I was taking a walk at the Kensico Dam in Valhalla, NY when I spotted a woman working out swinging ‘sumthin’ in the distance.
I was curious what the heck she was doing and just had to ask her. So, I walked over and saw she was swinging a contraption around her waist and hips, similar to what we used to do as kids with that old Skip-It toy you’d swing around your ankle and jump over with your other leg. She said it was a ‘Weighted Hula Hoop’ and she she it was a Tik Tok Trend. Who Knew? I instantly felt I might need one too! LOL
I got to talking with Dr. Karen Blacks, who said according to her app, her 20 minutes of ‘hula hooping’ was the same as walking 2 miles, plus it tightens your core, she said.
A few laughs later, I find out like me, Dr. Blacks enjoys talking to strangers, so I told her about my upcoming little book, “How To Talk To Strangers, Advice From A Professional Stranger Talker.” Then she told me she wrote a book called ‘Experiencing God in The Ordinary’. Then she mentioned she was excited she was being ordained at a Baptist Minister that weekend, then… I invited her on my show to share the big hula hoop discovery and celebrate her accomplishment!
Meanwhile, next day Amazon delivered my own ‘weighted hula hoop”. I chose blue. It was pretty easy to figure out how to size it to my waist and attach the weighted thingy. What was challenging was figuring ‘where’ to hula. I tried it inside my house and almost cleared all the glasses off my bar. I was too embarrassed to let my neighbors see me hula swinging outside my house, so I waited till almost dark and tried it out for like 2 minutes. Then I put it in my car and figured I’d just keep it there for when I went walking and do it in a random park. But every time I was about to take it out and swing it around, I thought I’d look stupid, so I didn’t.
One day just as I walked into a CVS drugstore, my phone rang, and it was my bestie Mo calling from the parking lot telling me that I’d just parked next to her and walked past her car without noticing. I knew she was in a funky mood, so I thought I’d cheer her up on the way back out, and make her laugh by showing off my moves with my new hula hoop in the parking lot while she watched from inside her car. That was a good laugh. She was laughing so hard she filmed it.
Anyway, I finally found the perfect spot to do my hula exercise, a hideaway grassy area in my local park. The other day after walking I put it on, and got my weighted hula hooping swinging up to 5 minutes and found myself sweating. Even crazier, I checked my ‘steps’ on my iPhone and sure enough it was like I had walked another half mile. I’m getting the hang of it now.
Last night after walking, right around dusk when I got back to my car in a mostly empty parking lot, I figured no one would notice me hula swinging. So I put it on, and hula hooped with my phone in my hand to just again see if it counted as ‘steps’.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw random woman walking in the distance toward her parked car but paid her no mind, until she turned and started walking toward me and I knew why. In her Norwegian accent she said,… ‘What’ is that thing you’re doing?”
I was laughing while still hooping as I told her, I had done the same exact thing when I saw the random Baptist Minister swinging her weighted hula hoop. Now the Norwegian lady wanted to get one too. So, while still swinging away, I gave her the name of it to look it up on Amazon.
Anyway, I decided some of you after reading this story, might get a kick out of the idea and want to try a weighted hula hoop too. I bought the Dumoyi Smart Weighted Fit Hoop For Adults.
Let me know if you get one. LOL
Meanwhile listen in and have some laughs and meet my latest ‘Random Run In’ Dr. Karen Blacks in this podcast of our live conversation from The Debbie Nigro Show.
When she’s not ‘hula hooping’ at the dam, Dr. Karen Blacks serves as the Associate Minister, and Minister of Women’s Initiatives at Antioch Baptist Church in Bedford Hills, New York. Dr. Blacks is also the founder of Women of God in the World, a welcoming community of over 10,000 women from 30+ countries. Dr. Blacks holds a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry from New York Theological Seminary and a Certificate of Specialization in Leadership and Management from Harvard Business School Online. She also has a heart for volunteering and can be found distributing food to those in need in the White Plains community. She serves on the Town of Bedford Prison Relations Advisory Committee, is a member of the Westchester NY Black Women’s Political Caucus and is on the board of the Women’s Empowerment Forum located in Liberia, Africa.
PS I may make a small commission from Amazon to support my good work.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
0:00:00
It’s time for the Debbie Nigro Show with Debbie Nigro, who says she’s still a babe, or at least she thinks she still is. That’s right, attitude is everything, and Debbie’s delusionally young. No one sees the glass of Cabernet half full like Debbie. She’s fresh air with a magnetic flair. Some day has arrived, and as far as she’s concerned, it’s time to roll.
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0:00:26
You’re like a pill to me, a luxury, my sugar, and oh, my… Well, maybe my random run-in today will save your soul. Hi, everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro. You know me, right? I love to be curious.
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0:00:38
And I’m taking a walk last week in a new place for me, someplace I love but haven’t been to in a long time, the Kentico Dam in Valhalla, New York, which is an extremely amazing structure and so much history there.
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0:00:51
There’s a 9-11 monument there. It’s just a cool place, right? A cool place. So I see this woman across the way. I can’t quite figure out what she’s doing, but she’s swinging something, like, around her. So I make my way closer to her, and she can’t, she doesn’t see me because she has earbuds in, and she’s just not, and I’m like, I don’t want to scare her. But I finally get her attention. I’m like, what are you doing? Oh, she says, Oh, this is a weighted hula hoop. And the story goes from there. I now own one because I immediately ordered one from Amazon. And I immediately had to invite my my guest who you’re going to meet in 10 seconds here to join me on the show today because I love meeting strangers. Anyway, she was a fun, fabulous woman who apparently enjoyed talking and engaging with strangers like I do. Dr. Karen Blacks is going to join me. What’s really wonderful about her being on the show today and why I wanted to have her smack right dab at the top on a Monday is she accomplished something yesterday that was very important to her life’s work, and she put a lot of effort into it and she became ordained yesterday as a Baptist minister. So., I have a hula hooping Baptist minister to open up my show today for you guys. Welcome Dr. Karen Blacks.
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0:02:34
Good morning, Debbie.
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0:02:35
Thank you.
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0:02:36
Thank you.
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0:02:37
I got a good laugh out of you. I have to tell you, Dr. Karen Blacks, it’s just so nice that you joined me that you didn’t even think twice that I was completely out of my mind. Like, who is this woman? And I do own a hula hoop, the same one as you, and I think you need to describe it to the listening audience who can’t see the video I put up on Instagram or Facebook this morning.
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0:02:57
So, go ahead. Well, this weighted hula hoop is a series of interlocked plastic joints that form a circle that fits around your waist like a belt, and it has a long cord and at the end of the court there’s a weighted ball. The ball probably weighs, I don’t know, two maybe three pounds and the ball is attached on a track and you swing the ball around and then you move your body to propel the energy of the ball in a circular motion
1
0:03:30
and you’re hula hooping. Oh wow, you should explain that way better than me. I describe it as a lot like that thing we used as kids. It’s called a skip it. It was something you put on your ankle, and you swung it around with one leg and you jumped over with the other leg. That’s what it reminded me of. I had to know more. You were telling me that you have an app for it that basically showed you doing 20 minutes of this weighted hula hooping.
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0:03:56
was like doing two miles. Yeah. I found the hula hoop on social media and ordered it from Amazon like you did and as I was using it I discovered that my Apple watch will detect the motion. And so now I use my watch, I set it for a workout other and then it detects the motion, and I was happily surprised when I checked my stats and after 20 minutes of hula hooping my watch registered a two-mile walk. I’d already done like 4,000 steps. Needless to say, I was super excited, and I was just encouraged to do so much more. When I left the park that day, I think I had like 10,000 steps in almost an hour of hula hooping. You know, little breaks.
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0:04:48
Back in the day I imagine like me you had a hula hoop.
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0:04:51
Yep.
1
0:04:52
Okay. And have you tried to do a regular hula hoop, fast forward, all these years later?
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0:04:59
A few years back at some kind of, you know, park event, a little girl had a hula hoop and we tried the hula hoop. And yeah, I was able to dust off my old school hula hoop skills and I mean, I could do it a little bit.
1
0:05:16
That’s the point I’m getting at here. I was hoping you’d say, I was hoping you’d say, I could barely do it. I tried to do it. I was a great hula hooper. These days, I’m like, come on, it falls down every 10 seconds. I can’t keep it going fast enough to get it going. So when I saw what you were doing, I go, oh, this takes me back. This could work. This is something that might help my core and my hips. Is that what it’s supposed to do, too, like tighten your core, you know, give you that hula girl shape. What are we doing here?
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0:05:40
Absolutely. I did a little research to find out which muscles are used during this hula hoop, and it is. It’s your core muscles. It definitely helps your abs because you’re moving in that kind of shimmying motion. It straightens up your back. It’s good for your legs, and it helps your arms even as you kind of propel yourself. You almost get a full body workout. Your legs are toned because you’re trying to anchor yourself to the ground. It works out my brain as I’m trying to coordinate all these things.
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0:06:15
Oh, I have to tell you, I did order it. I got right home, and I was like, I have to have this thing. So I chose mine in blue so I could find it because yours is black. And did you get the gold inside things? I was like, wow, this is like funky stuff inside There’s almost like springs that go completely around your waist so that whatever you’re doing It’s not like rubbing against you, and I took a couple of links off I don’t think I maybe took one too many, but then I’m in my living room I go how does this thing work because I didn’t expect the ball to be so heavy right like it’s like a ball and chain And I did one swoop, and I went whoa almost knocked everything off the bar. You can’t do that inside.
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0:06:50
Yeah, no, you must move some furniture out and really make sure that your belt is on secure so that it doesn’t fly off in the next room. I don’t trust myself in the house. I do it in the park.
1
0:07:04
That’s why I was laughing. I tell you; you made me smile and I’m always into trying new things and I’m not going to, you know, hurt myself with, but I found this to be exciting. I didn’t know it was a TikTok trend, so good for you that you were so cool that you knew ahead of me. And then we started talking and I said to you, listen, I hope you don’t mind me talking to you. I just wrote a book about how to talk to strangers, advice from a professional stranger talker. And you said, oh, I wrote a book, Experiencing God in the Ordinary. I’m like, oh, that’s so cool. And then you started to share that you were a minister, and I did some homework on you and you’ve got quite a list of things you’ve accomplished here. May I just run through a few things that you can tell me about yesterday?
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0:07:45
Sure.
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0:07:46
I think the nicest thing I read about you is that you believe, and I don’t talk religion or politics on the show, but that you believe that ministry should transcend boundaries and touch hearts everywhere. I’m a heart girl and heart-centered girl, so I know that’s why we connected. Just for those listening, Dr. Karen Black is the Associate Minister and Minister of Women’s Initiatives at the Antioch Baptist Church in Bedford Hills, New York, and she’s the founder of Women of God in the World, which is a community of over 10,000 women from 30 countries. Hello, that’s impressive. You have a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry from New York Theological Seminary and a Certificate of Specialization in Leadership and Management from Harvard Business School Online and a heart for volunteering too. Yesterday was a big day for you. You can share because I saw the excitement in your voice and the smile. Yeah, well yesterday we announced and invited the church to join me next Saturday for a large ordination celebration. I’ve been accepted for ordination in the Christian faith, which means all these faith leaders came together. I had to write a paper, they examined my paper to make sure that my doctrines sound and that I can be responsible to lead a congregation, and what it is, the ordination really means that I have been bestowed with a position of religious authority. It’s really an acceptance and a big nod, like a promotion, within our religious tradition. And so we did celebrate that yesterday. And the actual service will be next Saturday.
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0:09:27
when people from near and far will meet us at the church for a big celebration.
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0:09:33
I’m so happy for you. And I want to tell everybody that they can find more about you at KarenBlacks.com and more about her book, which I thought was kind of a nice topic. It was about ordinary people having these moments. I think maybe yours and my meeting was a bit divine. I’m so happy to have met you. Thank you for coming on my show today. Thank you for my new Hulu hoop. I’m going to report back to you on my weighted Hulu hoop journey. You inspired me so.
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0:10:02
Oh, I’m so happy about that.
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0:10:04
Yeah, thank you so much. Great to meet you. Maybe I’ll run into you again, but let’s stay a little far apart before we knock each other out with this thing.
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0:10:10
Absolutely.
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0:10:11
Dr. Karen Blacks, thanks for being on the show today. Have a great rest of your day. You too. Have a great day as well. You too. Have a great day as well. Thank you. All right, more to come here on the Debbie Nigro Show.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
