Cheerleading Tumbling Skills by Level: Cheer Tumbling Passes, Standing and Running, Level 1 to 6.

Standing and running tumbling are two different events on one floor.

This is the split that confuses parents most, and it matters because a judge scores the two separately. An athlete can be excellent at one and have nothing in the other, and the score sheet will show it twice.

Two rules decide where one pass ends and the next begins, and both are worth teaching early. Stepping out of a skill counts as a continuation of the same pass, so a back handspring step out has not ended anything. But a jump placed inside a pass breaks it up, and where the rules forbid tumbling after a particular skill, at least one step has to be inserted to separate the two passes.

Cheer tumbling by level, 2026 to 2027.

This is the part most tumbling pages get wrong, because they list what gyms typically teach rather than what the rulebook permits. The two are not the same thing. Below is what each level is allowed to put on a competition floor this season, standing and running, in plain language.

Four rules sit above the whole grid and apply at every level. An athlete may jump or rebound over another person, and may rebound from the feet into a stunt transition, but not to or through an inverted position. No tumbling may travel over, under or through a stunt, a person or a prop, and nobody tumbles while holding a prop. For the stunt side of the same rulebook, see cheerleading stunts by level, and for how the tiers themselves fit together, cheerleading levels explained.

Cheerleading tumbling names, in the order an athlete meets them.

Cheer inherits most of its vocabulary from artistic gymnastics and then renames a few things. These are the terms that appear on skill sheets and in level rules, defined the way the rulebook defines them.

What cheer tumbling is actually worth.

Tumbling gets the attention, the videos and the private lesson money. Building gets the points. On the USASF master score sheet for the divisions running a 170 point total, the split looks like this.

Tumbling is 40 points, or 23.53 percent. Building, meaning stunts plus pyramids plus tosses, is 90 points, or 52.94 percent. Every category is scored twice at equal weight, once for technique and once for difficulty, which is why a clean Level 3 pass performed by the whole team often outscores one spectacular Level 5 pass performed by two athletes. The full breakdown lives on the cheerleading competition score sheet page.

There is no official cheer tumbling skills checklist.

Search for one and you will find dozens of PDFs titled "Level 1 to 5 tumbling skills," all slightly different, all presented as though they were handed down by USASF. They were not. USASF publishes what each level may legally compete. It does not publish a class curriculum, a promotion checklist, or a rule that an athlete must hit a skill three times in a row to move up. Those are gym policies, and they vary.

This matters more than it sounds. A family that moves gyms will find their child re-evaluated against a different sheet, and neither gym is wrong. The two things that are genuinely fixed are the competition level rules in the grid above and the age grid, which sorts athletes by birth year rather than by age on a given date. Everything between those two, the class ladder, is the individual program's call.

Non-tumbling divisions, and why they are not a consolation prize.

Non-tumbling divisions run at Worlds. They exist so that programs can compete on building, and given that building is 52.94 percent of the score sheet against tumbling's 23.53 percent, a strong non-tumbling team is competing for most of the available points, not a fraction of them.

The rules are narrower than the name suggests. No tumbling is scored, but forward rolls, handstands, cartwheels and round offs remain legal when they serve a stunt or a formation change, provided they follow the inversion rules for that level. Non-tumbling routines are capped at 2:00. And in the Tiny Novice division the only two tumbling skills permitted at all are cartwheels and forward rolls, with handstands, backbends and bridges specifically excluded.

Cheer tumbling for beginners: what the injury data says to do first.

A 2025 systematic review of cheerleading injuries gives coaches better guidance than any drill list. Ankles account for somewhere between 24.4 and 44.9 percent of injuries and wrists and hands another 15.6 to 19.3 percent, which maps directly onto tumbling landings and handspring blocking. The intervention with the largest measured effect was not equipment. Highly qualified coaching teams reduced injury risk by 50 percent, and moderately qualified teams by 40 percent.

Cheer tumbling, answered directly.

The rest of the skills season.