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Back in the early days when we started hooping I must admit that we weren’t really interested in fitness. We were just out there doing it because it was fun, because we wanted to play, because we wanted to dance, because we wanted to express ourselves. The whole hooping for fitness thing actually turned out to be a bit of a surprise. But when people who hadn’t seen us in awhile said, “Wow, you look great, what have you been doing?”, it started to become apparent even to us that hooping could be a great tool for getting in shape too.

Over the years the fitness aspect of hooping has, rightly or wrongly, become increasingly predominant in the public eye as well. In my early years of talking with the media about the return of the hoop it was rare for a reporter to ask about fitness. Over time, however, it became rare for them to ask about anything else. It seems to me that there are loads of people out there in the world that really want to get in a hoop and play, but they can only allow themselves to do that or take time out for it if they have a practical reason for doing so.

How many calories do you burn hooping? Can you really lose weight with a hula hoop? Will hooping whittle my waist down? Do I need a heavy hoop to shed some pounds? Hooping.org gets numerous emails with questions like these daily. The short answer is that hooping is really great for fitness. The longer answer, however, is a lot more complicated.

Most of us know that hooping is a great calorie burner. The American Council on Exercise study at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse found that hooping compared favorably with most other group classes, that it was comparable to what you’d get from boot-camp, step aerobics, even cardio kickboxing classes. The exact calorie count they came up with was that hooping burns approximately 210 calories per 30-minute session – which fell within ACE’s accepted guidelines for exercise that can contribute to weight management. The American College of Sports Medicine signed off it as well, so yes – we know that hooping is great exercise.

That being said, there are questions that were left unanswered. They examined 16 healthy females (ages 16 to 59) who were regular participants in choreographed hooping classes. They were all women for one, secondly they were all healthy to begin with, and they were all in a class setting with others. Each subject completed a video-led, 30-minute hooping class. Would a live instructor have made any additional impact, negatively or positively? We don’t really know. The video used featured a five-minute warm-up followed by a 30-minute hooping workout that included seven different dances and a wide variety of choreography. Would you get the same results hooping in front of your television while catching the latest episode of True Blood? Again, we really don’t know.

The average heart rate for the 30-minute class was 151 beats per minute, which corresponds to 84 percent of age-predicted maximum heart rate. Average oxygen consumption was 20.6 ml/kg/min, and average caloric expenditures were 70 Kcal/min, which is equivalent to 210 calories for 30 minutes of hooping. Average RPE was 13.0, which corresponds to “somewhat hard” on the Borg scale. All of this data is, of course, incredibly fascinating if you’re a hoop geek like me – but I still have some questions. Do men burn more calories hooping since most men hoop a little “harder”? Does the size and weight of the hoop make a difference? While it seems like the answer would obviously be yes, without some science to back it up, can we really say for certain?

In my own personal experience, as well as in my independent, casual, random surveys of the years, which are hardly scientific, it seems to me that the hoop itself can play a significant role. Back in the early days of hooping we were all using large, over-sized hoops. They were heavier than anything you’d find in a toy store, but they weren’t weighted with water or sand or anything. Over the years as hooping began to become popular for fitness, along with that came this now widespread common misperception that weighted hoops were necessary to make it happen. Our adult-sized custom hoops made from pvc tubing were already larger and heavier than anything you’d find at Toys R Us. Our hoops weighed a pound or two depending on how much tape you put on it, and if you wanted it to be a little heavier you just added another color to your design.

Hoop size is, and hopefully always will be, a matter of personal taste that plays within your relationship to your own physical stature. What works for one person may not necessarily work for another. A hoop designed for me – a 6′ tall male -most likely won’t be the same as one made for a 5′ 2″ female. Finding the right hoop for you is incredibly important – and it’s important to your own personal fitness factor. If you were to decide that you really wanted to lose weight and you got yourself one of those heavier hoops (3 lbs, 5 lbs, 10 lbs) that are typically manufactured in China, one of the problems is that you’re really only supposed to use them for 10 minutes a day. Most come with warning labels actually to prevent internal injury. You also won’t be able to do any real full body work with them because while they are in fact great for building core strength, other than that they’re rather useless.

One of the things that the initial hooping movement really had in it’s favor when it came to losing weight was that we were having fun. Hooping with a heavy weighted hoop for ten minutes can become as much of a routine drudgery as any treadmill. Using a more standard adult-sized custom hoop that weighs 1lb to 2lbs, however, you’re going to have a lot more fun, be able to do more with it, learn some fun moves, dazzle your friends, and the more you enjoy yourself while hooping, the longer you are likely to keep on playing – I mean exercising. Taking this even a step further I’ve found myself wondering in recent months, is it easier for the human body to lose weight when you have a smile on your face and you feel good about yourself and what you are doing, then it is when you approach a fitness activity with the attitude of it being something you have to do or endure so you can check it off your list? While I don’t really know the answer, with all of the insights in recent years on how the mind and spirit impact the human body and our health, it really does make you think, doesn’t it?

As for me personally and my own hooping and weight loss journey, I started out using a hoop that was probably 48″ in diameter. It was actually a hand-made collapsable hoop with a bungee cord inside of it (instructions here) so it had a little additional weight – probably weighing two pounds. It was made from 1″ 100psi pvc pipe and being a guy probably played a part in how much I loved that hoop too. I loved the speed and momentum that the weight would give it while hooping. I could really rock that thing, and while women tended to gravitate to the 3/4″ pipe in those days, most of us guys liked having a little more girth in our hand. How did that hoop ultimately impact my life as a fitness tool? When I started hooping I had a 35″ waist and a year later I was fitting comfortably into my old 32″ pants again, which was pretty incredible. I really hadn’t changed much of anything in my life, other than the fact that I had picked up hooping. Once, usually twice a week, I would grab my hoop, head outside, crank up the tunes, and simply go at it for a two or three hours, sometimes more. Again, when you’re enjoying yourself you’re likely to play/exercise even longer.

A few years later when a newcomer fell in love with my hoop at a hoopjam, I ended up giving it to them. I then downsized to another hoop that I was beginning to really like that was 3/4″ pipe and probably 40″ in diameter. It wasn’t collapsable. It didn’t have any extra weight to it. It was lighter and smaller than the hoop I’d been previously using and I wasn’t even aware that I had begun putting the weight back on. Over the next several months I only noticed that the buttons on my pants seemed to be coming off, which was an odd thing to have happen all at once, and my clothes seemed to be shrinking and getting smaller and tighter. I seriously thought someone must have been playing with the dryer settings in my apartment building until I stepped on a scale one day at a shopping mall. 220 pounds? Gasp! Somehow I had managed to put all the weight I’d lost back on and then some!

While some with a nose for fitness would simply argue that my fitness routine had become that – routine – and my body was thus no longer responding to it, the fact that this didn’t occur during my first few years of hooping seems to say otherwise. In my independent, casual, random survey about this over the past year I’ve heard from others out there who had a similar experience – they downsized their hoop and increased their weight gain. Coincidence? Hmm, I think not.

Looking at all of this rather scientifically, however, there are simple basic facts that most anyone can agree on when it comes to hooping for fitness. If you exercise for an hour instead of only 30 minutes, you’re going to have a greater fitness impact result. How long you exercise for does indeed play a factor. How much you exert yourself during exercise has an impact as well. You can walk for an hour at a 2 mile per hour pace or a 3 mile per hour pace, and the faster you’re going, the more calories you’re going to burn. Thus the amount of energy you put into your hooping or hoop dance is bound to have an impact on your overall fitness factor. Using a hoop that is on the larger and heavier side for you does seem to be a bit of a no brainer in helping out in this regard.

When it comes to weight loss and fitness in general, however, whether you are hooping or doing yoga or any multitude of exercise options out there, there doesn’t really appear to be any sort of holy grail that can do it all for everyone. Genetics, metabolism, diet, all of these will, of course, play a role in just how big of an impact hooping can play in your own weight loss journey as well. As for mine, once I realized that I had in fact actually gained weight again and that there wasn’t some sort of clothing conspiracy going on, I went to work on losing it. I bumped myself up to a 42″ folding collapsable hoop with a little more weight to it, then I went to work on evaluating and changing my overall diet. Over the past few months I’ve lost 28 pounds so far with seven more to go – and I know many of you have your own hooping and weight loss stories to share as well. Hooping as a fitness option is still incredibly new in the big scheme of things and while we have a little research now that confirmed what we we already knew, there’s more to be done. Whether we have all the scientific data we need or not, however, one thing has already been made abundantly clear. Hooping is great for you and your body.