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Hooping it up!
Adults using toy-like equipment for exercise and relaxation

Orlando Worthy has a theory about aging. "We get old because we stop playing. Adults become inhibited," he says. And he has an idea for a simple way to head off the process or reverse it.

It's hula hooping.

While having this conversation at Springfield's Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, where he is youth director, the 57-year-old twirls a hoop on his hips, stands on one foot and then the other, moves from side to side, takes some steps and does a little dance.

If the hula hoop is indeed the fountain of youth, people all over Western Massachusetts have a good chance of taking years off their life or staying young in the first place. They are finding that the hoop develops core strength, helps coordination, aids weight loss and just generally makes them feel good.

In Amherst, 40-something mothers hoop while watching their children take tennis lessons, and the players hoop while warming up, hitting and serving the ball. In Greenfield, 22-year-old Shenandoah Sluter is making a name for herself as a dancer who performs with hoops and takes them into schools and to festivals. She's found a market for her colorful home-made hoops and she sells them wherever she goes and through her Web site, www.alottahoopla.com It isn't technically called hula hooping any more. Now it's just called hooping, the term applied to large customized hoops made with tubing and then weighted with water or sand. These hoops, bigger, heavier and more user-friendly, aren't just for children anymore. They've brought hooping back into the American culture after its heyday in the 1950s and '60s when it seemed like one was attached to every girl's hip.

"I call them hoopla hoops," Sluter said. "They're the evolved hula hoop. They're better so that we as adults can play with them."

People have played with different versions of the hula hoop since ancient Egypt. In 1958, Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, the founders of Wham-O, released the first modern-day plastic hoop and trademarked it "hula-hoop," inspired by the way that playing with the toy resembled the Hawaiian hula dance. The jam band called String Cheese Incident claims some credit for the resurgence, having tossed hoops into the audience since the late 1990s.

There are, of course, Web sites for the new kind of hooping, such as www.hooping.org, which calls itself "a gathering space for people who like to dance, meditate, play, perform and do tricks with large customized hula hoops." And a variety of Internet sites contain information about making your own hoop.

Locally, the people who use hoops for fitness and fun also make them, decorating the tubing with colorful tape. "Most guys think it's a girl thing, but it isn't," said Art Carrington, 59, who uses hula hoops, ribbons, maracas and other rhythmic aids at his Arthur Carrington Tennis Academy at Hampshire College in Amherst. He teaches kids and teens at his summer program, but, he said, "I show all my parents, and instead of sitting around, they hula hoop."

Carrington has been hooping for about 10 years. "Most people don't have any idea what hooping can do," he said. "Rhythmic movement is the key to efficient movement," Carrington said. "You totally forget you're doing it ... I teach simplicity and gracefulness that involves all the muscles moving concurrently."

Forty-five-year-old Lisa Kirwan of Amherst was among a group of mothers - some of them tennis players in their own right - hooping on a hill at Hampshire while their children did drills at Carrington's camp. "I have back problems. A couple of times I couldn't move. As long as I hula hoop my back is OK," she said. Demonstrating the movement required for getting started, she said, "You have to throw it hard and the momentum will carry you." Michele M. Ditomassi, 49, said she likes the abdominal workout. "It makes me feel healthy, in shape, energized," the Longmeadow woman said.

Back in Springfield, Worthy said that he started hooping at age 9 in his hometown, Winston Salem, N.C. and hasn't stopped.

"The primary thing was, it was fun," he said. "It connects adults with their childhood." He taught an adult class at the Springfield center recently using a medicine ball, ribbons, hoops and light weights and plans to offer it again in the fall. And he said that for children, hooping makes fitness enjoyable. "It's a useful tool in terms of combating childhood obesity."

He prescribes 20 minutes a day. It might take a few minutes for adults to remember the motion, but, he said, "Anyone can do it and I suggest everyone do it, young, old, big, small."

Shenandoah Sluter picked it up at a festival four years ago. "Someone handed me a hoop. I kept it going, which surprised me," she said. Later she bought a hoop at another festival and began dancing with it. That one was stolen, but she figured out how to make another with irrigation tubing that she got at a lumber yard. She made eight or 10 and took them with her while traveling out West. "People loved them everywhere I went," she said. "I was just going with the flow. It was a magical time."

A graduate of the Franklin County Technical High School in Turners Falls, Sluter worked as a preschool teacher but now spends summers painting houses so she can afford to travel while she's young. And then the hoop thing took off. "The spark that happens in people is amazing," she said. "It connects people with movement and the music." Standing inside a circle of colorful hoops in her back yard in Greenfield, she demonstrated how she dances with the hoop. Gracefully, she twirled one on her neck, arms and hands. She tossed it, caught it, and jumped in and out.

"It takes my mind off everything else. It balances my mind and my body in a unique way," she said. Sluter usually brings her hoops to the Coop Concerts at the Energy Park in Greenfield on Thursdays. She also plans to be at the Garlic and Arts Festival, scheduled for Sept. 16 and 17 in Orange. Information about the festival is available at www.garlicandarts.org