Hula Hooping - How does your body benefit?

[13moonmama]

Hi! I've lost 30 lbs by eating right and hooping. Hoop dancing is fun, and I'm doing it for fun, time flies and I can see a change in my stomach area. I can also feel my lower back being worked.

I really want to know how affective hooping is on the butt/thigh area? Does anyone have any facts compared to other well known butt and thigh exercises? My hoop weighs 1.8 lbs. Sometimes when I know my heart rate is up, I will hoop around my hips and thighs and rock back and forth, hitting the weigh of my hooping with my butt and front of my thighs as it goes around. I can feel that my saddle bag area is flexing. But, I feel like that area on me is so dead and non responsive that I will never see any benefit! I am curious to know how hooping around my hips compares to squats and lunges? I haven't done any of those yet, and plan to so that I can create muscle confusion.

I remember year ago, I did a 60 minute fat burning workout (my heart rate was always higher then it was suppose to be) where there were SO MANY squats and leg lunges, that it hurt to sit down, my butt hurt BAD!! I did that workout 3 times a week for 3 or 4 months and didn't notice a difference in my Butt and thighs. WHY?

btw, I'm 24 and I've been eating organically for 4 years. No saturated fats, no corn syrup, no refined sugar, bready snack foods, or fatty meats and I always choose complex carbs. I try to eat my fruit by itself. I'm 5'7 and 145 right now. I started out at 175. I can't get any higher then 175, no matter how much I eat because I tend to over eat on health food. I have an hourglass figure. I have always had horrible upper body strength even as a kid and my saddle bags are my worse area!

Thanks for the advice in advance!
Kayla

 

[bedfordfitness]

benefits?

If you love it and it is working for you, then it works.

Changing to something you don't like as much may maky you dread your workouts, but mixing in some other stuff would be fine.

Now to talk about what you are actually trying to do. You are doing spot training, trying to work the fat off of a particular place by working the muscles underneath. Unfortunately this does not work.

What you want is long lean muscles underneath with some overall body fat loss (I don't know what your actual body fat is, but i am guessing that if you still have some to lose, you know where you tend to keep it). So keep up the cardio, but do not do lots of bulking exericises... in the other thread I responded to everyone was telling you to get higher weights. While 3 lbs IS a little light, don't get excessive, because you do not want to do low reps/high weights if your problem area is your thighs etc, because the LAST thing you want to do is bulk that area, right? While the chances of your being able to build huge muscles, as a woman, are low, you CAN build muscle. So high reps that keep your heart going is exactly what you want to do.

I hope this answers your questions about why the exericising you did before did not work for you, while you may have adjusted your diet and simply taken in more calories to compensate for the calorie burn (and therefore not actually losing weight) you may not have noticed the change in your thighs because you were either building too much muscle underneath, or not building any because you were not giving your legs enough REST. Another key factor. Either is possible, hard to tell though, but if your legs NEVER stopped hurting, I would say the latter.

Good luck.

Oh, and I don't really know about the calorie burn on a hula-hoop plan, but having done it before, though not recently , I would say it is pretty decent (someone selling some says up to 100 calories in ten minutes). Like I said, if you love it, it's fun, and you can keep it up long enough for benefits (like you don't stop after five minutes and that is that)...

Do you change directions? Don't want to be lopsided you know!