Treelights March Monthly Challenge
Hey hoopers! Kiersten and Rebecca, the two goobers over here who make up Treelights, live in Ohio. From December through early March or so, Ohio is typically dumped with several feet of snow and often below-zero-Fahrenheit wind chills. This makes us both want to retreat into warm, cozy caves - and makes hooping practice harder, since neither of us have much indoor space to practice in.
But that’s no excuse, and this period of inactivity (seriously, thank you all for continuing to follow us when we’ve barely been posting) must come to an end. So we have a proposition.
It started as an idea for just the two of us to get back into a daily hooping habit (instead of picking up a hoop once every week or two, resulting in rusty work). But thanks to Kiersten’s ambitious spark, it blossomed into a bigger idea - an idea to share our personal challenge with the hooping community at large.
Hooping challenges are nothing new, but we hope some of you out there will want to jump on board with us for our Treelights March Monthly Challenge.
Here’s how it’s gonna break down:
The challenge will take place March 1st - March 31st.
You hoop every single day for the whole month. It can be for just one song if you’re crammed for time, but you’ve got the hoop spinning every single day.
You record yourself if you have the capacity to do so.
You don’t have to share your recordings - they’re for you to look back on and see all your awesome progress.
But if you want to, you can share your recordings here on Tumblr or on Instagram, tagging them with #treelightschallenge - and doing so might result in something cool (which we’ll mention at the end).
As for the challenge itself, we’re breaking it down week by week. Each week will have an overall theme with lots of freedom to customize, but each week will also have a specific assignment. (And Kiersten and Rebecca will be following along, too! You’ll be sure to see video updates of our progress right here on our Tumblr.)
Week One: Iso It Up. Work on your isos all week long. Have fun, play around, and try new things. The assignment: Pick one to three specific iso moves (whips, slides, cat’s-eye, ghosting, iso barrel rolls, and more) that you either don’t know yet or want to improve. Work on those moves all week, and show us your progress at the end!
Week Two: Variety. Make a conscious effort in your jams this week to mix things up. If you usually do lots of breaks, try sustained spinning instead. If you’re an iso junkie, work on-body. Or try combining things - breaks and sustained spinning in one session, or a mix of horizontal and vertical planes. The assignment: We actually have two for this week, and you can either pick one or do both. The first is to keep one hand on the hoop for the entire session. The second is to having a hooping session where you don’t repeat any specific move more than once (once in each direction/current is fine).
Week Three: Environment. Hoop somewhere new or somewhere challenging. Try a small space. Try hooping in water (or out in the snow). Go outside and inside, to new locations, places that are new and will challenge you. Heck, hoop on stairs or balance beams if you’ve got the balance for it (but stay safe! Don’t hurt yourself for this challenge!). The assignment: Hoop in public at least once. If you have constraints that don’t allow you to travel from home to hoop, then just hooping in your front yard/driveway works - just be somewhere where people can see you. It might be uncomfortable for some of you (or easy as cake for others), but it’s a great experience.
Week Four: Treelights Favorites. Hooping to new music is often a great way to mix things up and challenge yourself. This is mostly a free week to hoop however you like, except for the assignment. The assignment: Hoop once to one of Kiersten’s current favorite jam songs, "Can You Feel My Heart" by Bring Me The Horizon. And hoop once to one of Rebecca’s current favorite jam songs, "Shut Up and Dance" by Walk the Moon.
As stated before, you don’t have to upload your recordings - those are for your own sake. But if you’d like to, feel free to share full videos and progress compilations here on Tumblr or clips on Instagram. Either way, use the tag #treelightschallenge and we’ll see them, as well as everyone else participating.
Plus, each week if there’s a video we see in the tags that we really love, we’ll reblog it here and make your video our challenge highlight of the week!
The whole idea of this challenge was just to get ourselves hooping every day again, to brush off that snow and hibernation tendency and get back in the circle. But it can be much more - participation with the awesome community of hoopers we have out there. We’re constantly amazed and humbled how many of you follow our little hoop troupe duo over here, and we hope some of you will join us in this challenge.
Love and lots of spinning,
Kiersten & Rebecca
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