"I am also envisioning that it would not be a liner slow motion (ie 1/2 speed constant playback), but more of a gradual slow down and slowing down to an almost stop at what would be considered critical position of motion."

Velocity Envelope.

P.S. You're not going to get any competition from me with karate tutorials.

Thanks for confirming. I haven't played around enough with this yet, where I was leaning towards Velocity Evelopes or looking into a plugin like Twixtor to see if there was a similar automation envelope in Twixtor which could be used. I played around doing some slow motion with 30fps footage and using key frames, and while it worked, I tended to struggle using key frames since they seem to be so disjointed from the video events on the timeline and much prefer the velocity envelope sitting on top of the video event and on the timeline. Being more of an audio guy, velocity envelopes just make more sense to me, and while I'm getting up to speed that key frames are similar, I feel less comfortable controlling and editing whenever I use key frames. Really, I just needed to better understand some rule of thumb project and render settings to best pull this off similar to what @Grazie was asking.

No worries from me on competition...😄 My target audience is about 20 local students where the instructor teaches them class twice a week and the students are in the 5-12 year old age ranges where the intent is to give them some YouTube reference videos to practice to during the week outside of classes.