“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway”.  John Wayne

The hula hoop is 50 years old!   Remember how much fun we had as kids?  Well, it has just reinvented itself as a core tightening workout that is actually fun!  Fitness clubs are working it into their classes. 

 ”The hoop can teach you to move more freely and creatively – most of us don’t have a lot of opportunity to throw our hips around like that in everyday life,” says San Franciscan hoop instructor Christabel Zamor.  He has written a new book Hooping! A Revolutionary Fitness Program.  And, get this, you can burn 100 calories in half an hour with vigorous hooping!

If you are struggling to keep a kid-size hoop around your middle Zamor says, “Put one foot forward and keep both feet planted on the ground, then rock your hips front to back instead side to side.”  But you also may want to get a larger hoop, which Zamor says is easier for adults to keep going.  You can order on line www.sports-hoop.com for a variety of sizes.

 (We are clearly on a roll with our bathroom related info….we’ll try to get our minds out of the toilet for next weeks communications.)

Dear AgingButDangerous,
By the way, I lived “dangerously” this weekend.  I have this bathroom phobia thing, and am not at all comfortable going to bathrooms in gas stations, and other places where I worry about the conditions of the toilet, sink, and will they have toilet paper.  Now that we travel more,  I have had to suck it up many times and use bathrooms that I wouldn’t under normal circumstances.  Well, this weekend, we went to a Jimmy Buffett concert, and there were lots of Porta Potties.  I immediately said I need to go to the bathroom, but was unsure about the Porta Potty, because I DON”T DO PORTA POTTIES.  Well, long story short, after my husband used one and informed me that the Porta Potty was better than several of the bathrooms I used on an international trip, I lived “dangerously” and used a Porta Potty.  My husband was right, it was cleaner than I expected, and I survived.