The Many Benefits of Slow Flow Yoga.

Inhale, reach your arms up! Exhale, forward fold. Inhale, jump back to plank. Exhale, chaturanga. 

I can’t tell you how many yoga classes I’ve taken where these cues were thrown out so quickly I couldn’t finish a breath cycle in the time given for me to do a movement. In a fast-paced yoga class, I’m usually the one four or five poses behind everyone else, taking my time to get my wits together in a position while everyone else flies through their sequence. 

I’ve never been particularly gung-ho about fast-paced yoga classes. It generally doesn’t feel great in my body to move quickly from one end-range position to another. It certainly hasn’t helped me learn to do poses better over time. And I don’t experience as much strength, stability and mobility adaptations as when I move more slowly. 

For a long time, I didn’t have the words to articulate this. I just had my experience and what felt right in my body. As I started to learn more about movement and what my body needs to work and feel better as I age, I started to understand that there were very good reasons why I opted to move more slowly in my yoga practice. It’s not that I think fast movements are bad--I actually love moving quickly in other scenarios and respect fast-paced movement for its heart-health benefits and the power it can generate in our bodies. 

It's just that in the past several years I’ve developed a motto: If I can’t do something slow, I haven’t earned the right to do it quickly. Doing something quickly requires a certain level of skill, an ability to activate various parts of the body with precision, and an immense amount of control. But in order to develop all of those things, we need to move slowly. 

My affinity for slow flow yoga can be summarized very simply: Slow before fast. 

Let’s break down some of these benefits of practicing slow flow yoga. 

Benefits Of Slow Flow Yoga

More Activation

A good question to ask ourselves when we’re moving is: What is driving this movement? Is it the strength of my muscles, is it momentum, is it gravity or is it leverage? You can probably guess that when we move more quickly, our movement is more likely to be generated from momentum, gravity or leverage than from our strength. 

When we move slowly, we remove passive forces as possible initiators of our movement. In doing this, we are more likely to utilize our strength to create our movements, which allows us to activate more muscle fibers. Using more of our muscles means more strength adaptations when our practice is over. 

It’s pretty simple: Want more strength? Move more slowly. 

More Skill 

We become better at the things we practice. If we practice moving quickly through a push-up in a sloppy manner, we will get better at moving quickly through a push-up in a sloppy manner. 

When we slow things down, we give our brain time to process the request and break it down into component parts. We’re able to practice those components with precision, which adds up over time to create more skill. With more skill, things feel easier. At this point, we can introduce more speed into the picture, but only as much as we can maintain the precision we’ve worked so hard to cultivate. 

If you want to develop more skill, move slowly and with as much precision as you can manage.

More Control 

We can’t do something slowly if we lack control. By contrast, we can do something quickly when we lack control. When we move quickly, we can depend on momentum rather than control to execute a task. 

But here’s the thing: A controlled movement is safer than an uncontrolled movement. Injuries often happen in ranges of motion that we can endure but not control. Moving slowly ensures that we stay within a controllable range, which in turn generates more control. As we repeat, we are able to build control in deeper and deeper ranges, which makes way for bigger mobility and flexibility gains. We’ll also be able to gradually add in speed and maintain the control we’ve cultivated from moving slowly.

Basically, if you want a safe and sustainable yoga practice, consider moving with control rather than with momentum. 

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