I don't think I'm the best person to quote from, as I'm not a professional bodybuilder pr has an extremely strong build but, I thought this is by far all that I've heard, learned and trained and which I believe worked for me.
So let's get started.
I believe non-amateur cheerleader would know by now that cheerleading is that kind of sport that required full body strength. Although we always say that our strength should comes from the legs and not your upper body and etc, however, upper body do comes in handy when you fight for your stunts or when you proceed on to higher level stunts.
For example, without a strong wrist and forearms you would not be able to catch and stop a FULL UP or FULL AROUND.
So I believe that everyone should work towards a full body workout instead of zooming in to ONLY your major core muscles which are CHEST, LEGS and BACK.
Shoulders (CORE)
Shoulders are not usually a core muscle, but I include it to be one because we use our shoulders a lot when stunting.
Here are the workouts I do for shoulders:
Shoulder Press
Arnold Press
Military Press
Front Raise
Frot Lateral Raise
Reverse Dumbbell Flyes
Chest (CORE)
I'm not a big fan of BIG CHEST. What I usually do are the normal bench press and inclined bench press. It seems like inclined bench press in some sense helps when you are stunting. You can try it.
Backs (CORE)
Upper Back (Trapezius)
Shoulder Shrug
Up Right Row
Reverse Dumbbell Flyes
Barbell Row
Lower Back
Dead Lifts
Abs (CORE)
All the shoulderstand would have to agree with me that if you want your pyramid to be stable and not hurting yourself, not only that you need to have a strong back but strong ABS is a GIVEN !! Back and abs come hand in hand.
I would recommend what was suggested by a gymnastic teacher and ever since I started doing this, my abs feels stronger (doesn't guarantee you got the 'abs' thou)
What the teacher told me was two simple instructions. I had to translate it into English, try to understand me.
1.) 上固定 Lock your upper body and train your abs by moving your lower body.
For example: Leg raise or Hanging abdominal leg raise (I recommend this for the simplest matter that it can help in doing backtucks)
2.) 下固定 Lock your lower body and train your abs by moving your upper body.
For example: Just normal sit ups and crunches.
Legs (CORE) Legs consist of quite a number of different muscles groups such as quads, calves, hamstring and etc. If you want to get a higher tossing ability I recommend you to train up your calves as well.
Squats (Quads)
Leg Extension (Quads)
Calf Raise (Calves)
Leg Curl (Hamstring)
Romanian Dead lifts (Hamstring)
All of these are just strength training, sometimes you can incorporate your stunting requirement when you gym.
For example, when you are going for a higher toss (require speed), you can use lighter weight and do squat jumps.
Another example would be holding your weight at extended position to simulate extension and train your shoulders' endurance.
Last but not least, everytime you hit the gym, everytime you do your weights and everytime you workout, make sure every single one COUNTS.
Remember that your FORM is more important than the number you carry.
Make sure that you are doing it properly, lest you injure yourself for nothing.
WARM UP is very important !!!!!!!!
Just want to share what Weihoe told me during one of our legs day,
'if you walk into the gym and walk out of the gym after your leg workout, something is wrong'
GOOD LUCK CHEERLEADERS !!
PS: there are so many more exercises you can do, so many variations. FIND OUT something that works for you. FIND OUT something that you are lacking such as endurance? power? strength? These are just my humble suggestions, and sharing what I think would work. You can try, if it doesn't work, you should try something else. You can always use the most powerful tool in the worlds !!
G-double O-G-L-E
GOOGLE !!
GOOGLE !!
PLEASE SUGGEST MORE EXERCISES TO ME THAT'S GONNA HELP !! :)
