Warming up your Body

     As a cheerleader, it is always important to stretch your body before you do anything cheer related including cheers, tumbling, dancing, and stunts. This can also be included with any athletic activity or sport! A helpful non-fiction book called The Complete Guide to Cheerleading: All the Tips, Tricks, and Inspiration was quoted as saying "Before practice, prepare your muscles with a 10 to 15 minute warm up. Muscles with good blood flow are more elastic and therefore less prone to injury" (Clark, Farina 78). As a cheerleader on the Kentridge Varsity and Sparkle team, we actually often do 30-45 minutes of warming up our bodies with workouts that include a 2.5 mile run, squats, lunges, push ups, and a generic muscle stretching routine. Because of all of the warming up that we do as a team, we have had far less body pains because of strains, and more blood flow through our bodies during practice and games

 

     One of the many effective stretches that I learned from this book is called the "sit with thigh stretch". This stretch helps to loosen up the joints in out thighs and lower back. Christine Farina and Courtney A. Clark instruct us with this stretch by saying, "Sit with your knees bent, feet flat on the floor, and your hands behind you for support. Lower knees to one side, and try to keep your knees together as you reach the ground. Rock your legs over to the other side… to loosen up your thighs and lower back" (Clark, Farina 91). This book also mentioned how you should do this stretch multiple times in a row in order to create blood flow and keep loosened muscles loose throughout the cheerleading practice/game/competition, etc.

 

     This stretch has helped me in more ways than I thought that it would throughout my cheerleading career AND my home life. I have suffered from severe lower back pain for the past few months related to cheer, and this stretch was recommended to me by my physical therapist and massage therapist, even though I been doing this stretch for a long time since becoming aware of it from this book. After becoming more strict with my stretching routine and completing them on a daily basis, my pain has slowly decreased because of me loosening my back with this continuous routine, so I recommend doing this stretch before a strenuous physical activity, especially cheerleading.

A personal tip that I have learned from doing this stretch is that you can also stretch your shoulder muscles if you have the tips of your fingers facing the opposite way that you are facing; shown in the picture. You know that a certain stretch is effective if you are able to stretch multiple parts of your body at once with only one stretch. 

     Thank you guys for reading this post and hope y'all have learned something new!

 

My question for all of my readers of this post is:

What are some of your favorite stretches or exercises that you do before you do a physical activity or sport?

 

MLA Citation:

Farina, Christine, et al. The Complete Guide to Cheerleading: All the Tips, Tricks, and Inspiration [With DVD]. Ed. Adam Brunner. Minneapolis, MN: MVP Books, 2011. Print.