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Like millions of Americans, actress Marisa Tomei used to play with a Hula-Hoop as a child. And like most of those same Americans, she hadn’t hooped since.

That is, not until two and a half years ago, when a friend asked her to come to a hooping class in Los Angeles. The class wasn’t about the familiar plastic hoops that Wham-O popularized in the 1950s and 1960s and are spun around the waist — rather, it was about heavier, wildly adorned, adult-size hoops that are spun around practically every part of the body.

Tomei, the Academy Award-winning actress, was instantly hooked.

“You just can’t help but laugh and smile when you’re hooping,” she said. These days she hoops several times a week and credits the regimen with helping her get in shape for nude scenes in the 2008 movie “The Wrestler.”

Last year Tomei started working with Gaiam, the company that helped bring yoga to the masses, on the “Core & Curves” workout video that was released March 30. And when Gaiam asked her to work on another video, she had a ready idea for them: hooping.

In December, Gaiam shot a hooping workout video with Tomei that is scheduled for release in May. More are in the works.

“We’re working with Marisa Tomei in potentially the same way that Jane Fonda worked with aerobics,” said William S. Sondheim, president of entertainment and distribution at Gaiam. The collaboration, he said, “may be the catalyst to take hooping from a cottage-based industry status that has been bubbling under for a few years into a significant and new form of fitness.”

Tomei is the same age now — 45 — that Fonda was when she released her first aerobics video in 1982, but she does not invite a comparison. “I’m not even going to go there,” she said. “I’m just a girl with a pink hoop.”

Some exercise professionals say they doubt that hooping will make the leap to become a workout routine with mass appeal.

“My gut tells me it will be a personal tool to use occasionally in fitness, like a medicine ball — I think it will be a fad,” said Neal Pire, an exercise physiologist and a fellow with the American College of Sports Medicine. “As a group exercise class, I don’t see it taking off, because it’s too difficult to do a lot with it.”

But to hooping enthusiasts, the sight of Michelle Obama hooping on the front lawn of the White House this past fall was a happy omen. They predict that it is just a matter of time before hooping has its day in the sun.

“This whole culture has sprung up in the last few years, and there’s no reason to think it won’t continue,” said Philo Hagen, who helped found the Web site Hooping.org in 2003. The site, which started as a part-time gig but is now Hagen’s full-time job, gets 20,000 to 40,000 unique visitors each week, some of whom organize meet-ups in parks.

“The Internet was supposed to be this thing that brought people together, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily true generally, but it is with hooping,” Hagen said. “We all found each other all over the place.”

The promise of hooping is similar to many other emerging workout routines: you exercise while having fun.

“Anyone can hoop, and most people will be hooping within five minutes,” said Susan Guralnik, 43, who started hooping five years ago and now teaches it in the Los Angeles area.

“A lot of my students want to do it for the exercise, but they also like the playfulness of this,” said Allyson Makiej, 46, a full-time hooping instructor in Lowell, Massachusetts. “But it can also be nondenominational meditative. It’s a calming tool.”

One of Makiej’s students is Kathy Little, a 44-year-old mother of two who started taking hoop classes three years ago and credits them with helping her lose 18 pounds. “I do it more for the fitness part of it,” she said. “For me, it’s all about core strength. It’s not like you’re in Pilates and your instructor is telling you to hold it for eight seconds. You’re holding it to keep the hoop up, and that’s just fun.”

Gabriella Redding tells a similar story: She took a hoop class to help get back in shape after having a baby. By the following year she was so hooked on hooping that she became a cofounder of Hoopnotica.com, which sells hoops and DVDs and has helped formalize the exercise by certifying instructors.

“That’s the market I want: women who want to lose weight,” Redding said.

Hoopnotica opened in 2006 in Marina del Rey, California, and Redding said it has been growing steadily, to more than $1 million in sales in 2009. She said she believed the sport was about to grow exponentially.

“As soon as the gyms buy into it, then it will explode, the same way yoga did,” she said.

And a celebrity spokeswoman can only help. “We need a Marisa Tomei right now,” said Jonathan Baxter, 35, a hooping instructor based in Carrboro, North Carolina. “Hooping needs a marketing push. Everything else is right there.”  

NY Times