[Robbie] Hula hoops might seem like simple toys.

You know, for kids.

But, perhaps not surprisingly,

there are some people, most of them adults,

who are very, very good at hula-hooping.

They compete for things like time spent hooping,

the size of the hoop you're hula-hooping.

They even compete to see

who can hula-hoop longest underwater.

And then, of course, there are people who try to see

how many hoops they can keep spinning.

The current world record is an astounding two hundred hoops.

But could it be even higher?

Today, we're going to look at why hula-hooping

three hundred hoops is almost impossible.

To find out what it takes,

I hooped with world-record holder.

God, that is exhausting.

Talked hoop science with a neuroscientist.

[Ramesh] But once you have the hoop afloat,

and once you've hit the right impulse

and the hoop is moving, the hoop now

stays in equilibrium because of conservation of momentum.

And had my hooping abilities digitally mapped.

Your hip-ankle system is doing its thing,

but we saw much more of an involvement of your knee.

Hoops are some of the oldest toys on Earth,

and the ancient Greeks and Egyptians

used them for exercise.

But the modern hoop, the hula hoop,

dates back to the 1950's.

They were one of the world's very first big toy fads.

[Narrator] America's newest gift to the continent.

The hula hoop craze, spreading like wildfire

in lands already ravaged by rock 'n' roll.

Plastic hoops sold by the millions,

cause their easy, right?

You just swing your hips and make them go.

Naturally some people got very good at swinging their hips.

And started keeping track of how many hoops

they could keep going.

Today Marawa The Amazing, a performer from Australia,

holds the record.

The rules are simple.

The hoops have to be commercially available,

they have to be started by the hooper.

And they each have to go around a minimum of 3 times

above the knee to count for the record.

[Robbie] And how many hoops is that?

[Marawa] Two hundred.

That's a lot of hoops.

Yeah

That's a lot, a lot.

No one ever believes me when I tell them,

they're like oh yeah.

In 2005, a hooper named Kareena Oates broke through

to triple digits.

And I was like, that's amazing.

And then I started training to beat one hundred.

The next big jump was in 2009, when Paul Dizzy Hips Blair

took the record to one hundred thirty-two hoops.

Just blew it out, and I was like that's it.

We all gotta stop, retire, go home, that's the end.

But Marawa thought more hoops might be possible,

if she approached them a bit differently.

I think when I had the initial hundred as my goal,

like I had one hundred hoops that were all the same size,

and all the same weight.

One hoop, its made of plastic, does not weigh that much.

But if your talking about numbers, which we are.

You bring enough hoops together,

you're talking about a lot of weight.

[Guest 1] I have to pick up all of those?

[Guest 2] I don't know if I can pick all these up.

[woman laughing]

[Guest 1] That's impossible.

And that's not even taking into account,

how much space these things take up.

Because remember, you gotta pick'em up,

and get 'em going all by yourself.

So if your arms aren't big enough, your out of luck.

I used to just count one hundred, and then I'd spin them.

And then I was like, dammit I can't get my arms around it.

And then I remembered getting the guidelines,

and being like, oh well if you can have it-

you can have this diameter to this diameter.

By stacking lighter hoops, with varying diameters.

Marawa was able to send the record

to one hundred and sixty in 2014.

A year later, she stacked an additional forty hoops on,

and took the record to its current status.

Two hundred hoops.

But doing it, was anything, but easy.

Marawa even injured herself while training.

The muscle around here, and I pull

I ripped like the incision out of it at one point.

Which was-

Oh my god!

Yeah, didn't get to try and beat it that month.

That sound terrible.

[Robbie] Most people twist their hips,

to keep a hoop in motion,

but Marawa was tearing her body apart

hooping big numbers that way.

Worked with one physiotherapist,

who was like if you wanna fix this your gonna have

to completely relearn how you push the hoop.

She had to build a new technique.

One that can power massive piles of hoops around her torso

without injuring herself.

So when I hula hoop, I plant my feet.

I make my legs really strong, so its like

if someone was trying to push you over,

[Marawa] you'd be stuck there.

Yup.

And then, I think much more about using my core muscles,

and pushing every time the hoop hits me in the tummy.

Pew, I push it away like a lazar beam

coming out of my belly button.

And then, that is what pushes the hoop around.

Okay, Marawa gave me a lesson in hooping.

First with just 1 hoop.

There we go, breath and push.

Ha Ha, still got it.

Then we upped it to 4.

These are 4 regular waist hoops,

you want to try and think in your mind

just about the blue one, the bottom one.

The top ones can skirt around and move like that,

but if you keep pushing the blue one hard enough,

the rest should stay on top of it.

Okay.

So just keep-

Is that because the blue ones the heaviest?

No just cause its on he bottom.

Stand up straight, don't look down, all abs.

All abs.

Abs abs abs.

You ready, here we go.

There we go.

Just ignore that, keep going, keep going, keep going yeah.

I didn't have to much trouble with 4 hoops,

but I was still a very long way from two hundred.

I worked my way up to fourteen standard hoops.

Yup.

Remember, I just need to get 3 revolutions.

And then Marawa brought out her record hoops.

They're thin, and they come in 4 different diameters

for optimal stacking.

This is?

Thirty.

Thirty hoops! I just doubled my hoops.

Are these the actual hoops you used.

Some of them are, yeah.

Nope.

Beautiful!

Ha Ha there we go.

Then Marawa upped the ante.

This is definitely more than thirty,

and your not going to tell me

how many it is just yet, right?

No, I will tell you afterwards.

This was very hard, I was clearly struggling.

Close.

However many more she had added

was testing my core strength.

That felt pretty good.

Not quite.

3rd attempt.

That fell apart fast.

To the naked eye, that was fine.

Yes, alright to the naked eye, that counts.

How many hoops is this.

Sixty.

Sixty hoops?

Sixty hoops.

I was going to do fifty, but you smashed it.

There we go.

That's all it takes I guess.

Yeah.

That's not all it takes.

Do you want, even though your exhausted,

just to feel what one hundred feels like.

Absolutely.

Lets just cover my face.

How do you get all the way underneath?

[Upbeat music]

You did twice as many hoops as this?

Yup.

That's bonkers.

Wow that was catastrophic, that was terrible.

Not even one.

But one hundred hoops is kind of a warm up for Marawa.

She absolutely crushed it.

I'm rubbing it in, I'm sorry.

So you just made one hundred of these things,

like really easy.

Now I know you haven't been training.

Yeah.

But how many do you think you could just do, today?

Like right now.

Uh, I, I would like to think I could do at least one hundred and fifty.

Just like casual, but yeah.

I'm not super in training mode at the moment,

but we can give that a go and see,

Cool.

I might have to get into a costume change, yup.

Lets do this, lets do a costume change.

Serious hoop outfits.

Give it a shot.

Why I've done my costume change its easier

to hoop on skin, but when you use hula hoops like this,

they pinch.

I'm doing it in this cause it'll not hurt as much.

Marawa stacked up one hundred and fifty hoops,

and handled them no problem.

That looked good to me.

Marawa clearly has a lot of practice and skill

when it comes to hooping,

but I wanted to know what exactly she's doing,

and what I'm not.

So I took a bunch of hoops to UC Merced,

where I met up with this guy.

And right, there you go.

I'm Remesh Balasubramaniam.

I'm a professor of cognitive and information sciences.

I study what's known as a sensory motor neuron science.

I study how sensory in motor systems in the human brain

come together to produce skilled human behaviors.

Balasubramaniam looks at how the brain

and body work together to perform tasks.

He's looked at skatboarding, and playing music,

and yes hula hooping.

Though we looked at this very complicated task,

of how humans control a hula hoop,

which is something we can do at great ease.

But its requires control of

pretty much every part of your body.

To study hooping, his lab marks up subjects like me,

with motion capture trackers.

This is my crown of shiny balls.

Yes.

So we're here in the mobcap lab now.

I have a crown of mobcap balls,

and I have a bunch of them stuck to my body.

In various sort of point of interest.

And atomical landmarks.

And 4 of them are on the hoop itself.

And what these are going to do, is track

how the hoop is moving in relation to my body,

and how different parts of my body are moving

in relation to one another.

To understand what the body is doing

to keep the hoop aloft.

You first have to understand what it is

that the hoop is doing.

So first we approached it, by looking at

the physics of hula hooping itself.

So the hula hoop stay afloat.

By what's called the principle of conservation

of angular momentum.

So angular momentum is like linear momentum,

but its a conserved quantity in physics.

Which means that any object

that has to remain in a certain state,

will have to have angular momentum in all of the directions

conserved, for it to stay afloat.

So what we did with hula hooping,

was we wanted to see how the body is assembled

into this complex device that can sensually balance

the angular momentum up.

What he discovered, is that for most hoopers,

there's a critical relationship between the ankles,

hips, and knees that help keep

the hoop spinning around the waist.

I'm gonna ask you to do, Robbie, is to

hoop a little bit faster.

We add an extra challenge like spinning faster.

Right, so now you an see he's involving

much more of his knee joint.

Keep doing what your doing.

Or a mental task.

But mentally count backwards in 7's

starting at one hundred.

Ninety-three, eighty-six, things get interesting.

Seventy-nine, seventy-two, sixty-five, fifty-eight.

When you were doing the secondary task,

we're making you focus on things that are

that's not just about mechanics.

We're making you, we're changing your attention

to something else and your cognative load has gone up.

And clearly in both those cases we notice

that your hip, ankle system is doing its thing,

but we saw much more of an involvement of your knee.

Got it.

So you basically confirm many things that we've

you know, we've seen in our laboratory studies.

Then I tried doing a few hoops the way I had with Marawa.

So you can see how they kind of fan out, right?

And then suddenly the energy that I'm putting into,

the one I'm focusing on isn't necessarily timed

to some other hoop that like in a slightly different

position in this rotation, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

So I think that's kinda what separates

Marawa from the rest of us.

I'm using my body basically from the hips down

to manage a few hoops.

But Marawa is using her whole body,

to control a lot of hoops.

I asked Balasubramium to break down, how she does it.

So there's a video of um, Marawa hula hooping.

So its very clear, she's got a asymmetric stands

with her legs.

So one thing she's doing slightly different from

our laboratory subjects is that her, um

left and her right leg

are not, positioned in the same spot.

The other thing she's doing as we observed before,

is that she's breaking her lower limbs down very nice

in ankle strategy.

But more importantly she is actually,

created a very similar mirror strategy

with her upper limb as well.

So by using her upper body Marawa is able to keep

as many as two hundred hula hoops going at one time.

But what's keeping her or anyone else for that matter,

from doing more than that.

In Marawa's case really just the size of her arms.

And so much of the problem is you know, once you pack them

is I can't get my arms around them.

I mean I feel like I could probably lift two-thirty maybe.

Um if I could get them going, but I can't pick them up.

To give you a sense of how heavy these are,

I could barely pick up two hundred of them.

I couldn't stand up while holding them,

and trying to get them to spin nearly knocked me over.

What would the ideal numbers hula hooper look like?

Probably like an NBA player.

Or a elite swimmer.

Somebody tall with a lot of core strength and long arms.

Who can pick up and spin a giant stack of hoops.

Yeah someone like that.

So could we see Marawa's record go up?

[Remesh] I don't think we've reached a functional,

you know maximum capacity of some kind.

I would say two-fifty three-hundred probably likely.

Anything over that we'll just have to see

depending on, you know what kind of biomechanics

that person brings to the table.

I'm definitely not going to set that record.

This is only 4.

But you might,

and even if you can't, just remember

what Marawa's doing is already almost impossible.

[Upbeat music]