SweatFest: Day 2. House of Hoop

I actually did 3 classes last night, but I’m only counting two of them, because the middle class was weird.
The first class of the night was House, so I felt pretty much totally in my element. I play favourites, and even though I wrote a whole book about breaking, I’m not shy to admit: house is my favourite. What is house? Check out this house battle to get an idea. The guy in red is Ddimplz, the teacher of last night’s class.
The second class, the weird one, was bboying. What made it weird? I did the warm up– running, jumping jacks, push ups– all pretty light compared to the other classes I’ve done already this week. And then something pretty cool happened: the “topic” of the class was windmills.
This is a windmill, btw:
I’ve never done windmills before. Never even tried. Always assumed they’d be forever out of my reach. But the way the teacher, Rockit, explained them yesterday, I started to realize that there’s no earthly reason I shouldn’t be able to at least practice them. I can hold a crab freeze for an hour if I want to, and I can back spin. Everything in between is pretty much momentum and technique. I can do momentum and technique.
However, there are only so many people you can cram into a studio doing windmills, and we were close to capacity. So my patience, and my fear had me taking a lot of breaks on the edge of the room– so many, the class was almost all breaks for me. And then at the end, I didn’t feel like doing the cypher. So even though I learned a lot– maybe more than in any other class for a long time– I felt like I hadn’t actually done enough of the class to count it.
This is a cypher– people take turns, showing off their stuff in the circle. I often can’t work up the chutzpah to participate.
The final class of the evening was just total fun: hula hooping, (or just “hooping” I’m told, if you want to sound professional). Here’s an arty iPhone shot of the magical hoops waiting to be flung into action:

For the first class, we learned different ways of handling the hoop– around the waist, neck, arms hands. It was quite a mid-section workout. My back is a little tired today.
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