How to Count for Cheerleading Stunts

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Lucy Spain on behalf of Expert Village here to talk about cheerleading stunts. Now that you've mastered some pyramids, you definitely want to show them off at your games or in competition. It sounds the best if you can set your pyramid to counts or to a cheer. Now it's first and foremost important to go ahead and set them to counts. In cheerleading, we count in increments of eight. So if you reach eight, you go again, start back, eight. It's really important to know what you're supposed to be doing on each count. Now for example, getting into a stunt may be like this. One could be the clean, two could be the step, three, four may be a bounce, five may be halfway up, six may be all the way up. Seven may be a hold, eight may be a pop and one may be a catch. This is really important in pyramids, because both sides of the pyramid need to be doing the same thing all at once. If you have one girl getting in, one girl popping out, one girl landing, one girl flying up, it defeats the whole purpose of doing a unity pyramid, so we really need to make sure as a group we count aloud and get everyone together. Another thing you can do is set your pyramids to cheers, which is basically the same concept but instead of numbers, we're going to do words. So going back to the demonstration earlier, it could be: take it to the hoop, pause, score, hit two more, cradle. So you just want to make sure you know if you're going on a word or on a pause, you need to make sure everyone's going at the same speed, and really really remember what you're doing on each word personally so the whole unit can go together."