Exercise for People Who Hate Exercise: Why Hula Hooping Might Surprise You

I have a confession to make: for someone who has spent more than a decade teaching a form of exercise, I don’t really love exercise.

I’m never going to be the person who wakes up excited to do burpees. Running on a treadmill is approximately as fun to me as waiting in the car line to pick up my daughter from school. And I think the idea that a workout has to leave you sweaty, miserable, and counting down the seconds until it’s over in order for it to count is one reason why I struggled for so long to find an exercise that worked for me.

I finally figured out that I actually love moving my body, but to get there, I had to reframe in my mind what it means to exercise.

Maybe you’re like me and you’ve spent your whole life thinking you’re someone who hates exercise because of a traumatic experience you had in 4th grade PE class.

Maybe you’ve joined gyms you stopped going to, bought workout equipment that eventually became a clothes rack, or repeatedly promised yourself that this time you were finally going to become a person who loves working out.

I’ve done all that too. Multiple times.

Here’s what I’m asking you to consider today: maybe you actually don’t hate moving your body. Maybe you just hate the kinds of movement you’ve been told count as exercise.

Why Do We Hate Exercise So Much?

For a lot of us, our relationship with exercise got complicated long before we were old enough to choose how we wanted to move our bodies.

For me, it started with always feeling like the least athletic kid in PE class. I was often picked last for a team, couldn’t run as fast as the other kids, or had to do some ridiculous fitness test while everyone watched me, red-faced and near tears, struggle to come in last. It was humiliating!

Then life just kept piling it on. I grew up in the 1990s, when exercise became tangled up with dieting, weight loss, calories burned, and the never ending seemingly noble quest to make your body as small as possible.

Through all of that, many of us learned that exercise was supposed to be hard and honestly, even traumatic. It was supposed to require discipline. You were supposed to push through it even when you hated it. And if you couldn’t stick with a workout routine, well, obviously you just weren’t motivated enough.

I bought into that for a long time. We all did.

But think about how weird that is. If you absolutely hated knitting, nobody would tell you that the solution was to wake up at 5 a.m. and knit harder until you developed some discipline. You’d just…find a different hobby.

What I finally figured out is that yes, exercise is important, but moving your body doesn’t have to mean going to the gym, running, lifting weights, following along with a workout video, or doing anything else just because someone told you that’s what exercise is supposed to look like.

The best kind of movement is the kind you’ll actually want to do again. The kind you actually look forward to. 

And once I figured that out, my relationship with exercise began to heal.

The Exercise I Accidentally Fell in Love With

For me, that movement was hula hooping.

When I picked up my first adult hula hoop in 2013, one that was actually big enough that my plus-sized body could keep the hoop spinning around my waist, I wasn’t trying to discover my life’s passion. I certainly wasn’t planning to build a business around it, make tens of thousands of hula hoops, or spend the next decade teaching other people how to do it.

I just wanted to move my body. And I wasn’t super optimistic that this would be the thing for me, because nothing ever had been.

I’m just so glad I kept looking for my thing, though… because something surprising, and pretty magical, happened after I hula hooped with that big DIY hoop I made out of tubing I bought at Lowe’s…

I actually wanted to do it again.

Instead of staring at a clock waiting for a workout to be over, I’d put on music and hoop. I’d be drenched in sweat and totally engrossed in moving my body along to the beat of my favorite songs without even realizing how much time was going by.

Instead of thinking about how many calories I was burning, I was thinking about keeping the hoop going a little longer or figuring out something new I could do with it.

And every time I nailed a new hoop trick? That little YESSSS! feeling made me want to keep going.

At some point early in my hoop journey, I realized I wasn’t forcing myself to exercise anymore. I was having a freaking blast!!

That’s something we give ourselves permission to do all the time when we’re kids and then, somewhere along the way, we’re expected to grow out of it. Movement becomes serious. It becomes something we should do for our health or our weight instead of something we do simply because it’s fun.

Hula hooping gave me some of that playfulness back. It honestly allowed me to go back to that little chubby girl who never could get the hang of hula hooping, who always came in last in PE class, and reclaim a little piece of that childhood for her. It allowed me to heal some deep trauma inside of me while also making my physical body stronger.

And more than a decade later, I’m still doing it. Even better, I’ve met so many people along the way who fell in love with hooping just like I did.

There’s something about hooping that can keep pulling you back. With the right-sized hoop, there’s always another song to hoop to, another trick to learn, another little victory to celebrate, and an incredibly uplifting community of people to share the journey with.

That’s why, when someone tells me they hate exercise, I don’t immediately think they need a better workout plan or more motivation.

I wonder if they just haven’t found their hula hoop yet.

Maybe yours is literally a hula hoop.

And if you’re reading this, I’d really like the chance to convince you to find out.

Why Hula Hooping Works So Well for People Who Hate Exercise

So what makes hula hooping different from all those other forms of exercise you’ve tried and abandoned?

For me, it comes down to one big thing: when I’m hooping, exercising isn’t the main event.

I’m listening to music. I’m trying to keep the hoop spinning. I’m learning something new. I’m laughing when I completely screw up a trick I’ve attempted 47 times. My body is moving the entire time, but my brain is focused on solving the hoop trick puzzle, not on how many seconds and minutes are crawling by. It is night and day different from how I used to stare at that clock on the treadmill at my local Planet Fitness.

Here are a few reasons I think hula hooping works so well for people who hate traditional workouts:

It feels more like play than exercise.
There’s a reason you’ll never see someone hula hooping who isn’t also grinning. There’s something inherently silly and playful about picking up a giant colorful circle and seeing what you can do with it. You don’t need to make it serious for it to be worthwhile.

There’s always something for your brain to work on.
Once you learn to keep the hoop spinning around your waist, that’s really just the beginning. You can learn to move around while hooping, change directions, dance with your hoop, learn off-body tricks, or just challenge yourself to keep it going through one more song.

Music makes everything better.
Put on a song you love and hoop until it’s over. Congratulations—you just moved your body for four minutes without staring at a timer wondering how that four minutes has somehow felt like three hours.

You can do it in your own private space.
You don’t have to walk into a gym where you feel like everyone knows what they’re doing except you. You can learn in your living room, your backyard, your driveway—wherever you have enough room to swing a giant circle around without taking out a lamp.

You can start exactly where you are.
You don’t have to already be fit, coordinated, thin, young, or athletic to start hula hooping. I’ve taught thousands of beginners over the years, and believe me when I tell you that “I’m too uncoordinated to hula hoop” is something I’ve heard a LOT. You can do it. Yes, YOU!

You might find a whole community you never knew existed.
This was one of the biggest surprises for me when I started hooping. I thought I was just picking up a hula hoop. I had no idea I was also stumbling into this unique, wonderful, incredibly supportive community of people who would become such a huge part of my life. Some of my absolute BEST friends I met through hula hooping.

Hoopers cheer for each other. We celebrate when somebody finally nails the trick they’ve been working on for weeks. We share ideas, teach each other new things, meet up to hoop together at festivals, retreats, and just a random park or beach, and make friendships with people we probably never would have crossed paths with otherwise.

And here’s the really magical part: you don’t have to be good at hooping before you’re allowed to belong.

When you’re brand new and excited because you kept the hoop up for ten seconds, other hoopers aren’t thinking, Big deal, I can do that. They’re excited with you, because every one of us remembers what those first ten seconds felt like.

For someone who spent a lifetime feeling like the least athletic person in the room, finding a community where nobody cared whether I was the fastest, thinnest, strongest, or best at anything was something I didn’t even know I needed.

I came to hula hooping looking for exercise. I found my people.

Progress feels like a tangible accomplishment instead of a chore.
The first time you keep your hoop going for an entire song—or finally nail a trick you’ve been practicing, the payoff is huge! You feel incredibly proud of yourself and excited to keep going.

For me, that’s the biggest difference.

Instead of asking, “How long do I have to exercise today?” you start wondering, “What can I learn to do with this plastic circle next?”

It absolutely changes everything.

But What If I’m Too Big to Hula Hoop?

If you’re thinking, Okay, this sounds fun, but there’s no way I can hula hoop at my size, I need you to hear this:

Your body is not too big to hula hoop. If you have tried to hoop unsuccessfully, it’s likely because the hoop was too small. 

This is something I’m especially passionate about because I’m a plus-size hula hooper myself, and I’ve spent more than a decade teaching people in larger bodies how to hoop.

Most of us learned to hula hoop with those tiny, lightweight hoops we played with as kids. Then we pick one up as an adult, give it a few spins, watch it immediately fall to the floor and think, Welp. Guess I can’t hula hoop anymore.

Or, if you’re like me, you never could do it as a kid either. So needless to say, I wasn’t exactly confident I’d be able to learn as an adult.

UNTIL I found out that I just needed a bigger hoop. A larger-diameter adult hoop rotates more slowly around your body, giving you more time to respond to it and keep it moving. For many beginners, and especially beginners with larger bodies, that makes learning dramatically easier.

I’ve made hoops for people in a huge range of body sizes over the years, and they’re all hoops much larger than anything you’ll ever find hanging in the toy aisle at Walmart. Most of them are bigger than what you’ll find in the sporting goods section, too.

If you want more help choosing one, I’ve put together a complete guide to hula hooping for plus-size people and an adult hula hoop size guide that will help you figure out what diameter is likely to work best for your body.

You do not need to make your body smaller so you can hula hoop. You need a hula hoop made to work with the body you have right now.