Hoop Dreams: The new wave of hula hoops are bigger, better and all grown up

WINSTON-SALEM, NC—It didn’t take long for Kelly Jean Hayward to become known around work as the “Hula-Hoop Girl.“

She works as a reservation sales agent at U.S. Airways on Hanes Mall Boulevard. During her lunch break, she’d go out to her car, open the doors and turn on the stereo, spinning, whirling and jamming to the music as a multi-colored hoop swung around her body. Only heavy downpours would stop her.

Hayward picked up hula hooping last fall after she met a hooper on a trip to Philadelphia. At first, she just poked around on the Internet, looking up videos (how to make them as well as how to use them) on YouTube and fooling around on her own in her front yard with a homemade hoop.

The hula-hoop fad has come and gone in the United States since Wham-O started mass-producing plastic toy hoops in 1958. But this time “hooping,“ as modern hoopers call it, is part dance, part performance art, part meditation and part fitness fad.

There aren’t any circle skirts to be found around modern hoopers (or high heels, which fancy hooping 1950s ladies appeared to favor, looking at old photographs). They’re more likely to be dressed in comfortable yoga or skin-baring workout clothes, hooping in mirrored-studios, in grassy fields or in dance clubs to heart-thumping bass.

“I don’t know what it is. It’s more than the physical exercise,“ Hayward said. “You drop your hoop, and you tell yourself, ‘I’m going to pick it up again.‘ It’s OK to fail. This makes me stronger physically and emotionally.“

At age 48, she’s more fit than she’s ever been. And she feels happier, too - she says she’s struggled with depression a lot of her life, and other exercise, such as walking, didn’t seem to help.

Modern hoopers whip hoops around their arms, around their feet and knees. They use hoops filled with rice that sound like rain sticks, and hoops filled with water for added weight. They use hoops that glow in the dark and fiery hoops with small torches attached to the sides, LED hoops and holographic hoops, hoops covered in velvet and hoops wrapped in sparkly electrical tape.

There are hooping heroes with their own line of hoops, lessons and followers - HoopGirl Christabel Zamor, Hoopalicious Anah Reichenbach and in Carrboro, NC, Hoop Drum, a hooper and drummer performing duo.

And, of course, there’s a documentary all about the subculture that is hooping - The Hooping Life is in post-production. The movie’s tagline: “Is there a revolution in you?“

But part of the appeal of hooping is its simplicity - there isn’t much to the basic equipment, and you can hoop indoors or out. You don’t need a partner. You can do it barefoot.

Adult-sized hoops of today are often handmade, heavier and wrapped with decorative tape that also helps with grip. Typical ones cost around $20 or $30 (though tricked-out models can cost $100 or $200). And they’re far easier to use than the light, plastic hoops made for kids, hoopers say (in the interest of responsible journalism, I tried out a hoop for this story - I am a gifted klutz, and even I got a 41-inch hoop more than a few revolutions around my hips).

Hooping is also something of a cottage industry. A former radio DJ, Monica Casey started making hoops for friends and selling them to people through word-of-mouth as way to bring in some extra money. It became more important after she was laid off from her part-time job at radio station 100.3 FM The Buzzard in the spring. She started bringing her hoops to area festivals and named her business Monkey Hooper.

Her husband, James, cuts and connects irrigation tubing in their Winston-Salem garage. Then Casey gets out her box of electrical tape, and wraps the hoops in patterns - purple spiraling around white, yellow entangling red, pink snaking around black. Swirling around your middle, a blur of color, some of them look like circles of candy canes.

When she worked for the radio station, Casey used to throw out a hoop to listeners during promotional events. Turns out it doesn’t take much to get grown men to hula hoop. “Some of these big old boys would be out there,“ Casey said. “People will do anything for a free T-shirt.“

“You just get lost,“ she said on a recent afternoon in her backyard. She stood barefoot in the grass and swung the hoop around her knees. “It’s nostalgic. Who doesn’t want to remember being a kid?“

Casey first saw adult hoopers when she was at bluegrass festival in Colorado about 10 years ago.

The String Cheese Incident, a jam band, became known for tossing hula hoops into the crowd at their shows. Participants of the counter-culture fringe festival Burning Man also used them.

But hooping has moved more into the mainstream, into gyms and aerobics studios, and, like kickboxing, belly dancing and break dancing, hooping has become part of our ongoing quest to find to a fitness regime that can hold our attention and make us feel the burn.

Through her lunch-time hooping, Hayward met Hal Clayton, another reservation agent. Clayton used to hoop as a kid - he was a state champion, and there are plenty of newspaper clips from the mid-1970s, faded photos of him with hoops spinning around his feet, legs and hands - but had put down his hoops. Hayward got him back into it.

Hayward teaches hula-hoop aerobics classes around Winston-Salem, including ones at the Gateway YWCA. On a recent afternoon, the swish and swirl of hoops filled an airy aerobics studio there - followed by clatter after clatter as some inevitably fell to the wooden floor.

“When it feels like it will fall, speed up,“ Hayward advises, her own hoop whirling pink and green around her waist. Her body moves with the casual, slinky grace of a belly dancer. “It’s helpful to keep one knee forward and the other one kind of back.“

“You’re losing weight, too,“ Hayward told Morrison as they walked the length of the studio together, inching between two floor-length mirrors, hoops spinning. “I’m trying,“ Morrison answered, her face sweaty and still with concentration.

Hayward showed her two new moves at the end of class, including one called the limbo. It looks a lot like it sounds - you stretch your body back as if you’re limboing under a pole at a party, but keep the hoop circling around your middle as you move. “It will burn fat off you,“ Hayward said. “This is a workout.“

Constance Poe had never heard of modern hooping until this spring. She saw Hayward’s class at the Y and thought initially it would be something fun for her girls, ages 4, 5, and 8, to do.

Pretty soon, she was the one doing it.

Hayward teaches a group of women hooping once a week in a parking lot at Wells, Jenkins, Lucas and Jenkins, a Winston-Salem law office where Poe is a receptionist. At home, Poe hoops on her own about three times a week, hooping to gospel music once her daughters are in bed.

She still works out in other ways - weight and strength-training - but hooping has tightened her waist and reduced her stress, she says.

“I’ve been into fitness for several years, but I wanted something different. When you’re doing your traditional-type crunches, it’s not fun. When you’re hooping, you’re using your ab area, your hips, your legs, your quads, hamstrings.“

Morrison, who lives in Kernersville and is 45, started hooping after she saw a sign advertising the class at the Y, where she was a member. She played with a hula hoop as a kid, “but this is so much different,“ she said, “because these hula hoops are heavier.“

And she knows she’s getting something out of it, because she’s sore.

That’s probably something most of us don’t remember from hula-hooping as kids, either.