Movement Flow: Building Your Fluidity & Control

Anyone can learn some cool skills, but how many people do you know who are truly physically skillful?

My guess is: relatively few.

But you know them when you see them, because every move they make – the way they walk, they way they get out of a car, just about every physical movement – exhibits the grace and fluidity you’d usually expect from a dancer or a high-level athlete.

So what do these people do differently, and more importantly, can you learn it?

Aside from genetics and spending a lot of time practicing various sports, developing “flow” in your movements is still quite possible.

Let’s look at what it is that makes a person go from broken down robot to hot buttered ninja, and how you can make that happen for yourself

What’s so Special about “Flow,” anyway?

Most people simply don’t train for skillfulness and body control. Even very fit people who work out often tend to spend the majority of their training time developing strength and endurance, without much thought to movement quality.

So when when we see someone able to flow seamlessly between movements, it stands out.

Here’s three fun flow combos I shared to Instagram recently:

Now look: I know precisely how uncool the pants I’m wearing those videos are, and I’m not comparing myself to actual elite athletes, but just by combining some basic movements smoothly, you can see that these examples are more than the sum of their parts.

“Flow” has been a buzzword in the fitness and movement culture world for quite a while now, but it is essentially meaningless unless you put it in the context of learning individual skills and then learning to combine them.

Why Should You Bother Trying to Learn This?

Most of us reading this are not looking to be a professional athlete, but there’s tremendous benefit in training the attributes that will improve the way you move. There’s two main reasons why it’s worth the effort:

Developing Your Movement Flow Makes You a More Capable Human

When you develop the ability to easily connect every movement you make it’s kind of like painting a picture in one brushstroke, without letting your paint brush lift off the canvas.

Moving with control, slowing down or speeding up as necessary to make sure you don’t run into any hiccups becomes unconscious and available to you at any moment. Without this ability, you could wind up with something that looks quite different from what you envisioned. With this ability, your painting matches your vision.

How you picture yourself moving and accomplishing your goal in your sport/activity/life will be how you actually move. It’s very empowering.

Mindfully working on all these details will make your body so much stronger and more capable. So that, even if you never fully achieve that pro-level flowy movement, the very act of aiming for that kind of movement will make you better.

Life is Continuous, so We Must Flow with It

Of course, when you make your body stronger and improve your overall control, you’re going to see a big impact on your training goals, whatever they may be.

But (possibly more importantly), you’re also going to see a lot of carryover into your daily life.

We all move our bodies through countless positions and movements throughout our day. And when those movements don’t flow seamlessly from one into the next, well, most of the time you’re probably fine… until you’re not.

You may need to hop up on a curb to get around a deep puddle, then shift into a lunge as you rotate your body around to drop down onto the balls of your feet. You cleared the puddle – great!

What if your movement between those different positions isn’t very smooth at all?

Best case scenario? You slip and fall into the puddle and get your fancy minimalist shoes dirty.

Worst case? You somehow get hurt at any of those different position changes along the way.

Specifically training yourself to act with confidence and control in those “in-between” movements and smoothing out the way you transition from one position to the next can have a big impact on how you move through your day-to-day life.

It can also play a big role in injury prevention.

How Can You Bring Flow into Your Movement?

Making flow a priority in your training is not something that comes naturally to most people, since it’s so different from what we’re told exercise is “supposed” to look like. But there are concrete steps you can take to start moving more smoothly and seamlessly.

Practice Fundamental Movement Patterns – Even if You Think They’re “Too Easy”

Smooth movement, like anything that takes a lot of skill, starts from the basics.

Practicing and getting good at basic movement patterns is the first step to gaining a high level of control over your body, and continuing to practice those movement patterns is essential to keep making progress in smoothing out all the kinks in your movement.

We developed our Elements program to provide the essential basics for a broad range of physical activities.

Work on these movement patterns to develop your overall strength, flexibility, and control.

Add Complexity Gradually to Challenge Your Coordination and Control

As you gain mastery over those basic movement patterns, you can gradually begin to add in complexity. Complexity doesn’t mean just making movements harder, but rather, adding layers of variability that aren’t possible in singular planes of motion.

There are many different ways to add complexity to your movements. We talk about that a lot more in this article, but it can be as simple as changing your angle or adding in a balance component.

Adding in layers of complexity will help you solidify your mastery over those movement patterns.

Link Movements Together in Combinations

The next piece of making your movements flow seamlessly is linking different movements together. You’ll learn to go from one exercise or movement into the next, then the next, and so on. For instance, you may go from a squat into a monkey (a lateral moving squat) into a cartwheel, then back into a squat, ending off with a forward roll.

In the beginning, of course, these movements won’t flow smoothly at all, but over time, you can smooth things out.

Focus on Movement Quality over Intensity

One of the big mistakes we see is people trying to muscle through movements or try to merge this style of movement with getting as intense a workout as possible. There’s a time and a place for intense exercise, but when you’re working on making your movements flow smoothly and seamlessly, intensity won’t get you there. Quality movement will.

The goal should always be to “make it pretty” by paying attention to the details and trying to make your form smoother and smoother each time you practice. Eventually, you’ll achieve that “wow” factor you love watching.

Make Your Way Toward Beautiful Movement Flow

Seamless, beautiful movement is achievable, even if you don’t have hours upon hours to spend on drills like professional athletes do. It’s just a matter of putting smart and focused effort into the attributes you need to make your movements flow without sputtering.

Our training curriculum guides you through the four stages described above:

1. First, we practice basic movement patterns to improve our fundamental attributes: strength, flexibility, control, coordination, agility, and balance.
2. Then, we gradually add in layers of complexity to these basic movement patterns, which solidifies our grasp of those patterns.
3. Next, we start combining movements, learning how to efficiently move from one position to the next.
4. Finally, we work on smoothing all those movements out by focusing on our quality of movement.

You may never be a pro athlete, but you can certainly tap in to that incredible body control that makes your favorite athletes move the way they do. You just need a smart plan that takes you through the right steps to get there.

Develop Seamless Movement with Sequences

Not all movement flows are created equal. After all, walking is just “flowing” from one step to the next but it’s never gonna make you an athlete.

So we decided to make a program to teach the core athletic skills most training leaves out.

It combines rotational patterns, level changes, and transitional movement flow to help you build agility that transfers to any athletic environment. The result is seamless, efficient movement even in dynamic situations.

The program is called Sequences, and you can check it out below.