Animal Flow: The Innovative Fitness Program
Any fitness modality can help us achieve physical excellence as long as we practice it in an appropriate way. This means we have to choose the right loads, intensity and session length depending on our physical condition. However, exercise can also be filled with imagination, freedom, and dance, just as with animal flow.
The return to the wild and freedom of action
Ideally, we should include different modalities in our training routine to stimulate all of our faculties and qualities. However, many people are choosing to set aside analytical exercises and instead focus on the natural movement of the human body and the efforts that we make on a daily basis. This means they gravitate towards functional and multi-articulating exercises.
The fitness modality we’ll be talking about today (animal flow) has a lot of incredibly innovating characteristics. It has also gained many followers since it first started in 2010. A lot of fitness lovers are in the search for new experiences that help to activate their mental state, and they find them in this discipline. Let’s take a look at some of its properties.
Is animal flow an evolution of breakdance or capoeira?
It’s unclear if we can consider breakdance as a sport or acrobatic artistry. But beyond that, the animal flow has a very similar dynamic to the one we can find in the emblematic dance style for hip-hop culture.
It also holds some resemblance to capoeira, a combination of martial arts and choreographic dancing that originated among African slaves in Brazil.
The animal inside of us
If you want to practice animal flow, all you need is a wide and free space, letting go of every thought and allowing yourself to flow, mainly using your legs.
The idea is to create poses with your movements and go from being static to being dynamic, using the corresponding transitions. You do all of this by imitating animal postures and of course, by making the participant feel wild and free.
No equipment: animal flow is all about moving your body
In the fitness world, there are some exercises that use your own body weight to create resistance in certain areas when performing various positions. When doing animal flow, you don’t need any kind of sports equipment, it’s enough to use your imagination and tune in your movements to prevent injuries and improve your proprioception.
Animal flow promotes various physical and mental improvements
These are the main physical benefits of animal flow for those who practice it on a regular basis:
- Flexibility: since you’re performing different hyper-extensions without any weight, there’s a very small risk of injury. This allows you to work on particular joints.
- Coordination: by executing choreographic patterns in a free, yet structured way, animal flow stimulates aspects such as your balance and space-time conception.
- Strength: doing certain static postures with your own body weight requires an interesting muscle stimulus to prevent atrophy. This stimulus is needed when doing those isometric bodyweight exercises and also during the transition between poses.
- Creativity: an activity that’s as artistic as the animal flow will have a positive effect on other things you do. Flowing like an animal, with the same sync and dynamism, will help athletes increase their inventive ability.
- Freedom: at the very beginning of the session, your problems will fade away. This sport is characterized by a fluid and harmonic but wild style that will definitely distract you from any negative thought that may be weighing on your mind.
Which animal defines you?
Every culture has a catalog of mystical aspects that go beyond science. This is why many people find the idea of identifying with a lion, eagle, wolf or elephant quite appealing. With this new fitness modality, you’ll have the option to imagine that you’re in the jungle.
Don’t hesitate to submerge yourself in this transforming experience. You don’t need a specialized center to practice animal flow, as it’s not a widely spread activity.
All you need is to do some research -you can read about it on the Internet, where there’s a lot of useful information- and try out the things you find. Set yourself free from brick and concrete cities and remember where human evolution first started. Connect with your wild side!
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