Cheerleaders

Cheerleading Stretches: Cheer Stretches, Stretching Exercises and the Heel Stretch.

Every cheer stretching list on the internet shows you the same nine positions. Almost none of them answer the two questions a coach actually has: how long to hold each one, and where the stretch block belongs in a two hour practice. Those two answers are published, they are specific, and they disagree with how most gyms run a warm up.

Numbers on this page come from a 2016 systematic review in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, a 2025 systematic review of cheerleading injuries in Frontiers in Public Health, a 2006 randomized controlled trial in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, and the flexibility program Varsity Spirit publishes itself. Every source is named where it is used.

What the evidence changes

  • Under 60 seconds per muscle costs 1.1 percent of performance
  • 60 seconds or more costs 4.6 percent
  • The cost disappears if dynamic work follows the stretch
  • Range gained in a session usually lasts under 30 minutes
  • Stretching shows no clear effect on injury rates
  • Ankles are 28 to 44.9 percent of cheer injuries
Track body positions per athlete

Short answer: before practice, hold each cheerleading stretch 15 to 30 seconds per muscle group and follow the block with dynamic movement. A 2016 systematic review of stretching research found static stretching under 60 seconds per muscle group cost 1.1 percent of subsequent performance, while 60 seconds or more cost 4.6 percent, and that the cost was no longer observable once dynamic activity followed. Save the long holds for after practice, because that is when you are training range rather than protecting a tumbling pass. Flexibility itself does not carry over: range gained in a session typically lasts under 30 minutes, which is why daily short sessions beat one long weekly one. And if the goal is fewer injuries rather than a better heel stretch, the evidence points at balance and eccentric strength work, not at stretching.

The hold time

Sixty seconds per muscle group is the line, and it is the only number that matters.

Behm, Blazevich, Kay and McHugh pooled the stretching literature in a 2016 systematic review in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism. Measured immediately afterward, static stretching changed performance by 3.7 percent downward, dynamic stretching by 1.3 percent upward, and PNF stretching by 4.4 percent downward. Those averages are the headline most people quote, and on their own they are the reason a generation of coaches was told to stop stretching before practice.

The dose response buried underneath is the part that changes how you run a warm up. Static stretching of 60 seconds or more per muscle group produced a 4.6 percent deficit. Under 60 seconds produced 1.1 percent. That gap is the difference between a real effect and a rounding error, and it is set by how long you hold, not by whether you stretch at all.

There is a second qualifier that almost never gets repeated. Testing in those studies happened on average 3 to 5 minutes after stretching, and most of them did not put any dynamic activity in between. Where studies did include dynamic work after the stretch, the review reports no clear performance effect at all. The authors' own recommendation is stretching inside a warm up that includes additional post stretching dynamic activity.

The routine Varsity Spirit publishes, measured against that line

Swipe sideways to see the full table

Stretch Published hold Primary muscle group loaded
Standing pike 30 seconds Hamstrings, both legs at once
Straddle sit, center 30 seconds Adductors
Straddle sit, right and left 15 seconds each side Hamstrings, one side at a time
Right and left splits 30 seconds each side Hamstring on the front leg, hip flexor on the back
Runners lunge, right and left 30 seconds each side Hip flexors
Butterfly 15 seconds Adductors, short range

Add it up and the whole thing is 3 minutes 45 seconds of holding. The heaviest single muscle group is the hamstrings, which pick up 30 seconds in the pike plus 15 a side in the straddle plus 30 a side in the splits. Split by side, no single hamstring is held for more than 75 seconds across the entire session, and no other group comes close to 60. The largest brand in cheerleading published a protocol that sits almost exactly inside the threshold the research identifies, without ever citing the research. That is the useful coincidence on this page: you do not have to choose between the sport's own guidance and the evidence.

Where it goes in practice

Range gained in a stretch session usually lasts under 30 minutes.

This is the single most useful line in the 2016 review for anyone writing a practice plan. All three stretching methods improved range of motion, and those improvements typically lasted less than 30 minutes. Stretch the squad at 5:00 and the range you bought is gone by 5:35. If the pyramid section with the heel stretches runs at 6:45, the athletes are hitting those body positions on whatever range they woke up with.

Two consequences follow, and both are practical. First, if a body position is the hard part of a routine section, put a short re stretch immediately before that section rather than relying on the opening block. Second, flexibility as a lasting quality is built by frequency, not by one heroic session. Varsity Spirit's published challenge runs seven days a week for three weeks with the instruction never to skip a day, and that structure is consistent with range that decays inside half an hour: you are not storing flexibility, you are repeatedly asking the tissue and the nervous system to accept a longer position until the adaptation sticks.

Swipe sideways to see the full table

Point in practice What to do Why
Opening warm up Light aerobic work first, then static holds of 15 to 30 seconds, then dynamic movement Varsity Spirit publishes a warm up with aerobic conditioning and stretching every single practice. Keeping the holds short and finishing with dynamic work is what removes the performance cost.
Before tumbling or jumps Dynamic only: leg swings, lunge walks, skips, progressive jump attempts Dynamic stretching was the only method in the review that improved performance, and it improved it when completed within minutes of the activity.
Before a body position section A 20 to 30 second re stretch of the specific position The range from the opening block is gone. This is the reason a flyer hits her heel stretch in warm ups and misses it in the routine run.
End of practice Long holds, 60 seconds and up, and the positions you are actually trying to change The performance cost of a long hold does not matter once there is no performance left in the session. This is where scorpion, needle and split work belongs.
Non practice days The full daily routine at home Range decays fast, so the days between practices are where flexibility is actually built rather than maintained.

Worth saying plainly, because it cuts against how a lot of gyms run: a 20 minute stretch circle at the front of practice is the worst version of this. It is long enough to sit on the wrong side of the 60 second threshold, it is too early to help anything that happens after minute 30, and it comes out of the skill time that the same Varsity practice structure allocates as 10 to 15 minutes for jumps and 15 minutes for tumbling. Four to eight minutes at the front and the real work at the end gets you more of both. Our cheerleading practice plan page lays out the rest of the session around it.

The stretches

Sorted by the skill they unlock, not by body part.

A list of cheerleading stretching exercises organized by muscle group is useless to an athlete who cannot hit a scorpion, because she does not know which muscle is stopping her. Sorted the other way it becomes a diagnostic. Find the skill, read what limits it, and stretch that.

Swipe sideways to see the full table

Skill What usually limits it Cheer stretches that address it The part stretching will not fix
Toe touch Adductor and hamstring length Straddle sit center and each side, seated pike, butterfly Height comes from hip flexor and abdominal strength. This is why a flexible athlete can still have a low toe touch.
Right and left splits Front leg hamstring, back leg hip flexor Runners lunge, half split, couch stretch, split holds Square hips. An open hip split looks lower than it is and is a control problem, not a range one.
Heel stretch Standing leg hip flexors, working leg hamstring and adductor Standing side split, straddle sit, standing pike, runners lunge Single leg balance and standing ankle stability, which is strength and proprioception.
Scorpion Thoracic spine extension, shoulder flexion, quadriceps and hip flexors on the working leg Quad stretch at a wall, thoracic extension over a roller, shoulder flexion at a doorway, kneeling hip flexor stretch Reaching overhead behind the head is a shoulder range problem as often as a back one, and forcing it from the lumbar spine is how backs get sore.
Bow and arrow Everything a heel stretch needs plus rotation through the trunk Side split work, seated straddle with rotation, thoracic rotation The two hand grip changes the balance point entirely. It is a separate motor skill from the heel stretch.
Needle and scale Hamstring length in the standing leg, spinal extension Standing pike, single leg hamstring holds, back extension work Standing leg strength under a loaded hinge, which is what actually gives out.
Bridge and back walkover Shoulder flexion, thoracic extension, hip flexor length Doorway shoulder stretch, thoracic extension, kneeling hip flexor stretch If the shoulders and hips do not open, the lumbar spine takes the whole shape. Range in the right places is a safety issue here, not a cosmetic one.
Overhead extension as a base Shoulder flexion and thoracic extension Doorway and wall shoulder flexion, lat stretch, thoracic extension Overhead pressing strength and wrist tolerance. Bases fail on load, not on flexibility.

Read the last column across and a pattern shows up. In six of the eight skills, the thing that actually stops the athlete is strength or control rather than length. That is not an argument against stretching. It is an argument for knowing which one you are short of, because an athlete who stretches harder to fix a strength problem gets more lax and no closer to the skill. The cheerleading conditioning exercises page covers the other half.

The heel stretch

The heel stretch is two different things, and searching for it gets you the wrong one.

In cheerleading, a heel stretch is a flyer body position: the athlete stands on one leg in a stunt, lifts the other leg out to the side and up, and holds the heel or ankle with the same side hand. Outside cheerleading, "heel stretch" is a podiatry term for the calf and plantar fascia stretches used for heel pain, which is why searching the phrase on its own returns results about plantar fasciitis. If you landed here from that search, this page is about the cheer skill.

The confusion matters practically too, because the cheer heel stretch splits into two separate training problems that gyms routinely treat as one. There is the ground version, a standing side split where the athlete pulls the leg up while both feet are safe on the floor, and that is a flexibility exercise. Then there is the same shape performed at extension on top of a stunt group, and that is a balance and stunting skill that happens to require the flexibility. An athlete can own the ground version cold and lose the shape in the air, every time, because the limiting factor changed.

Train the range on the ground

Standing side split holding a wall or a strap, 20 to 30 seconds a side. Straddle sit and standing pike cover the same tissue. Runners lunge opens the standing leg hip flexor, which is the quiet limiter: if that hip will not extend, the pelvis tips and the working leg stops rising.

Train the balance separately

Single leg holds on the floor, eyes forward, arms in the finished position. Then the same on an unstable surface. The 2025 cheerleading injury review names balance training as a prevention strategy, and it is the same quality that keeps a heel stretch still in the air.

Do not chase it with the standing ankle collapsing

The standing foot is doing the work in the stunt. Ankle injuries are the most common cheerleading injury by a wide margin, and a flyer grinding heel stretch reps on a rolling ankle is training the thing that hurts her.

Re stretch before the section that needs it

Because range decays inside 30 minutes, the heel stretch in a routine run at minute 90 is not benefiting from the warm up. Twenty seconds a side immediately before that block is worth more than five extra minutes at the start.

For the stunt side of it, including what the bases and the backspot are doing while the flyer holds the position, the cheerleading positions page covers the whole group, and cheerleading stunts by level sets out which level a heel stretch is legal at in the first place.

The injury claim

Stretching to prevent injuries is the least supported thing every gym says.

The 2016 review looked at injury incidence directly and reported that static and PNF stretching had no clear effect on all cause or overuse injuries, with no data available at all for dynamic stretching. That is a much weaker statement than the one printed on most gym walls. The authors still recommend stretching within a warm up, and they frame it as reducing muscle injuries and increasing joint range with inconsequential effects on performance, which is a careful sentence worth reading twice.

Deng and Yu published a systematic review of cheerleading injuries in Frontiers in Public Health in 2025, covering 27 studies from January 1991 through April 2025. Ankle injuries ran 28 to 44.9 percent of injuries and wrist and hand injuries 15.6 to 19.3 percent. When the review turns to prevention it names closed chain eccentric training, which it associates with a 40 percent reduction in muscle injury risk, balance training such as single leg standing with tossing and catching, and six weeks of resistance training that reduced anterior shoulder laxity. It also flags joint laxity itself as a chronic injury risk factor, and describes a pattern of flexibility driven pursuit of high difficulty skills without matching core stability work.

The balance finding has direct experimental support, with one honest caveat. McGuine and Keene ran a randomized controlled trial of 765 high school athletes, published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine in 2006. Ankle sprain rates were 6.1 percent in the balance training group against 9.9 percent in controls, a significant difference, and the program roughly halved risk in athletes with a prior sprain. The caveat is that in athletes with no previous sprain the difference was 4.3 against 7.7 percent and did not reach significance, and the study was run in soccer and basketball, not cheerleading. It is the best available evidence, not cheer evidence.

The practical version

Stretch because your athletes need range for the skills the sport requires, and because range makes a bridge or an overhead press safer by keeping the load off the joints that should not be taking it. Do not sell stretching to parents as injury prevention. If lowering the injury rate is the goal, the ankle is where the injuries are, and the intervention with trial evidence behind it is balance training, followed by eccentric and resistance work. Three minutes of single leg balance in the warm up is a better trade than three more minutes of hamstring holds.

By position

One squad wide hamstring routine trains the flyers and misses everyone else.

The default cheer stretch circle is built around splits and straddles, which is exactly right for the four athletes on the team who need extreme hip range and roughly beside the point for the twelve who spend practice pressing weight overhead and catching it. Three or four minutes is short enough that the position specific version is realistic.

Flyers

Hips, hamstrings, spine

Standing side split, straddle sit, splits both sides, quad and hip flexor work, thoracic extension. Then single leg balance, because holding the position is a different problem from reaching it.

Bases

Shoulders, wrists, ankles

Shoulder flexion at a wall, lat stretch, thoracic extension, wrist extension and flexion holds, calf and ankle range for the squat. A base who cannot get her arms fully overhead compensates with her lower back on every extension.

Backspots

Shoulders, thoracic spine, hips

Overhead shoulder range for the load they take on the way up, thoracic extension so the lift does not come from the lumbar spine, and hip and hamstring range for the deadlift shape a catch really is.

There is a heat consideration on top of this that coaches in warm states already know about. The National Athletic Trainers' Association preseason heat acclimatization guidelines count warm up, stretching and cool down as part of the practice time limit, and state that they apply whether the activity happens indoors or outdoors. An air conditioned gym is not automatically outside the guidance, so a long stretch block in an August double practice week is eating into a capped allowance rather than sitting outside it.

Knowing which body positions each athlete actually owns

Flexibility is the part of a cheer program that is tracked worst, because it lives in a coach's head as an impression rather than a record. Who can hold a scorpion in the air today rather than in June, which flyers have a bow and arrow, who is close enough that another three weeks of daily work would get her there: that information decides what goes in the routine, and most gyms rebuild it from memory every season. Cheerleaders is team management built only for cheer programs, so body positions are tracked per athlete alongside tumbling and stunting, sign offs are dated, and the roster shows you who is cleared for a section before you choreograph it.

General class management products handle registration and billing well and were never built for skill records at this grain. If you are comparing them, the cheer class management software page lists what each vendor publishes, with prices read from source.

See skill tracking Built for cheer gyms

Cheerleading stretching questions

How long should you hold a stretch in cheer?

Hold each stretch 15 to 30 seconds per muscle group before practice, and keep the total under 60 seconds on any one muscle. A 2016 systematic review found static stretching under 60 seconds per muscle group cost 1.1 percent of performance, while 60 seconds or more cost 4.6 percent. Varsity Spirit publishes holds of 15 to 30 seconds, which sits inside that window.

Should cheerleaders stretch before or after practice?

Both, but for different reasons and in different forms. Before practice, use short static holds followed by dynamic movement, because the same review found the performance cost disappears when dynamic activity follows the stretch. After practice is where the long holds belong, because that is when you are chasing lasting range rather than protecting the next tumbling pass.

How often should cheerleaders stretch to get more flexible?

Daily, and the reason is measurable. Range of motion gained from a stretching session typically lasts under 30 minutes, so flexibility is not stored from one session to the next in any useful way. Varsity Spirit publishes a three week challenge run seven days a week with the instruction never to skip a day. Two or three sessions a week maintains; daily is what changes anything.

What stretches help you get a heel stretch in cheer?

A heel stretch is a standing side split held above the head, so it needs hamstring and adductor length plus hip flexor length in the standing leg and enough core and standing ankle strength to hold the position. Standing pike, straddle sit, side split and runners lunge cover the range side. Single leg balance work covers the part that actually fails in the air.

What is the difference between a heel stretch and a scorpion?

A heel stretch is a front and side motion: the working leg goes out to the side and up, and the athlete holds the heel or ankle. A scorpion pulls the working leg behind the body and overhead, so it is a back and shoulder position rather than a hamstring one. They fail for different reasons, which is why an athlete can own one and not the other.

Do stretches prevent cheerleading injuries?

Not on their own, and the evidence on this is clearer than the gym folklore. The 2016 systematic review reported that static and PNF stretching had no clear effect on all cause or overuse injuries. What the 2025 cheerleading injury review names instead is balance training, eccentric strength work and resistance training. Stretch for range, train balance and strength for injuries.

What are the best stretches for a toe touch?

A toe touch is a straddle position in the air, so it lives on adductor and hamstring range plus hip flexor strength to lift the legs. Straddle sit, center and to each side, plus a seated or standing pike, cover the range. The height comes from the hip flexors and the abdominals, which is strength work, not stretching, and this is the most common reason a flexible athlete still has a low toe touch.

How long does it take to get flexible for cheer?

Weeks to months, not days, and the honest answer is that it depends on where you start. Varsity Spirit frames its own published program as three weeks of daily work, which is a reasonable window to see a visible change in a split or a pike. Lasting change in a scorpion or a needle is a longer project because it involves the spine and shoulders, not just the hamstrings.

Do bases need to stretch as much as flyers?

They need to stretch differently, not less. A flyer needs extreme end range in the hips, hamstrings and spine to hold body positions. A base needs shoulder and thoracic range to press overhead safely, wrist range for catches, and ankle and hip range to squat and absorb load. Running one squad wide hamstring routine trains the flyers and largely misses the bases.

What is the most common cheerleading injury?

Ankle injuries. A 2025 systematic review of 27 studies covering 1991 through April 2025 reported ankle injuries in the range of 28 to 44.9 percent of cheerleading injuries, with wrist and hand injuries next at 15.6 to 19.3 percent. That distribution is the argument for putting single leg balance work in the warm up rather than another hamstring hold.

Can you overstretch in cheer?

Yes, and the mechanism is worth understanding. Range gained in a session comes partly from a temporary drop in muscle and tendon stiffness and partly from improved tolerance to the stretch sensation. Pushing past what the athlete controls trades stiffness for laxity without adding strength, and the 2025 cheer review specifically flags joint laxity as a chronic injury risk factor.

How long should the stretch block be in a cheer practice?

Roughly four to eight minutes at the front of practice, then dynamic movement, then skills. The Varsity daily routine adds up to 3 minutes 45 seconds of actual holding. Varsity Spirit publishes a practice structure with a warm up every time, 10 to 15 minutes of jumps and 15 minutes of tumbling, so a long stretch block is coming out of skill time.

Sources

This page is coaching and program planning information, not medical advice. An athlete with pain, a previous injury or a hypermobility diagnosis should be assessed by a qualified clinician before following any flexibility program.

Related reading for coaches

Cheerleading conditioning exercises

The strength and conditioning side, which is what the last column of the skills table keeps pointing at.

Cheer jumps and cheerleading motions

Toe touch technique and the drills that raise jump height, where flexibility stops being the limit.

Cheerleading positions

Bases, backspots and flyers, and why each one needs a different warm up.

Cheerleading practice plan

The full session around the stretch block, built on the published practice structure.

Cheerleading pyramids

What the rulebook allows once body positions go up in a connected structure.

How to do a toe touch

The single skill most athletes are stretching for, broken down step by step.

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