You know the drill. Lubricate the joints, wake up the muscles, and if you’re about to attempt something splitty, for the love of god, warm up those hamstrings. We’ve all got that part down.

But there’s something else we could be incorporating into our warm up time…and honestly it’s pretty underutilized.

You can use that time to switch on your sequence brain and practice your flow.

🧠 Sequence Brain

In aerial training, you usually learn skills one at a time, in isolation. Then one day your instructor says “okay, now string a few of these together” and suddenly you realize sequencing is its own whole beast.

It’s a new part of the brain you have to switch on and train, just like any other.

Good news: your warm up is the perfect sneaky place to start training this. It helps you connect movements, focus on transitions, and practice memory recall for movement sequences, all before you ever leave the ground.

Try this in your next warm up 👇

Next time you warm up (or teach a warm up), build a few small flow sequences. Keep it simple, nothing long or complicated.

In circus, our warm ups love to borrow from gymnastics and fitness, which means we default to repetitive drill-style movement.

Instead, for these sequences, think about linking one movement into a new movement until you’ve got a short phrase.

Example: Shoulder Mobility – Drill Style

Example: Shoulder Mobility – Sequence Style

🌊 Finding Flow

Once you know the sequence, start layering in the flow.

“Flow” can mean a lot of things. Here, I mean attention to movement quality. When you start linking movements together, you’re building phrases instead of individual tricks, and your movement quality is what glues the transitions together and gives the phrase style and variety.

This is your chance to stretch your range as a mover. Pick a movement theme and play with it. For example, you can take that same shoulder sequence and now find full extension, letting it ripple from the shoulders and arms into the torso, the head, and the eyeline.

Example: Shoulder Mobility – Focus on Extension

If you’ve been wanting to level up your sequence and flow game in the air, start here, on the floor, in your warm up.

Need inspiration? Dance classes are already doing this brilliantly. Vinyasa flow yoga is another great place to steal ideas from.

Instructors, try this in your next class. Already doing something similar? Play with different movement themes to layer on top of a sequence:

🔹 Make a melty lunge sequence
🔹 Create a floppy cardio jump sequence
🔹 Draw floor circles with your feet

I know warm ups can go stale fast, and I know the urge to blow through them just to get to “the real training.” (Guilty 🙋‍♀️ more often than I’d like to admit.) Hopefully, this shakes up your warm-up routine a little.

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