Hoopla Over Hoops

Kristle Minichiello learned that lesson when she took a rainbow-colored hula hoop and gamely attempted to spin it around her waist during a weekly hoop fitness class. Once, twice, three times it wobbled in a drunken circle before clattering to the floor.

For 10 minutes of the 30-minute class, Minichiello looked as though she was committing a centrifugal farce trying to keep that hoop spinning. Finally, something seemed to click, and she got her hoop rotating like a first-grader on a playground.

“It’s easier to do this when you’re 6 than when you’re 36,” a sweaty Minichiello said after class.

The hula hoop, that ubiquitous rattling toy that kids seem to abandon about age 10, has been taken up by adults looking for a new way to trim their waistlines. Gyms across the country offer hoop classes and companies sell DVDs teaching routines for the home. Actress Marisa Tomei is featured in the hoopBody DVD put out by Gaiam last month. The DVD comes with a collapsible hoop and promises to help users “sculpt and tone.”

Hooping groups have popped up in cities nationwide. Hooping.org keeps a directory of such groups, listing more than a dozen in California and two in Nevada. YouTube features homemade how-to videos or footage of people spinning hoops around their arms, legs, necks and waists. These aren’t your typical kids’ hoops you find at Walmart. They’re sized for adults and often weighted to help with the centrifugal force. Sporting goods stores and websites sell them for about $30, while some hoopsters actually make their own out of plastic tubing.

The hula hoop has been around in some form since ancient Greece. Wham-O popularized them in the United States when they released their Hula-Hoop in 1958.

Personal trainer Alice McFall started teaching her class about three years ago at Las Vegas Athletic Club, after realizing that it was actually a great way to work the obliques. And because it’s fun.

“It’s fantastic for your core,” McFall says. “A lot of people who take the class end up buying their own hoops for home use.”

When she picked up a hoop for the first time as a personal trainer, it was like a doorway to the past, she says. McFall had no trouble with making the hoop go ’round, probably because her core muscles were so well-developed.

“I was going through a divorce and hitting the gym a lot,” McFall says. “One night, I saw a guy carrying a hoop through the gym and he saw the look on my face. He said, ‘You want to try it, don’t you?’ ”

She did. The next day, she went to her supervisor and told him they had to start offering a class.

Minichiello is one of 13 women in the Sunday morning class at the Rainbow Boulevard gym. The idea of hooping seemed silly to some of the students. They wondered, how could a hoop provide a workout? It seems too easy.

Then they tried it and found it to be embarrassingly hard.

“I just thought it would be fun,” says Minichiello, who has taken four classes. “The first time, it took me the entire class to get it going. Every time you hear your hoop drop, you feel a little awkward.”

Vicki Newman took the classes because her personal trainer, McFall, told her to. She thought it was a bit nuts, at first.

“She does things you wouldn’t think of doing,” Newman says of McFall. “This wears you out.”

Some gyms are starting to offer recess fitness classes in an effort to make working out fun. Anything that seems fun and breaks the monotony is something you’re likely to do more of, McFall says.

What next? Hippity Hop? Whac-A-Mole?

“Next, I’m going to get a Skip-Bo,” McFall says.

Contact reporter Sonya Padgett at spadgett@ reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4564.