No Pain, No Gain

All athletic teams train and condition for their sport, well so does cheer. Cheerleader’s condition and train year around in order to perform at their best. If a cheerleader slacks off during a holiday or weekend, she can lose muscle mass and will fall a step behind in her skills. Cheerleaders, unlike many other athletes, will lose most of their performance ability, as in jump height, if they stop training and conditioning for only a week’s time and will lose the majority of their tumbling ability if they stop training and conditioning for a year or more. What it takes cheerleaders to learn and master in years can be lost or degraded in a short time span if they stop conditioning. Cheerleader’s condition as much as any other athlete, if not more, because their whole sport revolves around muscle mass.

Cheerleaders work tremendously on their leg muscles. The stronger your legs the better all around cheerleader you can be. The legs help you get into the air when jumping, or get enough height to complete a tumbling pass, and enough power to shoot a stunt up. There are many different leg workouts cheerleaders do, here are few:

Lunges



Demonstration of a Lunge



Squats

Demonstration of a Squat

Frog Jumps/Mary Poppins

Leg Kicks

Running- helps build all muscles in your legs

Calve raises

Jumps- jumping repetitively is one of the best conditioning tactics coaches use to build their cheerleader’s muscles



We do about 7 toe touches (pictured), right hurkies, left hurkies, right/left hurdlers, and pikes each practice



Arms are another important body part that cheerleaders workout constantly. In order to be able to support yourself when tumbling, your arms need to be strong enough to hold your weight while your legs whip around. You also need to have arm strength to hold up a flier, or else a stunt can fall or be unsteady. Cheerleaders condition their arms through many different ways, here are a few:

Push-ups- believe it or not cheerleaders can actually do quite a few



Demonstration of a Push-Up

 Arm Dips

Weight lifting- yes, cheerleaders actually lift weights

Stunts- Coaches make their stunt groups hold the fliers in the air and alternate from a bench to an extention to build arm strength

Handstand push-ups- way more difficult than your average push-up

But most importantly, cheerleaders work on building up their abs. Abs are the dominant muscle in cheerleading that can make almost any aspect of cheerleading effortless if a cheerleader can master the use of their hard-rock abs. Abs can help a cheerleader whip her body over faster when tumbling, whip her legs up faster when jumping, or make a stunt go up easier (mostly applies to fliers) if they can hold their weight through their abs. Even though the use of abs is not as apparent as the other muscles listed, the abs are the foundation muscles that every cheerleader must have to master the sport and their abilities. Here are a few different conditioning tactics cheerleaders use to build their rock-hard abs:

Regular Crunches/Sit-ups

Demonstration of a Crunch

Side Crunches

Butterfly Crunches

Demonstration of a Butterfly Crunch

 Bicycle

Demonstration of Bicycle Crunch

6-90%

Scissor Kicks

Demonstration of Scissor Kicks

Butterfly Kicks

V-ups



There are two different versions of the V-up, this is the regular version







This is our version, where you actually make a V with your upper and lower body and your legs!

 Cheerleaders are not prissy girls who just wear short skirts, make-up, and bows. Behind all the glitter and glam, when no one is watching these girls are sweating in a gym, burning fat, and making pure muscle machines. They must be in top shape in order to jump around for hours and make it look easy. Cheerleading is not an easy sport; it takes time, hard work, perseverance, sweat, and pain. Like they say no pain, no gain. Cheerleaders are just tough creatures that can fight beyond the pain and cover it with a pretty smile. How can they say were not a sport?

This work by Veronica Oviedo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.