Here’s a circus-style hula hoop drill to train your posture, condition your core and build strength. Get a stack of hoops spinning on your waist and then follow along with prompts for 5 1/2 minutes of tips, challenges and prompts to keep you going. This drill will carve you a six pack! (or a three pack, if you only go in one direction…)

The video is meant to be played while you are hooping through the drill, so it’s not a tutorial as much as a set of instructions and prompts set to music. There is text (high contrast for when you’ve got your iPhone outside in the glare, though this drill is very indoor friendly, too) and some graphics to help you keep track of where in the drill you are. Glance at it to get your bearings and don’t stop hooping!

How many hoops to should you put in your hoop stack? The Australian circus hoopers told me the “number of hoops you can split plus one or more.” So if you can split 3, your hoop stack is 4 hoops or more. If you usually only use one hoop, start your stack with two. The hoops should be the same size and similar weight.

When you can do the whole five minute drill without dropping your hoops, do it again in the opposite direction, or extend to ten or twenty minutes.

I plan to make more hoop drill videos in the same vein: simple explanations in graphics and text plus the timings for each move and music. The next one will involve spinning the hoop on all parts of your body. It’s a fun one.

Thanks to Jewelz and all the Aussie circus hoopers who helped me to learn this and other drills. You’re wonderful teachers and so strong.

Here’s another hoop drill that I learned in Sydney. The idea is simple and the training effect is strong. Using one hoop, you hoop on all your body parts for longer than you ever really would during a dance or performance. Why do you want to do this? It improves your control, strengthens your body and develops your stamina. You will discover weaknesses you never noticed as a hoop dancer; it’s pretty amazing. Get ready to sweat and bruise - if you haven’t trained like this before, these drills can be brutal. But they are worth it.

The video shows 12 different levels to hoop on from hands to knees. When we did these drills at SJC and Circus Fest we added a few more places to hoop, did the drills for a minute rather than 30 seconds, and added entertaining variations like turning with and against the hoop.

As with the previous hoop drill video, this isn’t a tutorial as much as a guide for your training. Play it while you hoop, keeping an eye on the countdown timer to know when to change to the next level. If you are paying close attention, you’ll see some prompts, tips and encouragements as the video plays. I plan to make more hoop drill videos for us to use as we advance through this basic one.

I picked music that I like to hoop to, but feel free to turn the sound down and crank your own tunes.

Happy training!

Well, I think we just lived through the long-overdue, ever-feared “Big One” that seismologists have been predicting for decades. It didn’t have its epicenter in Tokyo, but we sure as fuck felt it. I can’t even imagine what it must have been nearer the epicenter. But let me tell you what it was like here.

Tod & I were together at home this afternoon when the quake struck at 2:45. It was scary. Our five story apartment building shuddered and rocked like a ship at sea.

After the first few seconds, when the initial shake started getting worse, I opened an exit to the balcony and we stood together in the doorway watching the birds flap confusedly, trees sway and every local structure rattle and moan. It was disconcerting and eerily beautiful at the same time. I was fascinated and calm while it happened and very grateful that I wasn’t alone. It seemed to last for an eternity, though it was maybe less than two minutes in reality.

Our lucky boat capsized.

Even when the shaking calmed to a rolling wave and it seemed safe to move, things were still swaying. It felt like stepping back onto land after a long voyage and we were both feeling sort of seasick. I ran around the house to see what had happened. Stuff had fallen off shelves, counters and surfaces over all over the house, though amazingly enough nothing really broke. I put most of it to right in a few minutes.

The city made an emergency announcement over the public address system - the first time they have ever done that in my memory - though with the flapity-flap of helicopters and the echoing distortion off buildings, I could barely make out a word. Our apartment was still standing, so I figured we were fine to stay in it. We checked Twitter for the first details, updated Facebook status and more or less calmed down for a few minutes.

Japanese lanterns are stacked stones, now unstacked.

Then I wanted to go examine the what was up. In the hallway, the first sign of trouble. A stone lantern had fallen over and cracked the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window. Oops. Another stone lantern was toppled on the first floor, but that seems to be the extent of problems in our building. Amazing considering how loudly it was creaking and the amount of sway it experienced.

We went out to see the world. Really not a lot of damage in our area. A few unhitched cable TV wires and some crumbled old plaster. We stopped into the flower shop on the corner to check in with the store owner. She said she could see the big apartment buildings swaying. From one of the 13th floor balconies, someone’s stuff had fallen to the street.

After the quake a beer to celebrate surviving.

We continued on to Kashiwaya, our local liquor store, to see how our friends there had fared and also to get a beer. Our friend and their shop were fine - two bottles of sake had toppled over and broken but that was all. We ordered two draft beers and sat at the table outside the shop to watch people go by. We got a lot of double takes and some envious smiles, the two of us calmly enjoying our drinks. The worse was over and we were safe together. It was going to be OK.

The sidewalk was crowded with commuters walking home because every train in the capitol was stopped. People were actually hurrying, unusual in a city where ambling is the norm. Kasuga Dori is a main emergency road and it was pretty much packed with people from the afternoon until well into the night.

Determined walkers head home.

When it got cold after dark, I felt compelled to go out and give away my extra hats, gloves and scarves to all those people walking home a long way who needed them. I was oddly fearful to get too far from Tod so I pushed aside the feeling of needing to help and stayed inside. But the need to do something, anything to help people on this very strange day got too strong and I worked up the courage to go outside alone. It is hard to give stuff away in Tokyo, but I eventually found people who were cold enough to accept my mismatched accessories.

Now it’s almost 11 pm. We are listening to the Japanese news radio reporting on people trying to get home. At Shinjuku station the trains are still stopped, there is a 100 meter long queue for taxis…and no taxis. The streets are gridlocked with traffic. All the buses are completely crammed. Hotels are full. Convenience stores are running out of supplies in some places. Some people are in for a long, cold night. The aftershocks continue to make everything shake and sway in Tokyo.

And we got off lightly in Tokyo. The worst happened more than 300 km north of here. The magnitude of the quake was 100 times stronger than the one in Haiti last year. It reached the highest level of the Shindo scale, 7, and was eventually given an 8.9 magnitude.

Every minute brings more horrible news from the north. There’s a nuclear emergency in Fukushima with a reactor on the verge of melt down and people being evacuated; Kurihara, a town of 77,000, was entirely destroyed; 1800 people are taking refuge in an elementary school in Aomori; and the videos of the tsunami rolling inland are so disturbing that I can’t watch them. The grisly discoveries of corpses are just beginning; the number will not be small.

Tomorrow some friends and I are getting together to hoop at Yoyogi to relieve our stress and brainstorm ways we can help even a little bit. Feel free to join us. 12:30 in the usual place.

The supermarket in my neighborhood has a lot of empty shelves tonight. People are panicking and hording, I guess. Here’s what’s missing:

• rice
• tofu
• eggs
• bread
• milk
• juice
• pasta
• leafy greens
• mushrooms
• eggplants
• pineapple
• bananas
• cup ramen
• retort pouch curry
• udon
• nabe sets
• bento
• sushi
• deli foods
• most meat and fish

There was a fair supply of tomatoes, fresh herbs, zucchini, beer, wine, cookies, ice cream, and yogurt. I have a feeling that produce is going to be hard to come by for the next few days as transport and farming are disrupted from the earthquakes, tsunamis, and the nuclear emergency.

Staff in our local grocery store, and also in the convenience stores (also bare of most fresh foods), were busy trying to restock the shelves with cup ramen. At least there will be something to eat. We won’t have to add “famine” to our list of apocalypses.

When the quake hit, most of the power plants that serve Tokyo went offline automatically. That was a very good thing because Tokyo is served with nuclear, thermal and hydroelectric power. Nobody wants a nuclear emergency due to an earthquake.

Unfortunately, we are having one.

TEPCO is handling it as professionally and safely as possible by evacuating 90,000 people in a 20 km radius of the the Fukushima 1 power plant, venting pressurized gas in controlled ways, and basically destroying reactor number one by pumping sea water and boric acid into the reactor to cool it and kill the reaction. Very likely, reactor number one will never be brought back online.

Reactor number three is experiencing a cooling system malfunction today as well, so the TEPCO folks are really hustling. I have confidence that they will keep things under control.

Nobody in Tokyo is at risk. Even if there is meltdown in either reactor, it is unlikely to affect Tokyo dwellers with radiation. Scare tactics aside, we are 200km away and the type of reactor that is in crisis isn’t going to explode.

But the power plant shutdowns very may well affect us in another way. With so many sources of energy offline, TEPCO may not have enough electricity to meet peak demand. It said on Saturday morning that there might need to be blackouts and requested us to conserve energy as much as possible. But then they found some more electrons in a back closet or something and avoided having to cut any power. Today rumours of rolling blackouts and power loss are rampant and it’s hard to find out the facts, so let’s conserve as much as possible and hope for more back closets at TEPCO.

10 ways to conserve electricity

1. Turn off your TV.
2. Same goes for stereo, game consoles, computers, printers, etc.
3. Disconnect your heated toilet seat.
4. Move your computer server to an offsite host outside Japan.
5. Unplug appliances you aren’t using. Lots of them draw power even when they are off.
6. Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs.
7. Turn off lights if you aren’t using them.
8. Use solar power to dry your washing.
9. Turn down the heat and put on a sweater.
10. Start a raw foods diet.

I will be implementing #4 today, hopefully before any rumoured or real power disruptions. But I expect that this hosting transfer isn’t going to go 100% smoothly as I am also upgrading my blogging software at the same time. So I apologise in advance for any ugliness, broken links, or other discombobulations on mediatinker. I will strive to have it all up and running beautifully again asap.