Cheer Jumps and Cheerleading Motions: Cheerleading Jumps, Toe Touch Technique and Motion Drills.
Every jump and every arm motion named, with the technique cue that fixes each one, the drills that actually raise a jump, and the part almost nobody tells athletes: what a jump is worth on a score sheet, which is very different at a tryout than at a competition.
Written for coaches. Drill progressions and rep counts are taken from Varsity Spirit's published jump conditioning material rather than invented, and the scoring weights come from the USASF master score sheet and published tryout evaluation forms.
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17/18 confirmedLast comp
Winter Regionals
Place
2nd
Score
87.35
Packing lists, music timing and day-of schedules attach to each event.
Athletes are listed by competitor number.
Short answer: cheer jumps are the airborne shapes an athlete hits from a two foot takeoff, and five of them carry the sport: the toe touch, the pike, the herkie, the hurdler and the tuck. Cheerleading motions are the roughly twelve arm positions every sideline is built from, led by clean, high V, low V, T, touchdown and daggers. Height comes from the dip and the arm swing rather than from the legs at the top, which is why the fastest way to raise a jump is to train the takeoff and the shape as two separate exercises. Jumps are worth 10 of the 170 points on the USASF master score sheet, or 5.88 percent, but on the standard Varsity Spirit tryout sheet they are 10 points out of 50, a full 20 percent. A jump matters far more for making a team than for winning a competition.
The five cheerleading jumps a score sheet will actually ask for.
Programs teach anywhere from five to twenty named jumps, but tryout sheets and sideline routines keep coming back to the same five. Learn these properly and the rest are combinations. The column that matters most below is the last one, because it is the specific fault a judge writes down, and it is almost never the height.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Jump | Legs | Arms | What loses the point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toe touch | Straddled and straight, ideally parallel to the floor, toes pointed. The hips rotate back, which is what lets the legs get past 90 degrees. | T position, palms down. | Bent knees and reaching for the toes with the hands. The name is misleading and beginners chase their feet with their arms, which drops the chest and kills the shape. |
| Pike | Both legs together, straight in front, knees locked, body folded. | Straight out in front, sometimes called candlesticks. | A soft knee. This is the least forgiving jump in cheer because there is no straddle to hide behind, and a single bent leg is visible from every seat in the arena. |
| Herkie | One leg straight out to the side, the other bent with the knee pointing down at the floor. | Usually one arm high, one arm on the hip or in a T. | Turning the bent knee out, which turns it into a side hurdler. Coaches score these as different jumps, so an athlete who cannot tell them apart is inconsistent by accident. |
| Hurdler | One leg extended straight, the other bent. Front hurdler faces the extended leg. Side hurdler points the bent knee out toward the crowd. | T for the side, touchdown or a V for the front. | The extended leg drifting below parallel. The bent leg gets all the attention in practice and the straight one quietly sinks. |
| Tuck | Knees pulled to the chest using the abdominals rather than swung up by the hip flexors. | High V or high touchdown. | Leaning back to meet the knees. The torso should stay upright, and this is the jump where the habit of piking the chest forward or back is either built or broken. |
The herkie is named after Lawrence Herkimer, who founded the National Cheerleaders Association. It is the only jump in the sport named after a person, and it is worth telling a young team, because a jump with a story attached gets drilled more willingly than one without.
Every other named cheer jump, and where it fits in the teaching order.
These are the jumps beyond the core five. Two of them, the straight jump and the spread eagle, come earlier in a teaching progression than any of the famous ones, which is the single most common sequencing mistake in youth cheer.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Jump | Shape | Teach it |
|---|---|---|
| Straight jump (pencil, T jump) | Body completely straight in the air, arms in a T or overhead. | First, always. It is how you correct everything from the ribs down before any shape gets involved. |
| Spread eagle (X jump) | Legs apart, arms in a high V, so the body reads as an X. | Second. It introduces the straddle shape with no requirement to get the legs to parallel. |
| Double hook | Both legs hooked in, the shape sometimes called a cheer sit. | Early. Good for teaching the athlete to hold a shape at the peak rather than passing through it. |
| Double nine | One leg extended, the other bent to about 90 degrees, arms mirroring the legs so both sides form a 9. | After the hurdler. It is a hurdler with the arms doing something harder. |
| Around the world | Hit a pike, then whip the legs back around into a toe touch in the same jump. | Last. It needs a clean pike and a clean toe touch first, plus enough hang time to do both. |
| Power jump | Any jump taken with no arm swing at all, so every bit of height comes from the legs. | As conditioning, not as choreography. It exposes an athlete who has been living off the swing. |
| Triple jump | Three jumps in a row connected by the swing, with no reset between them. | Once a single jump is consistent. Connected jumps are where sideline routines and competition jump sections live. |
| Turntable | Legs rotate side to side while the arms travel back and forth. | Optional. It shows up in choreography more than in scoring. |
| Jump to tumbling | A jump connected directly into a tumbling skill such as a back handspring series. | Only once both halves are independently solid, and only inside the team's competitive level. |
The cheerleading motions list, and the correction that matters for each one.
Motions are the cheapest points in the sport and the most commonly wasted. Nothing here is physically hard. Every one of these is scored on whether twenty athletes hit the same line at the same instant and stop dead, which is a coaching problem rather than an athletic one. Fists stay closed with the thumbs on the outside, wrists stay straight, and the motion stops rather than floats.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Motion | Position | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Clean (ready) | Feet together, arms squeezed straight down the sides. | Every motion sequence returns here. If clean is sloppy, the whole routine looks unrehearsed between skills. |
| High V | Arms up at roughly 45 degrees from the body, pinkies rotated to the back. | Arms drift behind the head. The V should be visible in the athlete's own peripheral vision. |
| Low V | The same angle, arms down. | Hands creep in toward the thighs and the V collapses into a clean. |
| T | Arms straight out at 90 degrees, pinkies to the back. | Shoulders shrug up. The line should come from the shoulder joint, not from lifting the trapezius. |
| Broken T | A T with the elbows bent and the fists pulled in toward the chest. | Elbows drop below shoulder height, which reads as tired from the judging table. |
| Touchdown | Arms straight overhead, in line with the body, brushing the ears. | Bring the arms to the ears, not the ears to the arms. Athletes tilt the head forward to meet the arms and lose the line. |
| Low touchdown | The same, arms straight down in front, fists together. | Arms swing forward away from the body instead of staying tight to the thighs. |
| Daggers | Elbows bent and hugging the ribs, fists up, pinkies forward. Some programs call this table top. | Elbows wing out. They should stay pinned to the sides, which is also the starting position for sitting toe touch drills. |
| L (right or left) | One arm up in a touchdown line, the other straight out in a T. | The two arms end up at different heights relative to each other across the squad. Set both from a wall. |
| Punch (right or left) | One arm straight up, the other fist on the hip. | The hip arm gets forgotten. Both arms are scored, not just the one in the air. |
| Diagonal | One arm high, one arm low, forming a single straight line through the body. | The line bends at the shoulders. Check it from the side, not the front. |
| K | One arm high in a diagonal, the other bent across the body. | The bent arm's placement drifts. Pick one contact point on the body and hold the whole squad to it. |
Motions only exist to carry words to the far side of a stadium, so they are best drilled inside the material they belong to rather than in isolation. Our cheerleading cheers and chants page sorts sideline material by game situation and covers what a judge scores when a squad leads a crowd.
Jumps are worth four times more at a tryout than at a competition.
This is the fact that should shape how much practice time jumps get, and most programs have it backwards. A competition routine is won in the building sections. A tryout is very often won or lost on a toe touch, because a jump is one of only five things a judge is scoring in ninety seconds.
Swipe sideways to see the full table
| Score sheet | Jump value | Share of the total |
|---|---|---|
| USASF master score sheet (competition) | 10 points of 170 | 5.88 percent. For comparison, stunts, pyramids and tosses together take 90 points, or 52.94 percent. |
| Varsity Spirit standard tryout sheet | 10 points of 50 | 20 percent. The other four categories are cheer, dance, a specialty skill and overall impression, each also worth 10. |
| Varsity Spirit competitive tryout sheet | 10 points of 90 | About 11 percent, across nine categories that split execution from difficulty. |
| Bartram Trail HS, Florida (weighted tryout) | 10 percent weighting | Stunt carries 35 percent and cheer 30 percent on this sheet, so jumps sit alongside dance and tumbling. |
| University of Georgia (college tryout) | 5 points of 100 | College inverts all star weighting again, loading points onto sidelines, fight song and the interview. |
One change worth watching: USASF has published an updated rubric for The Cheerleading Worlds 2027 that converts Club divisions from 170 points to 100 to align with IASF, and jumps become a capped category in that version. USASF describes it as primarily a scale conversion rather than a change in scoring philosophy, with weights staying within less than one percentage point. If your program competes at Worlds, re-check the published sheet before you rebuild a routine around it. The full breakdown lives on our cheerleading competition score sheet page, and the tryout side is on the cheerleading tryout score sheet.
How to get cheer jumps higher, using the drills Varsity actually publishes.
A jump has four parts and athletes usually only practice one of them. The dip and the swing produce the height. The lift produces the shape. The snap down produces the landing and most of the ankle risk. Train them separately, then put them back together. The progressions below come from Varsity Spirit's published jump conditioning material, with the rep counts as written rather than rounded off.
Drill 01
Leg explosions
Feet together, dip until the knees reach 90 degrees, then explode into the air without using the arms at all. Start at 3 sets of 5 controlled jumps and build to 15 consecutive. Removing the arms is the whole point: it stops an athlete from borrowing height from the swing while the legs stay lazy.
Drill 02
Sitting toe touches
Sit in a tuck with the feet slightly off the floor and the arms in daggers, then quickly lift the legs and arms all the way into the toe touch position. Toes pointed, legs straight, back upright. Also 3 sets of 5, building to 15 in a row. This trains the shape with no landing to worry about.
Drill 03
Straddle lifts
Sit on the floor in a straddle with the hands between the knees and lift one leg two inches for a two count. Progress to holding each leg for a five count, then a ten count, then lifting both legs at once. This is the drill that raises a toe touch above 90 degrees, and it is the one athletes skip.
The 70 jump conditioning sequence
Once technique is sound, Varsity publishes a jump conditioning block run to fast music on an 8 count: high V, hold, start jump, hit jump, land jump, hold, stand, hold. The sequence is 5 T jumps, 5 tuck jumps, 5 left hurdlers, 5 right hurdlers, rest, then 5 pikes, 5 toe touches, 10 toe touches, 5 toe touches, 5 pikes, 5 right hurdlers, 5 left hurdlers, rest, then 5 tuck jumps and 5 T jumps to finish. It runs about six to seven minutes.
Two warnings come attached to it and both are worth repeating to a team. It can take several weeks to see results, so nobody should expect a higher toe touch by Friday. And technique has to be mastered before repetition based drills start, because seventy repetitions of a bent knee is how a bent knee becomes permanent.
For where this sits in a practice, Varsity Spirit's own published practice structure gives jumps 10 to 15 minutes in a session that also covers warmup, tumbling, stunting and a cheer or chant block. Their note on it is the useful part: the quality of practice time is what matters, not the quantity. Our cheerleading practice plan page lays that whole session out block by block.
The half of a jump nobody drills, and where the injuries are.
Ankles are the most injured site in cheerleading, showing up in 24.4 to 44.9 percent of injuries depending on the study population. Jumps are one of the two places that load comes from, and unlike a stunt, a jump landing is entirely under the athlete's own control. A snap down that lands flat footed with locked knees is the pattern to hunt for.
What the evidence supports
- Balance training cut ankle sprain rates from 9.9 percent to 6.1 percent in a randomized trial of 765 high school athletes, roughly halving risk. That study was in soccer and basketball, not cheer, and in athletes with no previous sprain the difference was not statistically significant, so treat it as strong but borrowed evidence.
- A previous ankle sprain roughly doubles the risk of the next one, which is the argument for keeping a returning athlete on balance work long after the pain has gone.
- Eccentric training twice a week reduced muscle injury risk by 40 percent in the reviewed literature, and jumps are an eccentric skill on the way down.
- Crash pads around 6 inches thick cut ankle sprain risk by about half. If a team drills seventy jumps, the surface underneath matters.
What to put in the plan
- Single leg balance holds before jump blocks, not after, while the athlete is fresh enough to correct.
- Snap down landings taught as their own skill: toes down first, knees soft, hips back, arms finishing clean rather than flailing.
- UCA's published conditioning guidance for cheer sits at cardio three to four times a week for around 20 minutes, strength twice a week on an upper and lower split, and stretching daily. Jump height responds to all three.
- Volume caps. Seventy jumps is a conditioning block, not a warmup, and it should not be run on consecutive days.
The full set by position sits on our cheerleading conditioning exercises page, split into base, flyer and backspot work.
Cheer jumps for beginners, in the order that actually works.
Unlike stunts and tumbling, jumps are not restricted by USASF level. There is no rule stopping a Level 1 team from throwing a toe touch. That freedom is exactly why the teaching order gets skipped, and why so many athletes arrive at a tryout with a jump that has been wrong for three years. The sequence below is ordered by how much hip mobility each shape requires.
01
Straight jump and tuck
Build the dip, the swing and an upright torso. No shape to chase, so every correction lands on the mechanics.
02
Spread eagle and double hook
Introduce a shape at the peak without demanding parallel legs. This is where holding the position gets taught.
03
Hurdler and herkie
One straight leg at a time. Name the bent knee direction out loud every rep so the two jumps stay distinct.
04
Toe touch, then pike
Both need real hip range. Gate them behind a floor straddle and a floor pike, or you are teaching a bent knee.
Tracking which athlete has cleared which gate is the part that breaks down in a program of any size. Coaches end up carrying it in their heads, and then tryout season arrives and nobody can remember who was signed off on a pike in October. Signing skills off per athlete, the same way you would for cheerleading stunts, turns that into a filterable list instead of a memory test.
Cheer jumps, answered directly.
What are the 5 basic cheer jumps?
The five jumps almost every program teaches are the toe touch, the pike, the herkie, the hurdler and the tuck. The tuck and the straight jump come first because they build the swing and the landing. The toe touch and the pike come last because both need hip mobility that takes months to develop. Most tryout score sheets only ever ask for these five.
What is the hardest cheer jump?
The pike is the hardest of the standard five, because it demands straight knees and closed hips at the same moment and there is nowhere to hide a bent leg. The toe touch is harder to make look good, since a low toe touch reads as sloppy from the judging table even when the athlete is airborne. Around the world, which pikes and then whips into a toe touch, is the hardest jump in common use.
How do you get your cheer jumps higher?
Height comes from the dip and the swing, not from the legs at the top. Train the takeoff separately with leg explosions, which are 90 degree dips jumped without any arm swing, starting at 3 sets of 5 and building to 15 in a row. Then train the shape separately on the floor with sitting toe touches and straddle lifts, so the athlete is not trying to learn power and flexibility in the same repetition. The flexibility half of that split is its own project; the cheer stretches that open a straddle are listed by the skill they unlock.
How many cheerleading motions are there?
There are roughly a dozen core arm motions and every sideline in the country is built from them: clean, high V, low V, T, broken T, touchdown, low touchdown, daggers, left and right L, left and right punch, diagonals and K. Everything else is a combination. Sharpness, not variety, is what gets scored.
What is a herkie jump?
A herkie has one leg extended straight out to the side and the other bent with the knee pointing down toward the floor. It is named after Lawrence Herkimer, who founded the National Cheerleaders Association. The side hurdler looks similar but points the bent knee out toward the crowd instead of down, and coaches use that single detail to tell the two apart.
How much are jumps worth on a cheer score sheet?
On the USASF master score sheet jumps are worth 10 points out of 170, which is 5.88 percent, while stunts, pyramids and tosses together take 90 points, or 52.94 percent. Tryouts invert that completely. On the standard Varsity Spirit tryout sheet, jumps are a full 10 points out of 50, so a jump is worth 20 percent of whether an athlete makes the team.
How long does it take to get a toe touch?
A flexible athlete who already has a straddle on the floor can usually hit a recognizable toe touch inside a few weeks. An athlete starting without the straddle should expect a season. Varsity is blunt that jump conditioning takes several weeks to show results, and the mistake that costs the most time is drilling volume before the shape is correct, which just makes a bad jump automatic.
What order should you teach cheer jumps in?
Straight jump first, then tuck, then spread eagle, then hurdler, then herkie, then toe touch, then pike. The order tracks how much hip mobility each shape needs, not how impressive it looks. Teaching a toe touch to an athlete who cannot yet sit in a straddle produces a bent knee habit that takes longer to remove than it took to build.
The rest of the skills season.
Technique
How to do a toe touch
The four phases of the jump, the six faults coaches see most, and a six week block to fix them.
Building
Cheerleading stunts by level
Every stunt name explained, plus what each USASF level legally allows for 2026 to 2027.
Levels
Cheerleading levels explained
Levels 1 to 7, the Novice, Prep and Elite tiers, and what the decimal levels actually mean.
Tryouts
Cheerleading tryout score sheet
Real categories and weightings from published school and all star sheets, ready to copy.
Conditioning
Cheerleading conditioning exercises
Sets and reps split by base, flyer and backspot, built around where the injuries actually happen.
Product
Skill tracking in the app
Sign off jumps, stunts and tumbling per athlete, and see who is one gate away from the next shape.
Game day, every day
Know which jumps every athlete has actually cleared.
Sign off jumps and motions per athlete, filter the roster before you choreograph, and walk into tryouts with a record instead of a recollection.
Takes 30 seconds. No credit card needed.