Learning to hula hoop is like learning to ride a bike. Sure, someone can explain the mechanics to you, and you can observe how others do it, but ultimately it comes down to you alone. There is a moment when you shift from thinking consciously about your movements, your body wobbly and unsure, to that instant when your mind clicks off, your instincts take over and suddenly you are moving under your own power, your motion is in sync with the bike. In that moment, there is magic. And it’s the closest feeling I can compare to the wonder of making that transition from “I just can’t get it” to squeals of joy when I finally master a new move. Whether you’re working on simply keeping it spinning for the very first time or conquering something much more complicated, I have noticed a personal pattern of learning for most of us and it breaks down into four stages.
Step 1: Observe.
I love watching hooping videos online. They enable me to see what a move should look like, they teach me about flow and they give me something to aspire to in my own practice. You know those scenes in movies where a dancer goes to an audition, watches a complicated routine and proceeds to blow it out of the water when it is her turn to perform? Well, I am the opposite of that. I can watch something a dozen times and still not get it. I’m still the only person at the wedding who doesn’t know the Electric Slide. That’s why tutorials are so helpful to me and Hooping.org has hundreds. They break down each move into simple steps, and I can watch them again and again until my brain starts to process what I am seeing.
Step 2: Practice.
Okay, I know. Practice seems like such an obvious step, but so many people get frustrated when they can’t get something right away that they give up too soon. One of the things I love about hooping is that practice really does make perfect. I can pound away on the treadmill till the cows come home and never really get better at it – beyond building my endurance and maybe increasing my speed. But with hooping, you can take a move that looks and even feels physically impossible at first and with practice we can take it from choppy and uneven into something fluid and graceful. I remember learning how to do an overhead lift and repeatedly got tangled up in my hoop, thinking that there is no way I was ever going to get my arm to go straight in the air from behind my back, while holding a spinning hoop no less. And then it happened. Very awkwardly, smacking myself in the head on the way up, but it happened. Little victories provide motivation to continue practicing until we can deliberately repeat a movement with greater speed and accuracy. Even my 16-year-old daughter grudgingly admits, “Wow, Mom, you’re getting pretty good.”
Step 3: Make Adjustments.
I play tennis, and once or twice a year I will take a lesson with a pro. I liken it to taking my car in for a wheel alignment. There are always minor adjustments he’ll suggest, whether to my footwork or to the angle of my wrist as I grip my racquet. The impact, however, is noticeable. When I am struggling with a hooping move, I look for pointers from other hoopers. Back when I first started out and I was trying to master shoulder hooping, I had bruises the size of dinner plates on my forearms from the constant pummeling of my hoop. I went online and found an essay by Hooping.org columnist Lara Eastburn. She advised, “Statues can’t hoop and you can’t hurt Jell-o.” And like a key turning in a lock, I suddenly got it. Instead of trying so hard to force that hoop around my shoulders, I let my body go loose and I practiced feeling it move around my torso. I’ve been able to shoulder hoop ever since. Which leads me to the final and most important stage of learning.
Step 4: Stop Trying.
There is an expression, “Let go and let God,” that is about handing over your worries to a higher power. It is a form of release and it has a place in hooping for me. Only to better describe this last stage of learning, I’ll call it, “Let go and let bod.” After observing, practicing and making small adjustments, it’s time to stop working at it and to start feeling it. Hooping is about your body’s connection to the hoop. When it feels right, it works! Remember those optical illusion posters that were so popular in the nineties? You’d stare and stare at an abstract design and when you finally relaxed your eyes, a three-dimensional image would start to take shape until it became as obvious as a photograph. Our fourth step of learning how to hoop is like that. Once I relax my body and really feel it, the movement becomes second nature.
…second nature. Kinda like riding a bike.
Source: by Abby Schwartz at hooping.org
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