Hula Hoops, Batons, and Playlists

Ya’ll, I’m 65 years old. I can see the entrance to the other side in the hazy distance. Only a short ten years ago, I would have said the idea of stepping through the veil between this world and the next as a result of age was only a concept.

Yet, ten years ago I was less healthy and I felt much older than I do now.

Feeling good

In the time between the ages of 55 and 65, I have lost weight, stopped taking medication for both high blood pressure and high blood sugar, and quit a medication that I had taken for five years from neurological pain due to fibromyalgia. That last one had a negative effect on my thinking abilities and decision-making. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until after I stopped using it!

I’ve struggled with health and fitness over my adult years. I've done a few things in the past couple of years that have helped finally set me on the road to fitness. One of those is what my husband and I call "passive exercise." This approach is a way for us to stick to our exercise programs. The secret is that we only do "exercise" that we have fun doing, whenever we feel like doing it.

Hula hooping brings me joy

When I started hula hooping at the age of 62, I created a playlist that had sixteen songs on it. Well, I used that playlist for months. I began to get bored with the selections. Eventually, my brain registered that if I put it on shuffle I wouldn’t hear the same songs every time I hooped. That helped.

Counting songs

One day as I was hooping I realized that it was distracting to count the songs until I knew I’d reached my minimum time. You see, I had started doing this because I needed to manage my time better. Trying to make it through sixteen songs was unrealistic if I wanted to schedule everything I wanted to do into my days.

Recently, I deleted that playlist and created three new ones. Each of the playlists contains eight songs to hoop to, plus one additional song to use when I do my arm work at the end. The hooping songs total somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes. I hoop through all eight songs, then grab the smaller arm hoops or my baton.

This is my attempt to strengthen my arms without using weights. Like the hula hoop, the baton is something I’d never been able to do as a child and like with the hula hoop, I learned by watching YouTube videos. I’m still pretty clumsy, and I can’t finger-twirl very long, but when I throw it in the air, I catch it more than half the time.

Scheduling my time

I had to stop the weights because they bothered my wrists too much. It's important to recognize my limitations.

I hula hoop three days a week. On the same day at least twice a week, I kick the bag, throw the medicine ball around a bit, and jump rope. On alternating days, I practice yoga.

For a while, I did yoga every morning. However, that became unsustainable as I began adding new asanas to my practice and the additional exercises to my hula hoop days.

I want to stay fit and healthy, but I don’t want to spend all my time exercising. Now that I have specific days for my exercise and yoga, is my exercise still “passive?”

In the way I mean the term, I think it is. While I’ve chosen the slight structure of assigning these activities to certain days, I do them when I feel like it. I add things like belly dance arbitrarily, based on my mood. I walk the balance beam sporadically and take walks in the neighborhood if I want to and the weather is good.

Keeping these physical activities “passive” in this way keeps me wanting to do it. Creating my new playlists for my hula hoop days was a way to help myself maintain interest and have more fun.

At my age, goodness knows I need to keep it interesting!

The playlists

Whether you hula hoop, want some short playlists for your listening pleasure, or you’re just curious, here are the links to my new lists:

1. The childhood memories

2. The young adult empowerment

3. It's all about the dancing

ENJOY!