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| First Lady Michelle hooping it up! |
I am whittling my middle with cardio hooping. Cardio hooping is a lot like the hula hooping kids do (or use to do) but the hoop is much larger and a bit heavier. I tried this one-on-one last Friday with an amazing instructor and I have decided that cardio hooping is now my new thing! What it does is it enforces good posture and stability of the core muscles. Often enough people think that core muscles are just the abdominals when they are actually the low back muscles (spinal erectors), the hips and the pelvis. When these muscles are strong you stand up taller and you look leaner and thinner. Now, doing a hula hoop at my age is not easy. In fact the first few times I had a lot of trouble keeping the hoop up and then keeping it going. Now since I have a fair share of hips I thought I would be able to keep that hoop going like no body's business, but it's truly not about the hips... it's about the waist and it's hard to do. You really have to suck in your stomach and push from your abdominal muscles and your butt while doing sort of like a modified lunge. It feels really weird and it looks strange if you don't know what you are doing (which I totally didn't) but I liked it and I want to get it! The instructor Jennifer Alvarez who was leading me during this private class was a freaking bombshell at it. She demonstrated some of the harder movements that involve more rhythmic dancing. That's the stuff I want to do! As she was moving the hoop about her body it was truly mesmerizing how she would take it from her hips up to her waist then her chest than she would take one leg out from the center and walk with one leg through and one leg out. It was wild and I want to do that! Jennifer also performs hoop dance at lots of places throughout the Delaware valley as she has been doing this a long time. She was also real encouraging. So now that's its 5 days later and I am still thinking about hooping I began to research more about it online. See when I discover a new fitness thing I want to know all about it. So, I do a search for cardio hooping on google. Lo and behold I find an article that says that First Lady Michelle Obama and Beyonce does hooping! Okay. I am sold. If Michelle Obama does hooping and she is the First lady than I know I can hoop! When I read Beyonce hoops too I was doubly (doubly is that a misspelled word?) sold. Anyone who knows me know that both of these ladies are the divas I am training to be! They are both outstanding business women who know how to empower a woman to take charge of her career, life, and total wellness while maintaining their respect, class and status. I actually posed as both Michelle Obama and Beyonce on a photo shoot that paid homage to black women icons throughout the ages (those pictures are a whole other blog post). Anyway, as I digress into lesser important things the article included a study on hooping....I'll be darn that someone had that much time on their hands to create a study about this....but then again I have enough time to read it, so I guess we're even in that regard. The study took 16 women from the ages of 16 to 59 and asked them to perform 2-30 minute segments of hooping. Following the testing, the researchers determined that hooping burns an average of seven calories per minute for a total of about 210 calories during a 30-minute hooping workout. As for heart-rate data, the average HR was 151 bpm (beats per minute), which works out to approximately 84 percent of the age-predicted HRmax for the average subject (Figures 1 and 2). Finally, the RPE (rate of perceived excertion) average for the workout was rated by participants as “somewhat hard” on the Borg Scale. In addition to the hard data the researchers uncovered, they suggests that given the variety of movements in hooping it should be considered a total-body workout that has the potential to improve your flexibility and balance while strengthening and toning the muscles of the back, abdomen, arms and legs. The rhythmic nature of hooping may also be relaxing and almost meditative for some.
So this proves that hooping is not only good enough for a Mom and diva in training like myself, but it does the heart and the mind and the body some good too!
Check out this video of my girl Jennifer Alvarez in action
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