2 Strategies for Elevated Flows

Happy Friday!

I have a short question for you: What roles do moving slowly and moving quickly play in your mace flow practice?

Both strategies are incredibly powerful tools when applied with intuition and purpose. Today’s Flow Friday is as much educational as it is an invitation for personal investigation.

Move Slowly

Moving slowly provides the opportunity to bring greater awareness to individual aspects of our mace flow practice. In any given flow, our whole body is engaged in movement while manipulating the mace as it also moves. Without slowing down, we will focus only on the most salient aspects of the flow - often our upper body and the mace itself. But there are many more aspects to flows:

• Stances
• Landmarks
• Footwork Transitions
• Hand Transitions
• Tempo & Rhythm
• Breath
• Posture

Moving slowly means we can bring attention to each of these aspects in turn and refine the way we perform the flow by adjusting a single aspect of it. We will learn new ways of performing the same movements and will find new ways to balance and coordinate our bodies. Slowing down can also help us explore new techniques and combinations. It takes discipline and focus, but the results are incredible. It is also a pathway to flow state!

Invitation: Pick a flow you’re comfortable with and slow it down to 80% speed. Pick one of the bullet points above and bring the majority of your focus to that single aspect of the flow. Then repeat with 2 more bullet points of your choice. Finally, do the flow at regular speed and notice how performing the flow feels different - is it subtle or obvious?

Sidenote: This week’s Single Arm 360 Drill Tutorial teaches you to move slowly by adjusting the technique itself - a spectacular strategy for learning advanced techniques.

Moving Fast

In sharp contrast to moving slowly, when we move quickly, the entire flow collapses into a single focus. All the areas of flow listed in the bullet points above become seamless once more.

The advantage is adaptability. When moving at full speed, our conscious mind has no time to focus on the previous technique, future techniques, or even how to ‘make’ our body perform them. The flow becomes automatic and in the moment. It pushes the edges of our athleticism because our balance, coordination, and technique all must happen automatically without conscious planning beforehand. 

As your intuition takes over, you will notice that movements you’ve previously mastered will happen easily and that you automatically create new combinations and transitions between these movements. This is the special part: not only are we re-wiring our brain for new patterns and combinations, but we also experience creative joy as we witness something incredible happening before us. This is my favorite way to tap into flow state!

Invitation: After performing a flow slowly and then at regular speed (as described in the previous invitation), do these three rounds:

1. Time yourself for 90 seconds and perform the flow continuously at regular speed (100%).
2. Time yourself for 90 seconds and perform the flow continuously at 105% speed.
3. Time yourself for 2 minutes and perform the flow (with any additional movements you intuitively add) continuously at 100% speed. Don’t worry about ‘messing up’, just flow!

What did you experience? How did your body and mind feel while flowing at different speeds?

Talk about this with friends

Thank you as always for reading and I invite you to share this post with a friend. Talking about these exercises and your experiences with a friend expands the depth and significance of what you’ve explored!

Carpe Diem, 

Coach Lochlainn