Hula Hooping vs. Sit-Ups

In ancient Egypt, kids swung grass hoops around their waists. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that plastic hula hoops were launched in the American market and became a popular toy. Since then, hoops have evolved into a fitness tool, providing a total-body cardio workout. Compared to hooping, sit-ups are a form of calisthenics, targeting your abs and hip flexors for strengthening.

Targeting Versus Total-Body Exercise

A sit-up is designed to isolate and strengthen your front abdominal wall, or rectus abdominis, hip flexors and lower back. Because you lift your lower back off the ground, you activate your hip flexors and the stabilizing muscles in the lumbar spine. When performing a hooping session, you use a 1- to 4-pound hoop with a diameter ranging from 37 to 45 inches. The circling movement of the hoop actually depends on hip thrusts in which you move your hips forward and back. The standard hooping exercise tones your hip flexors, lower back, abdominals, obliques, quads and hamstrings. You can also circle the hoop around your arms, which helps build the muscles in your shoulders, chest and upper extremities.

Big Difference on Calorie Burn

In 2011, the American Council on Exercise sponsored a study on the intensity and calorie burn of hooping workouts. Researchers at the Exercise and Health Program at the University of Wisconsin studied the effects of a 30-minute hooping workout on the heart rate and oxygen consumption of 16 participants, ranging between the ages of 16 and 59. They found that people burn an average of seven calories per minute, or 210 calories for 30 minutes of hooping. The rigor and calorie burn of hooping compares to cardio kickboxing, step aerobics and boot-camp workouts. In contrast to hooping, sit-ups don’t burn many calories. As a form of calisthenics, a 123-pound individual can expect to burn 126 calories doing sit-ups for 30 minutes.

Core Strength and Technique

Sit-ups are typically incorporated into a core strengthening regimen, building stability and abdominal power for a variety of sports. By conditioning your lower-back muscles, sit-ups also help to alleviate back pain and issues, according to the University of California, Berkeley’s “The New Wellness Encyclopedia.” If you’re just spinning the hoop around your waist and rocking back and forth on your feet, you won’t get a rigorous core workout in the same way that you can with sit-ups. Begin a hooping workout for your core by standing with your feet shoulder-width apart and feet parallel. As the hoop makes contact with your navel, push your stomach out to push the hoop and give it the momentum to circle. By expanding and contracting your abdominals while you hoop, you can strengthen your core muscles. In contrast to sit-ups, hooping also improves your hand-eye coordination, rhythm, motor skills, balance and flexibility. While rhythm isn’t a decisive factor in completing a sit-up, you need to develop a sense of rhythm to keep the hoop rotating around your hips or the hoop will topple to the floor.

Flexibility and Variations

Sit-ups involve a pre-determined range of movement. In comparison to hooping, it’s not a flexible exercise that can be modified on a whim in the middle of a workout. The point of a sit-up is to complete the desired number of reps with the same movements. While you can add resistance to a sit-up, such as holding a weight plate, you typically perform other exercises, such as crunches, planks, bicycles, leg raises and trunk rotations, to achieve a balanced strengthening program for your core. In contrast to sit-ups, you can improvise movements in the middle of a hooping workout. For example, hooping classes at gyms incorporate dance moves to provide variety and novelty. How you move your arms or body while the hoop rotates around your body is limited only by your imagination. You can pivot on one foot, do step touches or shimmy the hoop up and down your body, according to “Hooping: A Revolutionary Fitness Program” by Christabel Zamor and Ariane Conrad.