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Meet the happy hoopers (from Raleigh newspaper : New & Observer)topic posted Yesterday
Grown-ups find fitness, fun and even spirituality in twirling circular piping
By Joe Miller, Staff Writer
What's behind North Carolina's emergence as a hot spot for Hula Hooping?
An abundance of irrigation pipe.
Actually, that's just one reason why a childhood activity born of the 1950s is finally bridging the generation gap to adulthood. Another reason: a technological advance is doing for hooping what the oversized racket did for tennis in the 1980s and supersized golf clubs did for golf in the '90s: making the activity fun for the masses, especially those who may not have the coordination and energy of a 10-year-old girl. And you need to factor in our growing desire to make workouts fun as well as our quest for spirituality.
Spirituality? Through twirling a Hula Hoop?
"When I'm hooping, I'm visualizing," says 46-year-old Mary Water of Chapel Hill. "I think about my goals, my aspirations."
Over the past 10 years -- and particularly over the past two -- a growing number of people have been finding emotional relief and physical release inside the rotating ring. What started as a gimmick by the band String Cheese Incident to get its audiences up and dancing now has all the earmarks of a nascent fitness craze: formal classes, spiffy how-to DVDs, local clubs (called tribes in hooping circles) and rising stars who have achieved celebrity status in the tight-knit hooping community.
"There certainly isn't any data about how many hoopers there are," writes Philo Hagen, editor of the San Francisco-based hooping.org magazine, via e-mail. "But whatever that number is, it has definitely grown exponentially in the last six to 10 years."
And perhaps nowhere has hooping taken hold as firmly as in the Triangle's most eclectic nook, Carrboro.
"Carrboro is a hoop scene unlike any other," says Hagen, "and it is one that is having an impact on hoopers all over the world."
Most hoopers date the birth of adult hooping to 1990s jam band The String Cheese Incident. To get people up and dancing at their concerts, the band tossed hoops into the crowd. The hoops went over big. Soon, hoops began showing up on the rave scene.
Beginning in 2002, a group of women in Carrboro began embracing the hoop. Every Saturday, Julia Hartsell, Vivian Hancock (who now goes by "Spiral") and others took their homemade hoops to the Weaver Street Market and jammed. They brought extra hoops for any onlooker who wanted to join in. Some didn't know what to make of the scene.
"I was shy about it at first," recalls Beth Williams of Chapel Hill. "I was very self-conscious." But she had with her the ultimate ice breaker for such occasions: her 5-year-old daughter. Her daughter wanted to hoop, so Williams, who was into rock climbing and yoga, found herself hooping, in public.
The scene also attracted an art major from UNC, but for a different reason.
"A friend of mine told me there were all these pretty girls at Weaver Street on Saturdays, that I should check it out," Jon Baxter says. At the time, Baxter had just bought a new bike and was into cycling. But the day he bought the bike, he went down, crushing several bones in his right hand (not a good thing for an art major). Within a year, he went down again, breaking his collarbone. Hooping was starting to look pretty good.
Not only was it looking good as a safe fitness alternative, but Baxter saw something that made him think it could help rehabilitate the atrophying muscles in his shoulder. The Weaver Street women didn't confine their hooping to their hips; they got their whole bodies -- including their arms and shoulders -- involved. Pretty soon, his homeopathic hoop therapy was making an arm out of his chicken wing.
But the hoop was doing much more for Baxter. The bouts of depression that had plagued him for most of his life were becoming less severe.
"I'd suffered from depression," says Baxter, who is 34. "I wasn't incapacitated by it, but I was subject to it." The bouts that had come in cycles lasting months were getting shorter and shorter.
"Now," he says, "it's down to days."
Undulating into the light
Baxter is quick to acknowledge that it's the movement, the motion that keeps his depression at bay, that other types of physical activity could do the trick. For him, though, it was hooping.
He built a hooping space in the backyard of his Carrboro rental where he could hoop for hours during warm weather. When it turned cold, he began frequenting a 24-hour gym, which he hit after getting off his bartending gig. He could go for hours.
"Once as I was leaving the guy at the desk said, 'Good morning,'" says Baxter. The sky outside was just beginning to lighten.
One of the great things about being on the front edge of a movement, Baxter quickly discovered, is that there's no precedent, no blazed path, no rules -- even loose ones -- to follow.
"It's an interesting place to be," he says. "It's not like it's a new form of an old thing. It's all new."
When he started teaching hooping classes at Carrboro's Balanced Movement Studio in April 2005, he discovered he needed to create a "curriculum" as it were, from the ground up. "I had to write a language, come up with a format."
That has driven Baxter to help forge a distinctive form of hooping. In some circles, circus tricks (twirling eight hoops at a time, for instance) are big. Others are into performing.
"The North Carolina style," says Hooping.org's Hagen, "evolved as naturally as it did anywhere else, but the results were markedly different, emphasizing hooping in both directions, hooping blindfolded, the spirituality of the hoop path."
That spirituality manifests itself in different ways.
For Mary Water, it's an opportunity to visualize. For Bonnie MacDougal of Mebane it was a new way to find the escape she once found running, which she had to cut back on because of fibromyalgia. (It also proved a diversion just before giving birth to her second child last month; during a long labor, she hooped for a brief spell as a diversion.) And for 50-year-old Anna Mulqueen of Chapel Hill it's about getting to the core of what play should be about.
"It's hard to find activities that are fun to do."
And it's also about stepping inside the protective circle of the hoop and just escaping for a while.
Says Water: "It's hard to hoop and think about your to-do list."
Hitting a sweet spot
In the 1970s, every tennis player in the land wanted the Wilson T2000 racket. Trouble was, only one person in the land could play with the unforgiving thing: two-time Wimbledon singles champ Jimmy Connors. The newfangled metal racket with a sweet spot the size of a dime sent balls flying in all directions except one: over the net. Then, in the early 1980s Howard Head gave the yeomen tennis players the great equalizer: the oversized racket with a sweet spot the size of New Jersey. Now, anyone could sustain a volley.
Something similar happened with hooping.
When you were a 60-pound grade-schooler, Wham-O gave you one option: a 30-inch diameter Hula Hoop. And that was OK, because you were a bundle of flexible energy and had little trouble keeping the featherweight ring rocking. But try keeping 30 inches of nothing up with slower, older hips.
The solution: a heavier, oversized hoop.
"My first hoop was huge," says Baxter, hauling out a 48-inch hoop weighing 6 or 7 pounds from a stash in the house he shares with hooping partner Ann Humphreys.
It may sound counterintuitive, but give the big hoop a good first swing, give it a little momentum, and it takes surprisingly little effort to keep it up. Get your rhythm and technique down with the big hoop and you can gradually move to a smaller size.
"It's a physics problem," Baxter says.
One key difference between the oversized racket and big hoop. When the oversized racket came out, you paid a premium for the bigger sweet spot. You can make your own hoop for less than $10. All you need is a 12-foot or so length of PVC pipe, a coupler and some colorful electrical tape.
Don't leave them in a hot car, Humphreys advises: The Carolina weather that's generally a boon to hooping will warp a hoop in a flash. If you do leave it in the car, that same Carolina warmth can straighten you out in a jiffy: just lay the hoop on hot pavement for a minute or two.
So far, hooping tends to be female-dominated. The typical student in one of Baxter's classes is a woman, a mom, in her 40s. Surprisingly, adds Humphreys, who assists with the classes, the women tend to be somewhat restrained and lead "a moderate to low-activity lifestyle."
Guys, on the other hand, need a couple of things to embrace hooping. One, they need a heavier hoop, Baxter says, because their tendency is to muscle the hoop rather than finesse it. They also need to have a less testosterone-driven attitude. At least in this neck of the woods.
"It's really weird to be a guy and hoop," Baxter says. "It's hip-oriented. In some cultures that's considered macho.
"In the South," he adds, "it doesn't quite play that way."
joe.miller@newsobserver.com or (919) 812-8450© Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
Grown-ups find fitness, fun and even spirituality in twirling circular piping
By Joe Miller, Staff Writer
What's behind North Carolina's emergence as a hot spot for Hula Hooping?
An abundance of irrigation pipe.
Actually, that's just one reason why a childhood activity born of the 1950s is finally bridging the generation gap to adulthood. Another reason: a technological advance is doing for hooping what the oversized racket did for tennis in the 1980s and supersized golf clubs did for golf in the '90s: making the activity fun for the masses, especially those who may not have the coordination and energy of a 10-year-old girl. And you need to factor in our growing desire to make workouts fun as well as our quest for spirituality.
Spirituality? Through twirling a Hula Hoop?
"When I'm hooping, I'm visualizing," says 46-year-old Mary Water of Chapel Hill. "I think about my goals, my aspirations."
Over the past 10 years -- and particularly over the past two -- a growing number of people have been finding emotional relief and physical release inside the rotating ring. What started as a gimmick by the band String Cheese Incident to get its audiences up and dancing now has all the earmarks of a nascent fitness craze: formal classes, spiffy how-to DVDs, local clubs (called tribes in hooping circles) and rising stars who have achieved celebrity status in the tight-knit hooping community.
"There certainly isn't any data about how many hoopers there are," writes Philo Hagen, editor of the San Francisco-based hooping.org magazine, via e-mail. "But whatever that number is, it has definitely grown exponentially in the last six to 10 years."
And perhaps nowhere has hooping taken hold as firmly as in the Triangle's most eclectic nook, Carrboro.
"Carrboro is a hoop scene unlike any other," says Hagen, "and it is one that is having an impact on hoopers all over the world."
Most hoopers date the birth of adult hooping to 1990s jam band The String Cheese Incident. To get people up and dancing at their concerts, the band tossed hoops into the crowd. The hoops went over big. Soon, hoops began showing up on the rave scene.
Beginning in 2002, a group of women in Carrboro began embracing the hoop. Every Saturday, Julia Hartsell, Vivian Hancock (who now goes by "Spiral") and others took their homemade hoops to the Weaver Street Market and jammed. They brought extra hoops for any onlooker who wanted to join in. Some didn't know what to make of the scene.
"I was shy about it at first," recalls Beth Williams of Chapel Hill. "I was very self-conscious." But she had with her the ultimate ice breaker for such occasions: her 5-year-old daughter. Her daughter wanted to hoop, so Williams, who was into rock climbing and yoga, found herself hooping, in public.
The scene also attracted an art major from UNC, but for a different reason.
"A friend of mine told me there were all these pretty girls at Weaver Street on Saturdays, that I should check it out," Jon Baxter says. At the time, Baxter had just bought a new bike and was into cycling. But the day he bought the bike, he went down, crushing several bones in his right hand (not a good thing for an art major). Within a year, he went down again, breaking his collarbone. Hooping was starting to look pretty good.
Not only was it looking good as a safe fitness alternative, but Baxter saw something that made him think it could help rehabilitate the atrophying muscles in his shoulder. The Weaver Street women didn't confine their hooping to their hips; they got their whole bodies -- including their arms and shoulders -- involved. Pretty soon, his homeopathic hoop therapy was making an arm out of his chicken wing.
But the hoop was doing much more for Baxter. The bouts of depression that had plagued him for most of his life were becoming less severe.
"I'd suffered from depression," says Baxter, who is 34. "I wasn't incapacitated by it, but I was subject to it." The bouts that had come in cycles lasting months were getting shorter and shorter.
"Now," he says, "it's down to days."
Undulating into the light
Baxter is quick to acknowledge that it's the movement, the motion that keeps his depression at bay, that other types of physical activity could do the trick. For him, though, it was hooping.
He built a hooping space in the backyard of his Carrboro rental where he could hoop for hours during warm weather. When it turned cold, he began frequenting a 24-hour gym, which he hit after getting off his bartending gig. He could go for hours.
"Once as I was leaving the guy at the desk said, 'Good morning,'" says Baxter. The sky outside was just beginning to lighten.
One of the great things about being on the front edge of a movement, Baxter quickly discovered, is that there's no precedent, no blazed path, no rules -- even loose ones -- to follow.
"It's an interesting place to be," he says. "It's not like it's a new form of an old thing. It's all new."
When he started teaching hooping classes at Carrboro's Balanced Movement Studio in April 2005, he discovered he needed to create a "curriculum" as it were, from the ground up. "I had to write a language, come up with a format."
That has driven Baxter to help forge a distinctive form of hooping. In some circles, circus tricks (twirling eight hoops at a time, for instance) are big. Others are into performing.
"The North Carolina style," says Hooping.org's Hagen, "evolved as naturally as it did anywhere else, but the results were markedly different, emphasizing hooping in both directions, hooping blindfolded, the spirituality of the hoop path."
That spirituality manifests itself in different ways.
For Mary Water, it's an opportunity to visualize. For Bonnie MacDougal of Mebane it was a new way to find the escape she once found running, which she had to cut back on because of fibromyalgia. (It also proved a diversion just before giving birth to her second child last month; during a long labor, she hooped for a brief spell as a diversion.) And for 50-year-old Anna Mulqueen of Chapel Hill it's about getting to the core of what play should be about.
"It's hard to find activities that are fun to do."
And it's also about stepping inside the protective circle of the hoop and just escaping for a while.
Says Water: "It's hard to hoop and think about your to-do list."
Hitting a sweet spot
In the 1970s, every tennis player in the land wanted the Wilson T2000 racket. Trouble was, only one person in the land could play with the unforgiving thing: two-time Wimbledon singles champ Jimmy Connors. The newfangled metal racket with a sweet spot the size of a dime sent balls flying in all directions except one: over the net. Then, in the early 1980s Howard Head gave the yeomen tennis players the great equalizer: the oversized racket with a sweet spot the size of New Jersey. Now, anyone could sustain a volley.
Something similar happened with hooping.
When you were a 60-pound grade-schooler, Wham-O gave you one option: a 30-inch diameter Hula Hoop. And that was OK, because you were a bundle of flexible energy and had little trouble keeping the featherweight ring rocking. But try keeping 30 inches of nothing up with slower, older hips.
The solution: a heavier, oversized hoop.
"My first hoop was huge," says Baxter, hauling out a 48-inch hoop weighing 6 or 7 pounds from a stash in the house he shares with hooping partner Ann Humphreys.
It may sound counterintuitive, but give the big hoop a good first swing, give it a little momentum, and it takes surprisingly little effort to keep it up. Get your rhythm and technique down with the big hoop and you can gradually move to a smaller size.
"It's a physics problem," Baxter says.
One key difference between the oversized racket and big hoop. When the oversized racket came out, you paid a premium for the bigger sweet spot. You can make your own hoop for less than $10. All you need is a 12-foot or so length of PVC pipe, a coupler and some colorful electrical tape.
Don't leave them in a hot car, Humphreys advises: The Carolina weather that's generally a boon to hooping will warp a hoop in a flash. If you do leave it in the car, that same Carolina warmth can straighten you out in a jiffy: just lay the hoop on hot pavement for a minute or two.
So far, hooping tends to be female-dominated. The typical student in one of Baxter's classes is a woman, a mom, in her 40s. Surprisingly, adds Humphreys, who assists with the classes, the women tend to be somewhat restrained and lead "a moderate to low-activity lifestyle."
Guys, on the other hand, need a couple of things to embrace hooping. One, they need a heavier hoop, Baxter says, because their tendency is to muscle the hoop rather than finesse it. They also need to have a less testosterone-driven attitude. At least in this neck of the woods.
"It's really weird to be a guy and hoop," Baxter says. "It's hip-oriented. In some cultures that's considered macho.
"In the South," he adds, "it doesn't quite play that way."
joe.miller@newsobserver.com or (919) 812-8450© Copyright 2008, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company
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