Cheerleading Conditioning Exercises: Cheer Conditioning Workouts, Drills and the Full Conditioning List.

The cheer conditioning list, with sets and reps attached.

Every cheer conditioning list on the internet gives you exercise names. Almost none give you a dose, which is the only part that decides whether anything changes. Here is the same list with numbers on it. Two sessions a week covers all of it if you rotate the emphasis. Rest 60 to 90 seconds between strength sets and 30 seconds between core and ankle sets.

Eighteen exercises is not eighteen exercises per session. It is a menu. A single session pulls six to eight of them, and the ankle and core items are the ones that should appear in almost every session because they carry the most injury share and cost the least time.

Two strength days, and the conditioning block inside practice.

A UCA conditioning handout by Tom Jensen, distributed to coaches under the title "What's New in Conditioning? Success with Less", breaks cheerleading into four physical components: cardiovascular endurance, strength training, flexibility, and skills and drills. Its prescription is short. Cardio at least three to four times a week for about 20 minutes with the note "Don't overdo it". Strength training twice a week on a two day split, lower body one day and upper body the next. Stretch every day in the summer and during warmups, and stretch flyers inside their stunt groups by holding the body position for eight 8 counts and nudging. How long each of those holds should last, and where the block belongs in the session, is covered separately under cheerleading stretches, because the published research puts a threshold on it that most warm ups cross without noticing.

Two strength days a week is also what the research supports, and the agreement is not a coincidence: the cheer injury literature found that two eccentric sessions per week reduced muscle injury risk by 40 percent. Here is that structure written as an actual week for an in season team practicing twice.

Preseason inverts the emphasis: more strength volume, fewer full outs. Competition season inverts it again, cutting strength to a maintenance dose of one to two shorter sessions so the legs are fresh for cleaning and full outs. If the team is peaking in two weeks, conditioning volume is the first thing that comes down, not the last. How the whole session gets ordered around this block is covered on the cheerleading practice plan page.

Cheer conditioning drills that use the skills instead of replacing them.

The UCA handout has a section it calls cheer specific conditioning, and it is the most useful part of the document. Hold motion placements for 30 seconds. Run a stunt stamina contest to see which group holds a stunt longest. Play a sharpness game, effectively Simon Says in the air. Run 1-2-3 hit drills. These do two jobs at once: they build the endurance quality the routine actually demands, and they do it in the positions the athletes will be in. A conditioning game that has nothing to do with cheer builds general fitness, which is fine, but it is not the fastest route to holding a pyramid for eight more counts.

One honest caveat about that handout: it is a dated document. Its resources section recommends P90X, Insanity and Zumba, which places it firmly in an earlier era of coaching. The parts that have aged well are the frequency guidance, the two day split and the fact that it schedules dedicated ankle and wrist work, which is exactly what the modern injury data says matters. The parts that have aged poorly are the very high repetition circuits.

Check your own state association handbook before you assume a number. Rules vary by state and by activity, and figures published for football frequently do not apply to spirit at all.