Importance of Stretching When Cheerleading

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Lucy Spain on behalf of Expert Village here to talk about cheerleading jumps and tumbling. Before we start any jumps and tumbling, we need to make sure that our muscles are properly stretched out. First of all, you're going to want to make sure that your muscles are warm. We don't want to come right into practice and start stretching. We need to do at least 5 laps around the gym, 20 jumping jacks, and just something to get your blood flowing. Basic stretching. You can start out with your arms. We want to make sure that our shoulders are stretched out. We can do these cross stretches. You can also reach around and link your arms behind you to get the underneath of your arms stretched out. Secondly, we want to make sure that are legs are stretched out. We can start with a simple butterfly stretch. It's really up to you how comfortable you want to do it. It can be as far out as this. It can be as close in as all the way. It's really important to deepen your stretch. You want to push down on your knees, get them as close to the floor as possible. Second, for our split our jumps, we're going to want to do a stretch where you open your legs. You're going to want to go from side to side, all the way to the middle. It's really important once you're in your stretch, you need to be able to hold it for at least 20 seconds or so. These are really fun to do in your group. You can get a circle with the rest of your squad, pick a different girl to lead each time so you get a variety of stretches in, and you want to make sure you're holding them. Another good stretch to do to get our torso stretch is over to the side. We want to make sure we stretch both sides evenly. Make sure you stretch all the way from your head, neck stretches, down to rolling each ankle, which is really important, our wrist and our ankles, to make sure when we land we don't injure ourselves."