In a storefront in Amherst on a recent Saturday morning, five women are creating a blur of color as they spin hula hoops around their arms and hips to a techno beat booming through the room.
Dressed in Spandex from head to toe, instructor Stephanie O’Keeffe is at the front of the room twirling a blue and gray striped hoop with her hips.
“Very nice, talk about a workout,” she says, encouraging her students. “Create some motion above the hoop. You want to alternate your shoulders and let the hoop climb your body.”
O’Keeffe’s class, offered at the business she calls Hoop Joy, is scheduled twice a day every day covering a wide range of hula hooping moves and tricks. These range from the fundamentals of traditional waist twirling to spinning the hoop with just your legs or arms. Calling on an activity many learned as children, O’Keeffe offers a fun way to get fit.
“I often describe it as the body bliss of yoga with the fun of singing in the car,” she says. “It’s about really connecting with your body, and essentially dancing with the hoop.”
On this Saturday, women ranging in age from their 30s to their 70s, twirl hoops not only with their mid-sections, but on their wrists above their heads and over their backs. One women lays down and kicks into the air spinning the hoop around her foot.
Some are dressed in baggy T-shirts and sweat pants, others in tank tops and tights. Hoops occasionally fly out of control scuffing the walls.
To keep a hoop spinning, you have to move your hips — or whatever body part the hoop happens to be on — either side to side or back and forth. Practice strengthens the muscles and allows you to keep the hoop going longer and longer.
After an introduction to waist hooping, students learn techniques for passing the hoop under their legs or around their torsos.
Each move builds on the next, O’Keeffe says.
“If you feel the hoop falling, increase the speed of your wiggle,” O’Keeffe tells her students as she demonstrates.
“To keep your posture straight, fight the urge to watch the hoop, look up.”
“People who come to the class find that it is as much a mental workout as a physical workout because your brain is figuring out all these moves,” O’Keeffe says later. “Your body is developing all sorts of muscle memory about what works and what doesn’t work. It is kind of like putting a puzzle together.”
Playing with hoop toys appears to date back to ancient Egypt, but hula hooping as we know it took off in the United States in the 1950s and has since become a way for adults to stay in shape. It’s cardio activity that puts little to no stress on the joints and increases flexibility and coordination. The American Council on Exercise says that waist hooping can burn as many as 400 calories per hour.
“It’s a full body workout. It’s working everything,” says Janet Price of Northampton, one of O’Keeffe’s students.
Price, 77, focuses intently as the hoop wobbles around her hips.
A retired computer support employee at Amherst College, Price says that after a year of attending O’Keeffe’s class once a week, she’s noticed a big boost in energy and endurance. She went from being able to twirl the hoop for only 20 minutes to being able to keep it spinning for the better part of a 75-minute class.
“Obviously, it involves coordination and practice and you have to develop strength,” she says.
Since it is a low-impact workout, it’s also a good way to improve well-being while aging, says O’Keeffe, 47.
The average age of her students is about 50, she says, but some people well into their 80s come to the class.
“The skills that we develop of flexibility, of balance, are super good for us as we age,” she says.
O’Keeffe became intrigued with hula hooping about four years ago after she encountered adults hooping at The Taste of Amherst, the annual food and music festival held on the Town Common.
“I had never seen such a thing,” she says. “I thought it was so cool.”
At the time, she was a yoga fanatic but was soon ready for something new. “Eventually, I burned out on yoga and I needed something else to do. The idea of hooping stuck with me.”
She says she ordered her first hoop online. “I opened up the box, I cleared some space, I put on some music, and my first thought was: ‘Everyone needs to know about this.’ ”
She turned to YouTube videos to learn technique and began going to parks in town to practice.
Since she had been chair of the Select Board in Amherst for almost six years and had been a longtime volunteer delivering meals with the Meals on Wheels program, people in the community recognized her.
“At first people were really surprised. I was a town official, people viewed me in a certain sort of way, and then they saw me hula hooping on the common or on Kendrick Park.”
People started coming to her weekly gatherings to which she brought a pile of hoops — again thanks to YouTube instruction — she had made herself. She lent them to whomever needed one.
The hoops are constructed from irrigation tubing purchased from home improvement stores. O’Keeffe wraps colorful tape around them to add extra grip.
“The hoops have always been a big hit,” she says.
The idea to open a studio a few years ago came naturally, she says. Her parents were both small business owners: Her father ran Valley Bicycles in Amherst and her mother, a hairdresser, has her own beauty shop on Cape Cod.
“Opening Hoop Joy seemed like the perfect opportunity to create a businesss based on something I enjoy so much,” she says.
Aside from her daily classes, which carry a $12 admission charge, she hosts birthday parties for children at the studio. And recently, she launched a series of free online tutorials on YouTube and the Hoop Joy website to both guide her students in home workouts and to introduce newcomers to hula hooping.
Brandi Perri, 34, who started hula hooping just five months ago, has already mastered dozens of moves since joining O’Keeffe’s classes.
When she gets going, Perri looks like she could be dancing at a night club, bumping her hips from side to side. With ease, she balances two hoops, one spins around her belly, another pivots on her arm up in the air.
She says using one of O’Keeffe’s handmade hoops — which come in varying sizes — helped her improve on the slow progress she had made trying to learn on her own.
Finding the right size hoop made all the difference, she says. A larger hoop takes longer to orbit the body, extending the necessary reaction time and making it far easier, she says.
Dozens of O’Keeffe’s hoops, which are for sale or loan, hang on the walls at Hoop Joy.
Keeffe helps each student find a hoop size that works best depending on his or her body type.
Perri, who has moved into an intermediate class, can hoop around her chest. She can even bend her arm like a chicken wing and spin the hoop on her elbow.
People spin hoops on almost every part of their bodies, says O’Keeffe. Some can even twirl the hoops on their noses, sometimes referred to as “nooping.”
Some of the tricks bring the hoop off the body entirely, like in what O’Keeffe calls a “Z-spin,” where she grabs a hoop and holds her arm out 90 degrees from her body. Her knuckles face out and her thumb points down before she brings the hoop above her head. There she pivots it back and forth in the air by twisting her wrist, flipping the hoop in her hand, as she makes a big sweeping circle.
“Things that look so simple are surprisingly challenging,” she says.
Learning moves like this helps Perri, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, break away from an otherwise sedentary lifestyle of reading and writing, she says.
“It’s been really cool to see how my muscles automatically remember things,” she says. And, she adds, she loves that hooping has boosted her confidence and given her a way to get her body moving.
“It is just fun — there is an aspect to hooping that is just goofy,” she says. “There is a really nice element of play in it too, which we don’t get as much as adults.”
Lisa Spear can be reached at lspear@gazettenet.com.
Hoop Joy is located at 7 Pomeroy Lane in Amherst. Classes are $12 each. A full list of classes and video tutorials, are available at http://www.hoopjoyamherst.com. 687-0809.