Most cheer conditioning is inherited rather than designed. Somebody's old coach ran suicides and crunches, so that is what the team runs, twenty years later, in a sport whose injury profile looks nothing like the one those drills were built for. The useful question is not what makes athletes tired. It is what the sport actually breaks, and what training has been shown to change it.
That question has answers now. A 2025 systematic review of cheerleading injuries pulled together the epidemiology and the prevention trials, and the picture it produces is specific enough to program against. This article turns it into a conditioning block you can run.
Is conditioning required in cheerleading?
The governing body treats it as expected practice, not optional. The USA Cheer rules state that "All cheerleading squads should adopt a comprehensive conditioning and strength building program" and that "An appropriate warm-up exercise should precede all cheerleading activities." The same section adds that "All programs should qualify cheerleaders according to accepted teaching progressions" with spotting used until performers demonstrate mastery. Most school and state programs adopt those safety rules directly, which means a squad running no conditioning program is out of step with its own rulebook, not just undertrained.
What conditioning should cheerleaders do?
Train the places that get hurt. The review reports ankle injuries at 24.4 to 44.9 percent of all cheer injuries and wrist and hand injuries at 15.6 to 19.3 percent, with stunt work responsible for 52 to 60 percent of the total. Among catastrophic cases, 52 percent were head injuries and 32 percent cervical spine. Falls from four to eleven feet caused 87 percent of severe injuries, and 89 percent of severe fall related injuries were associated with stunts and pyramids.
None of that says a cheerleader needs to run three miles. It says ankles need to tolerate repeated single leg landings, shoulders need to hold load overhead under fatigue, and the whole team needs to stay sharp enough late in a routine that a catch does not get missed.
| Where injuries happen | Share of injuries | What to condition |
|---|---|---|
| Ankle | 24.4% to 44.9% | Single leg balance, hopping and landing mechanics, calf and tibialis strength |
| Wrist and hand | 15.6% to 19.3% | Loaded wrist extension tolerance, front support holds, gradual tumbling volume |
| Shoulder (bases, spotters) | Bases and spotters take 34% of injuries | Overhead stability, scapular control, six week strengthening block |
| Head and cervical spine | 52% and 32% of catastrophic cases | Not a conditioning fix: spotter ratios, surfaces and skill progression |
That last row matters. Conditioning is not the lever for the most severe category. The review credits a rule change with that one: after hard surface basket tosses were banned in 2006 and 2007, the catastrophic injury rate fell from 1.55 to 0.40 cases per million, a 74 percent reduction. Surfaces do similar work. The review puts the critical safety height of a spring floor at about 11 feet against roughly 6 inches for concrete, roughly 22 times, and reports that 6 inch crash pads cut ankle sprain risk by half and fall injury severity by 60 percent. If your gym is choosing between another conditioning session and better matting, the matting wins.
What conditioning do cheer bases need?
Shoulder stability and trunk stiffness, because of what a base absorbs. The review found that base athletes take 2.8 to 3.5 times body weight through the lumbar joints and experience 63 percent more landing impact force than flyers, and that spotters and bases together account for 34 percent of injuries. It also reports that a six week shoulder strengthening program reduced anterior shoulder laxity and increased stiffness.
In practice that means overhead pressing, loaded carries, and anti-rotation trunk work rather than isolation exercises. A base who can hold a heavy overhead position while walking is training the exact demand of an extension. A base doing bicep curls is not.
How often should cheerleaders condition?
Two dedicated sessions a week is the number with evidence behind it. The review reports that eccentric training twice a week reduced muscle injury risk by 40 percent, that a 12 week closed chain eccentric program cut hamstring injury related pain from 6.07 to 3.67 on the scale used, and that the same approach improved tendon load resistance by 22 percent. Twelve weeks is roughly a preseason, which is convenient: the block that pays off is the one you run before the season, not the punishment laps you add in January when the routine is not clean.
One scheduling constraint catches programs out. The national preseason heat acclimatization guidelines used across US secondary school athletics state that all conditioning and weight room activities should be considered part of practice, and cap a single practice at three hours including warmup and cooldown. A separate conditioning session in August is not free time on the schedule. Build it into the cheerleading practice plan and count the minutes.
A two session weekly conditioning block
This is a template, not a prescription, and it assumes athletes have been cleared and taught the movements. Keep both sessions away from the stunt block, because the review's central finding is that fatigue plus stunting is the mechanism behind most cheer injuries. If you want the movements themselves with sets and reps attached, and split by base, flyer and backspot, the cheerleading conditioning exercises list carries the full dose for each one.
| Session | Focus | Work | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Lower body eccentric and ankle | Nordic hamstring or slider curl 3 x 5, split squat 3 x 8 each leg, single leg calf raise 3 x 12, single leg hop and stick 3 x 6 each leg | The eccentric work is the 40 percent risk reduction. The hop and stick trains the landing that sprains ankles. |
| Day 2 | Upper body stability and trunk | Overhead press 3 x 6, half kneeling landmine press 3 x 8, farmer carry 3 x 30 yards, pallof press 3 x 10 each side, hollow hold 3 x 20 seconds | The six week shoulder block, in the positions bases and spotters actually load. |
| Either day, last 10 minutes | Routine specific intervals | 4 to 6 rounds of 30 seconds hard, 60 seconds rest, progressing to 45 seconds hard, 45 rest | A routine is 2:30 of short high intensity bursts. Steady state running does not rehearse that. |
How do cheerleaders build stamina for a routine?
Train intervals that match the routine, not steady state running. A competitive routine is two minutes thirty seconds of short, high intensity bursts with almost no true rest, which is why a team that jogs well can still fall apart in the last thirty seconds of a full out. The standard progression is to run routine sections back to back with shrinking rest until a full out no longer spikes the team past the point where they can hit skills cleanly.
The review also suggests a way to know when to back off: counter movement jump height, measured with a wearable, as a marker of neuromuscular fatigue. Most programs will not have the hardware, but the principle transfers. If jump height is visibly down at the start of practice, that is not the day to add conditioning volume or teach a new stunt.
The intervention with the biggest effect is not an exercise
Of everything in the review, the single largest measured effect belongs to the coaching staff. Highly qualified coaching teams reduced injury risk by half, and moderately qualified teams by 40 percent. The review also recommends at least one qualified spotter for every five athletes.
Both of those are administrative facts about your program rather than training decisions, which makes them easy to let slide. Certifications lapse quietly, and the spotter ratio silently degrades the week three coaches are out. Programs that keep this tight usually keep credentials and renewal dates somewhere they can be checked in seconds, whether that is a shared sheet or the kind of system that tracks staff training and certification that larger organizations use, rather than in one person's memory. The important part is that somebody notices before the certificate expires, not what the tool is.
What to cut
Two habits show up in cheer conditioning that the evidence does not support. The first is high volume crunches and sit ups as a default core block, which trains trunk flexion when the sport demands trunk stiffness under load. Carries and anti-rotation work fit the demand better. The second is conditioning used as punishment after a bad run through, which reliably puts the most fatigued version of the team on the mat right when concentration matters most.
The wider trend is worth knowing too. Between 2010 and 2019, overall cheerleading emergency visits fell 15 percent and stunt related injury rates dropped 36 percent, while concussions rose 44 percent annually. The sport got safer in the ways rules and surfaces address, and did not in the way that depends on recognition and reporting. Conditioning does not fix a concussion rate. Knowing which problems training can solve, and which need a rule, a mat or a better trained coach, is most of what separates a conditioning program from a punishment routine.
Sources
Injury epidemiology and prevention figures are from a 2025 systematic review of cheerleading injuries published on PubMed Central, covering epidemiological characteristics, biomechanical mechanisms and prevention strategies. Rules language is quoted from the USA Cheer 2025-26 College Rules. Practice time limits are from the inter association preseason heat acclimatization guidelines for secondary school athletics published by the National Athletic Trainers' Association. Nothing here is medical advice, and a program with an athletic trainer should build its conditioning with them.