Most people have a favorite direction for spinning their hoops while hooping. To determine your dominant direction, look down at the hoop as it rotates around your belly. Think of yourself as the center that holds the hands of the clock. Which way is your hoop spinning? For the majority of folks, the direction is counter clock-wise (CCW) though some people prefer clock-wise (CW). From what I can tell, there isn't much correlation between right-handedness and left-handedness or which side of the equator you're on. Our preferences seemed to be based on something else, probably something to do with the way our brains are wired. But all of us have a dominant direction, one that feels more comfortable and easier to utilize.

It is important to hoop in BOTH directions though! It is essential to your skills development and important for your overall health. If you're only hooping one direction, you are only developing one side of your abdominals and one side of your back muscles. You are continually wrenching your spine in one direction over and over and over, which can lead to chiropractic problems, irritated nerves and greater soreness. Hooping in both directions, though, not only develops both sides of your abdominals and your back muscles, it supports your spine, increases your balance, helps you find your Center, allows you to move freely in all directions and to learn new movements faster and it re-wires the neural pathways in your brain, effectively making you smarter. You are enhancing your ability to do every pattern related thing in your life, including but not limited to music, dancing, drumming, mathematics, planning and organizing, and much, much more.

Hooping in both directions helps you find your Center, the core from which all your movement flows. We humans are diurnal creatures. If you split us down the middle from head to toe, we look basically the same on the right side as on the left -- one lung, one kidney, one arm, one leg, one eye, one ear, half a heart, half a brain, etc. Our center is at that split down the middle vertically and also that horizontal center, which falls somewhere around your belly button. This is the core from which all movement flows. Once you find and explore this place, you'll find it easier to lift with either arm, step out with either leg, and stall back and forth from CW to CCW effortlessly. Your dance will be more graceful and a new world of possibilities will open up to you. And the sooner you start learning your non-dominant direction, the easier it will be to learn.

Every movement stems from this center place and the sooner you start accumulating rotations and muscle memory from this core, spinning out in both directions equally, the sooner you will be learn everything else and the deeper your understandings will be. You will have understandings of body mechanics that are beyond my (or anyone's) ability to explain to you. Spinning both directions is your path to self-discovery.

And as you progess, soon you'll find that you no longer have a dominant direction. You'll find that you can move in both directions with equal ease and grace.

If you have been defaulting to one direction that you find easier, I challenge you to change that today. I encourage you to test your boundaries and open up your hoop practice in ways that will amaze you. You have some lost time to make up for -- and by that, I don't mean the time you've already been hooping. I mean all the years of your life that you have defaulted to your right side to crank your car, sign your name, open the fridge, close the door, flush the toilet, brush your hair, and so on and so on and so on... Here's a great way to start. Select a song you really like and spend that entire song hooping in your non-dominant direction. When the hoop drops, simply pick it up and keep going. Do this every day for a week. Choose a short song if that helps. Mine was a bluegrass version of Paperback Writer, a Beatles song reworked by the Charles River Valley Boys. The song lasted 2:20. I still remember it. It seemed so long at first. Now it seems like nothing. I no longer have a dominant direction.

And soon neither will you! You can do it. You can do anything you make up your mind to do. The trick is to learn this mantra: "Darn. Let me try that again..." As long as you can keep saying that, and keep doing that, you can learn anything. "Darn. Let me try that again..."

One final benefit – whenever we do a thing we think we cannot do, we open up glorious new possibilities for ourselves. We become braver and we live more fully. We grow and blossom.

Now turn your face to the sun and grow!