrate hoop dance to the children. It resulted in 25,000 million hula hoops were sold in the next four months.

Starting in the mid-1990s, hooping was in Spring Cheese Incident concerts and outdoor music festivals such as High Sierra. Hooping also was an element of an annual bacchanal Burning Man in NevadaDesert where hoopers around the world to share their tricks and techniques.

Today, hoop dance is often combined with Pilates or Yoga to build strength, balance, and flexibility in the gyms. Unlike the hula-hoops, the hoops for hoop dance are heavier and larger hoops. In hoop dance, the hoop rotates around all parts of the body such as waist, hips, chest, neck, shoulders, thighs, knees, arms, hands, and feet. Hooping combines technical movements and tricks with free style and technical dancing that accompany with music. Hooper sway the body to keep the hoop suspended in the air and make the hoop go round and round effortlessly. Both inside and outside spaces of the hoop are explored freely. Hoop dance is the combination of rhythmic gymnastics, hip-hop, free style dance, twirling, and other dance movements. The goal for hooping is to master the moves and tricks to keep the heart thumping.

Hooping has been introduced into the mass consciousness through a variety of dance studios and videos as fun, practical path to whole body fitness and wellness. Normally, either the hoop or hooper is kept in constant rotational movement. However, there are new styles of hooping emphasize on “isolations” and the “touch” technique. The heart of these evolutions of hoop dances is moving the hoop in a point in space instead of around the dancer’s body. For example, “the stall” creates the illusion that the hoops stay in the same body position. This technique involves timing, balance, and coordination. The hooper’s body spin must match the hoop’s rotation while transferring the hoop from hand to hand with arms extending below the waist.