Benefits of Hula Hooping. Q&A

Can Hula Hooping help you lose belly fat?

If you hoop for 30 minutes, you'll burn 210 calories. The heart rates of research participants elevated to 84 percent of their maximum heart rate, sufficient for burningfat as fuel. To lose abdominal fat, calories must be burned. Hooping contributes to overall weight loss, including the extra fat across your core.

Is a hula hoop good for abs?

Fat Loss. While the claim that you can spot train to lose weight in one area is a myth, it is possible to lose fat wherever it is in excess on your body. Since working out with a Hula-Hoop is a very good aerobic exercise, it burns more calories than other ab-building anaerobic exercises.

What is a hula hoop good exercise for?

Using a hula hoop works your arm, leg and core muscles. Hula hooping is a total-body workout that not only tones your muscles, but also improves joint flexibility and balance. The rocking motion of hula hooping is also relaxing and fun, which can relieve stress.

Is a weighted hula hoop better?

In fact, any type of hula hooping, using a weighted hula hoop or a regular hula hoop, can help you meet your exercise goals and provide aerobic activity. And it can be fun! Weighted hula hoops are bigger and heavier than are traditional hula hoops. ... The weight of the hoop is up to you

What are the benefits of hula hooping?

Hooping will make you feel the (calorie) burn. Hooping has been proven to burn over 400 calories per hour by the American Council on Exercise, although thecalorie-burn from hooping may be as high as 600 calories per hour when other parts of your body, such as your arms and legs, are engaged

How many calories do you burn with a weighted hula hoop?

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) funded a study completed at the University of Wisconsin, and found that a 30 minute weighted hula hoop workout which consisted of hooping moves and twirling motions around the arms, waist, and legs burned roughly 7 calories per minute.

I Lost 85 Pounds By Hula Hooping

Cori Magnotta, 32, was the kind of person who couldn't stick with a workout routine. But faced with stubborn extra pounds after the birth of her son, she decided it was time to make a change. She lost 85 pounds in a year doing an exercise she loved: Hula-Hooping. 

When I was 5, Hula-Hooping was my party trick. I was really good at it. As I got older, I Hula-Hooped less and less and eventually joined the real world, put the hoop aside, and forgot about it.

I'm 6 feet tall and I've always struggled with my weight. I just didn't find working out fun. I would join a gym, go once, and never go back. When I was pregnant with my son, I developed preeclampsia, or high blood pressure, and had to be on bedrest for 2 months. Being sedentary contributed to my weight gain during my pregnancy. At my heaviest, I was 265 pounds. My son was a big baby—10 pounds!—so I attribute some of that to him. But I struggled with getting the rest of it back off. I developed hypothyroidism after my pregnancy, and my metabolism had slowed, making it easier to gain weight and that much more difficult to lose it.

In October 2014, I was down to 250 pounds, and I started searching the internet for fun workouts. I came across FXP Fitness, which uses a weighted Hula-Hoop in a routine that borrows from barre, yoga, and pilates. I remembered how much I loved hooping as a kid and signed up for a class. I drove from my home in Portland, CT, to Massachusetts, the only place classes were available at the time. "Let me go see what this is all about," I remember thinking.

I immediately loved it. It's impossible to not smile while Hula-Hooping. I wore a fitness tracker and a heart rate monitor and watched my heart rate spike like I was doing a high-intensity interval training workout. I could burn as much as 800 calories in an hour, doing the class's combination of ballet movements, yoga poses, strength exercises like squats, and of course traditional waist hooping. We even hooped around our arms and our hands to give our waists a break. We used the weighted hoop to do stretches and hooped while we did dance routines like the YMCA and the Macarena.

I took the 2 lb hoop home with me to Connecticut and started hooping on my own. I started with just 10 minutes a day and built up my stamina. It was easy to stand in front of the TV and whip it around my waist, even if I had toys all over my living room floor from my son. It didn't take me long to decide I wanted to become an instructor myself. I decided I was going to push my fears aside, and I went to Boston to get certified.

Hooping helped me slowly and steadily lose weight, and in about a year, I was down 85 pounds to 165. It helped that I now have a 2-year-old I have to chase everywhere! Once you start exercising, there's a snowball effect: You have more energy to do more things. I started eating a little bit better, because I now had the energy to cook instead of going to the drive-thru. I had the energy to play with my son instead of watching him at the playground. Now, I teach hooping three times a week

I competed in pageants when I was young, and 20 years later, I gave it another shot: I was recently crowned America's Fit Mrs., and I Hula-Hooped as my talent. I was even recently featured as Trainer of the Month with FXP Hoop Fitness. If you told me 2 years ago I would now be a fitness instructor, I would have laughed at you.

The most important thing is that it's fun. Most people crack up when I tell them I'm a Hula-Hoop instructor and tell me they can't hoop. But I have yet to meet someone I can't teach to hoop! I have 21-year-olds and 65-year-olds in my class, petite people and tall people, couch potatoes and marathoners—it's for anyone and everyone.

Source:prevention.com/weight-loss/i-lost-85-pounds-by-hula-hooping

Think Hula Hoops Are Toys? They Could Change Your Life...

As told by Jenny Wood.......

Going through my wardrobe recently, I found a pile of brightly coloured bikinis languishing in a drawer. They can go straight to the charity shop, I thought glumly, stuffing them into a bin bag. 

When I gave birth to my little boy 18 months ago, I gained something else as well - a wobbly belly, or, as it’s affectionately known, a ‘mum tum’. So, I was pretty sure my bikini-wearing days were over.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate my body. Long walks with a buggy, breastfeeding and running after a toddler have actually helped me lose more than the three stone I put on during pregnancy. But, while the rest of me has slowly shrunk back into shape, my tummy hasn’t followed suit. Wearing anything body-hugging  still fills me with fear.

I’d love to have abs like Olympic athlete Jessica Ennis. And, it would seem, I’m not alone. In a recent survey of 3,000 women, 58 per cent said their stomach was the body part they most wished they could change. 

The problem is, like most people with children or busy lives, I can’t spend hours in the gym or afford to hire a personal trainer. But now, thanks to the latest celebrity fitness craze, I may have found an unlikely solution: hula hooping.

‘I’m all about hula-hooping right now!’ tweeted Kelly Osbourne recently. ‘Five mins in the morning, five mins at night ... in five days I lost two inches from my waistline!’ Michelle Obama, who can apparently hula while kneeling, Grace Jones, who hooped throughout her Queen’s Diamond Jubilee performance last year, and Beyoncé have all credited the humble hoop for their fantastic figures. If they can do it, I reckon, so can I.

So I arrange to meet hula hooping expert Anna Drury, 30, at a gym in South London. Anna first picked up a hoop in 2006 after seeing them used in a performance at a music festival. 

 

She’s been hooping professionally for five years now and teaches in schools, runs adult classes and performs at events worldwide, often using several hoops at once and even setting them on fire. Crikey.

The last time I picked up a hula hoop, I had ankle socks and pigtails, so I’m understandably nervous as I join the 12 other women in the evening’s class. Anna believes that everyone - even those who are hopelessly uncoordinated like me - can learn to hula hoop. 

The secret is lots of practice and the right equipment - the larger and heavier the hoop, the easier it is to control and the more it’ll help you tone up. 

As for what to wear, apparently the fewer or tighter the clothes the better. That way the hoop sticks to you rather than the fabric, so I opt for a purple vest top and blue leggings. 

As the class starts, Anna explains that hooping is like riding a bike - it’s all about finding your own personal rhythm and once you’ve got it, it never goes. Music helps you relax, making the whole process much easier, so she turns on the stereo and off we go. 

Getting the hula hoop ‘in flight’ (to use the technical term) is actually easier than I’d thought - I just hold it around my waist and fling it sideways - but keeping it twirling for more than a few rotations is going to take some practice. 

Anna’s tip is to stay positive - just concentrate on trying to keeping the hoop from falling. That’s easy for her to say, casually spinning her hoop around her neck, but I get countless knocks as mine keeps clattering to the ground. 

Anna cheerfully explains that bruises are par for the course when learning, and that my stomach will toughen up, so I should look at them as war wounds. 

Slowly, I start to get the hang of it, although I find it much easier to hoop in an anti-clockwise direction than a clockwise one (apparently this is normal for right-handed people). However, if I can learn to hoop in both directions I’ll get better-looking abs, because I will then be working the muscles on both sides of my body. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2333002/The-10-minute-workout-rolled-away-spare-tyre-weeks-Think-hula-hoops-toys-They-change-life-.html#ixzz4wKPS5HLv 


I will be doing my own trial of a different kind of hula hoop in the next few weeks with a video so wacth out for that!!