You Spin me Round: HoopCraft for fitness and fun

–By Julia Dodge

Laurie Williams, owner of Hoopcraft. Photo by Kat Repose.

With the emergence of hoopdance—a cardio workout routine using a heavier hoop than the childhood variety—hooping has become a bit more complicated since then, but it hasn’t lost it’s playful and smile-inducing appeal.

“Hoopdance is a form of exercise that takes the ‘work’ out of working out. It’s fun. It takes you back to your childhood. It gets you playing again,” says Laurie Williams, the founder of HoopCraft, a Bay Area organization that teaches hoopdance classes.  “Hooping can burn up to 100 calories every 10 minutes and tones the stomach, buns, and thighs, which is typically the areas most women are concerned with. As one client told me, ‘hooping is sneaky’— you don’t realize how hard you’re working until the next day.”

Williams, who founded HoopCraft in 2008, credits a week-long desert festival as her inspiration to take her love of dance and make it a full-time gig. “Burning Man made me realize that I didn’t have to settle for my 9-5 Monday-Friday job where I was bored and uninspired. Life is beautiful and short. Why waste it away being unhappy?” she says.

It’s difficult to pin-point the origin of hoopdance, but all signs point to music festivals in the mid-90s (The String Cheese Incident passed out homemade hoops during their concerts) and counterculture events, such as Burning Man. “It caught on like wild fire,” says Williams. “People learned all sorts of hoop moves at Burning Man and then went home and shared it with their communities. Since then, people have been starting up small businesses teaching hoopdance and selling hoops.”

While some hoopdance classes focus on the spiritual side of hooping, and others focus on the sexy side, William’s HoopCraft classes focus mostly on the healthy, playful side of hooping. “Dancing or moving while hooping around the waist is an easy way to get your heart pumping. It’s also good to learn some moves that are often referred to as ‘off the body hooping’, which means moving the hoop with your hands and arms so that it’s no longer around your midsection,” she says. “Hoopers are creating endless variations of ways to manipulate the hoop, all of which are a great form of exercise.”

According to Hagen, a bigger, heavier hoop makes for a nice muscle massage, as well as gives the intestines and organs a “rhythmic rubbing”. The biggest advantage of a heavier hoop is that it rotates slower around the body, making it an activity anyone can do, regardless of size, age or sense of rhythm. “As children we see something we want to do and we do it! As adults, we tend to come at things with preconceived notions of ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m uncoordinated,’” says Williams.  “The best thing to do is to let go of that thought pattern. It’s very common for people to tell me, ‘I can’t hoop’ or ‘I’m really bad at this’ and then find that, once they relax and put their mind to learning the moves, they can hoop just fine.”

HoopCraft classes are currently available at San Ramon Valley Fitness for $10 per class, or $60 for a 10-class pass, but Williams also enjoys instructing private lessons, parties and companies. “I taught at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for a year, teaching hooping to their employees during their lunch breaks. So many incredibly brilliant minds work at the Lab, but trying to get them to coordinate waist hooping with footwork and arm movements could sometimes prove very challenging,” she says. “I had a lot of fun breaking moves down in a more methodical scientific way and finding ways for them to relate to what was happening. For instance, explaining to them that if they push the hoop harder and faster that centrifugal force brings the hoop up higher around your torso. It was great—I’d see these lights go on, and all of a sudden they’re hooping around their chests.”

Finding enlightenment from her craft, Williams encourages everyone to learn from what they love: “If you have passion and talent for something, EMBRACE IT AND SHARE IT.”

For more info, visit HoopCraft.com.