The Benefits of Slow Flow Yoga for Improved Health and Wellness
Slow flow yoga is a gentle practice which combines deep breathing, stretching and relaxed postures to bring restorative energy and serenity to your body and mind. If you’ve been going hard all week at your barre & Pilates classes, slow flow yoga can help you stretch out those tired, aching muscles. Need to calm the chaos in your mind? Give yourself the mental-space and bring a little more peace into the day-to-day, with a regular slow flow yoga routine.
Whether you’re a complete beginner, or yogi-for-life, practising slow flow yoga regularly can help improve your overall health and wellbeing in many ways. In this blog, we’re exploring all the benefits this relaxing form of yoga has to offer. If you like what you’re hearing, come and join us at our Gold Coast studio for an energising and relaxing experience!
What is Slow Flow Yoga?
Slow Flow Yoga is, as the name suggests, a slower-paced form of vinyasa yoga, incorporating a combination of traditional yoga poses that flow from one to the next and are often held for longer during the sequence.
It is an accessible, gentle practice, making it perfect for beginners wanting to start exploring the benefits of yoga. By moving through postures at a slower pace, the overall energetic intensity of the practice is reduced, making for a relaxing and restorative experience.
Slow flow yoga connects movement with breath, emphasising mindful engagement, awareness and ease through each pose. As most postures are typically held longer than in more energetic forms of yoga, students have the time and space to move deliberately, explore subtler levels of alignment and deepen the stretch as they connect-in with their body.
The slower pace allows you to feel into each movement, gaining a deeper understanding of your body – feeling each and every one of those tweaks and niggles that have been stacking up over time, and working to release them one by one. Breathing into each movement helps to create a better balance between effort and ease in both physical and mental states.
Improve Strength, Flexibility and Balance
Slow flow yoga can help to improve strength, flexibility and balance while also creating enhanced physiological benefits. One of the primary ways in which slow flow yoga increases these physiological aspects is through increased range of motion around joints, while maintaining proper form during the practice. Unlike more dynamic forms of yoga, slow flow yoga involves holding poses for a longer duration, causing a stretching effect on the muscles eligible to be stretched without exceeding individual limitations.
Moving slowly from one pose to the next builds endurance and teaches the body to move with ease, grace and control. Even if you are experiencing lower back pain, recovering from injury or haven’t been practising yoga for some time, slow flow yoga offers different variations of poses, so that you can discover which way feels most comfortable for your body.
Ultimately, slow flow yoga helps release tension from the body that can build up during intense practices, leaving practitioners with greater inner peace and overall well being. With each class, or if you can find time to practise most days, you’ll likely notice that movements become easier and your flexibility increases each time.
Increase Relaxation and Stress Reduction
Slow flow yoga is an excellent way to lower your stress levels as you take the time to explore each pose. Furthermore, by connecting breath with body movements, slow flow yoga can help to reduce cortisol levels and promote deeper states of relaxation. Incorporating relaxing postures into your practice can help to bring your energy back into balance. By shifting your focus to being mindful, the restorative practice of slow flow yoga takes the focus away from energy-consuming activities that our bodies are constantly experiencing on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, slowing down allows you to stay connected with each movement, creating a sense of presence rather than anxiousness in your mind-body practice.
Enhance Emotional Wellbeing and Mental Clarity
Slow flow yoga is the perfect practice to help boost emotional wellbeing, as you become more in tune with your breath — this can lead to increased mental clarity and a clear focus. The calming sequences practised can help to relax your nerves while promoting an overall calmer state of mind. That’s not to say that slow flow yoga doesn’t still challenge you – the slower-pace postures challenge both flexibility and strength in core muscles — helping to give you a feeling of being both grounded and uplifted at the same time!
Improve Overall Health and Wellness
Slow flow yoga can help improve overall health and wellbeing by aiding in better digestion, boosting your immune system and increasing oxygen levels throughout the body. This calming practice can also lead to improved physical alignment, as well as improved posture — making it easier for you to move freely without risk of injury or feeling of tension. In addition to improving physical health, regular slow flow yoga also promotes feelings of peace, relaxation and positivity.
Yoga can be an incredibly powerful tool in achieving greater health and wellbeing. Slow flow yoga, focuses on linking a series of poses with breath to bring about a relaxed-yet-focused state of mind. This restorative form of yoga can provide practitioners with numerous physical and mental benefits such as improved strength, flexibility and balance; increased relaxation and decreased stress levels; enhanced emotional wellbeing and mental clarity; and improved overall health and wellness.
Whether you are completely new to yoga or have been practising for some time, slow flow yoga is definitely an accessible form of exercise that can be adapted for all levels. So why not take that first step today? Try our OnDemand platform, with plenty of at-home yoga flow videos to explore, or join us in the studio - you'll quickly see how much your life will benefit from this ancient practice.