Some cheerleaders are so engaged in negative thinking that their performance suffers.  

Does this sound like you? 

You tell yourself:

• “I’ll never stick that skill.”
• “I’m not going to do it.”
• “I’m just not good enough.”

 If so, read on!  (more…)

Yesterday I wrote about how some cheerleaders over-react to a bad practice.  Let’s take that a bit further today. 

I invite you to think about how you assess a bad day or good day.  Do you tend to allow a rough practice ruin your whole day or even your week?  Do you float on cloud 9 if you have a great practice? What is the conversation you have with yourself about this?  (more…)

Although she was not a cheerleader, Mia Hamm, a star member of the U.S. women’s soccer World Cup 1999 winning team, knows about good days and bad days as an athlete.  Here is a quote from Mia that any cheerleading squad can relate to: 

“As players, when we are having a bad day, we tend to think in melodramatic terms, that we’ve lost it, that everything’s gone wrong, but usually all you have to do is correct one small element of your game and everything else will fall into place.”

Does this happen to you?  If you have a cheerleading practice session where you just aren’t hitting it, do you get discouraged and start thinking that it’s all over?  (more…)

One of the joys of attending cheerleading conferences is learning from my colleagues in the cheerleading industry. 

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending and teaching at Spring Tumbling’s first annual cheer coaches’ conference in Toronto. Mike Pare, President of Spirit Cheer, UCA All Star Director for UCA All Star, and assistant cheerleading coach at the University of Central Florida (whew! – when does he sleep?) offered a class called “Running an Effective Practice” which I attended. (more…)

Shawn Johnson on cheerleading safetyOlympic Gold medal winner and famous gymnast, Shawn Johnson, has teamed up with Top Gun All Stars and GK Elite Sportswear  to promote safety in cheerleading.  Shawn said, “As an Olympic athlete, safety comes first for me.”  And it should for you too! 

See and hear Shawn and Victor and Kristen Rosario (owners and coaches for Top Gun) talk about how cheer coaches can make cheerleading safer for their athletes.

I just came across this video of cheerleading stunts (below) on YouTube (where you can find anything!!) and thought I’d share it with you. It’s very impressive and anyone watching it would never ever doubt that cheerleading is indeed a sport!

Champion athletes know that winning is the science of being totally prepared.  For cheerleaders who want to ace a competition, here is a technique called the Enders Practice Routine. 

It’s based on a psychological learning theory called classical conditioning. The technique helps you to train your mind and body to respond in the way you wish. Each time you practice this you will be building the brain you want. 

Here’s how it works. You begin with a relaxation exercise and then you say your “power word” to yourself to connect yourself to your ideal performance state. And then you begin to practice. 

(A power word is a word or phrase that connects to the way you want to feel during competition.  It should be meaningful to you. It can be something like “focused,” or “confident” or “doing it” – whatever works for you.) 

Let’s say you are working on your tumbling; you would exhale slowly, call up your power word, and when you feel really focused, then and only then, begin to practice. As soon as you feel yourself getting distracted, stop everything! Then go back to your breathing, get focused using your power word, and then resume practice. Repeat. 

Each time you get distracted, stop and repeat the breathing, power word, and focusing. You only rehearse or practice while you are in this positive mental space. This way, you are training yourself to only perform while you are in this ideal state and when you reach the actual performance situation, you’ll be in great shape! 

Obviously this requires patience on your part.  The temptation will be to rush ahead and just practice in the same old way but please – give this a try and you will reap the benefits! 

ENDERS PRACTICE ROUTINE  

1. Begin with relaxation exercise – exhale slowly several times

2. Once relaxed, connect with your Ideal Performance State

3. Say power word/phrase to yourself

4. Once firmly in “positive space” begin to practice

5. As soon as you notice you are leaving positive space, STOP EVERYTHING, then re-connect with positive space.

6. Once firmly in positive space again, repeat power word/phrase and resume your work.

7. Practice ONLY in positive space.

8. Important to strengthen association between positive space and practice.

9. At time of performance, exhale slowly three times and repeat power word/phrase to get back into positive space.

You say you want to place first at your cheerleading competition? How hard are you willing to work for it? 

Successful athletes are single-minded in their focus and have crystal clear goals and expectations. This clarity helps them keep track of their progress and ensures they will reach their goals. 

Since I assume you, too, want to be a successful athlete, here are some questions for you to help you organize your thoughts and create a winning plan. Remember – the more specific and detailed your plan, the better it will help you succeed. 

And yes, this takes a bit of time and patience but a true champion is willing to do the work in order to win! 

1. Can you envision your cheerleading goal? Can you describe it in detail? Good! Go ahead and write it in here and be specific! 

2. What are the benefits or rewards you will gain by pursuing your goal?

3. What are the costs? (Such as time, money, forgoing other activities.)

4. What might get in your way? What challenges might you encounter?

5. How can you deal with these challenges? Who might help?

6. What specific steps do you need to take to reach your goal? 

7. How will you be accountable? Who else will know if you follow through with your plan?

8. In the space below, write in the times during a typical week that you will devote to working on your goal. Include time for practice with your team and alone  

Mondays:___________________________________________________

Tuesdays:___________________________________________________

Wednesdays:________________________________________________

Thursdays:__________________________________________________

Fridays:____________________________________________________

Week-ends:_________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

It happens every day.  You, as a cheerleading coach, are constantly giving feedback to your squad as you observe them in practice. But did you know that the way you offer praise can affect the motivation of your cheerleaders? 

Psychology professor, Carol Dweck, studied what happens when people praise others for ability versus praising for effort and the effect this has on young people’s motivation and performance. 

The results showed that 90% of young people who were praised for effort (“you worked really hard on this;” “your persistence is helping you succeed,”) wanted to perform tasks which were challenging and from which they could learn (and not necessarily immediately succeed). 

Two-thirds of young people praised for ability wanted to carry out a task which ensured further success; they weren’t as interested in being challenged.  

When both groups were given a set of harder problems, the students who were praised for their ability (“you are so smart;”  “you are really good at this”) reported the least enjoyment. They were also the least likely to take problems home to work on.  Also, the students who were praised for their ability (not effort) demonstrated considerable negativity after failure (“I am stupid”) even though they had had a previous string of successes! 

The group that had been praised for ability also showed a significant decline in performance compared to those who had been praised for effort. 

The group that had been praised on effort continued to enjoy the task even when they encountered problems and they were more likely to persist when they confronted challenges. This group (effort) on the whole performed much better than the other group (ability). 

How does this translate to cheerleading?  Well, I would suggest cheer coaches will enjoy more success with their cheerleaders when they praise them for their efforts rather than their abilities.  Why should this be true?  Effort is something we can control.  We either exert effort to learn, to improve, to refine, or we do not.  It’s a matter of choice.  Ability is innate; we either have it or not and thus we cannot control it per se.

So take note of how you give feedback to your cheerleaders.  It’s fine to say, “good job!” or “great focus on that last jump” but be wary of saying, “you’re the best flyer we’ve ever had.”  Even if this is true, add to this: “…your focus and practice time is paying off; you’re really enhancing your natural talent by all your hard work.”

Cheerleaders are busy people.  There’s all that school work to get done on top of hours of cheerleading practice plus maintaining a social life.  Many cheerleaders tend to listen to music while they study and in addition to that, they are busy responding to emails and text messages. 

Of course, if you ask them how they can stay focused and get anything done, they will tell you they can manage just fine, thank you.  But can they? 

There is, at this point, a significant body of research on the impact of multitasking and the studies suggest that cheerleaders, like many of us, are fooling themselves into believing that they can get more done by multitasking. 

Actually, pushing yourself to perform two or more tasks is extremely inefficient says David Meyer, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.  Dr. Meyer and his colleagues found that people who toggle between tasks lose valuable time in the transitions. 

You see, the brain has to refocus each time it switches activities and that time can add up over the course of a day.  There is also something called “working memory” which is like “mental counter space,” says Dr. Laura Vanderberg, a biology researcher at Tufts University. There is only so much “mental counter space” and everything we do takes mental energy which takes up room on that mental counter. 

Multitasking adds to the drain on the brain’s limited supply of resources. 

So, what does this have to do with cheerleading?  Well, researchers at Stanford University found that people who try to juggle things such as checking text messages while writing an email or studying, are unable to block unimportant information as well as those who consume one media stream at a time. 

In other words, these people are distracted – all the time!  They cannot stop thinking about tasks they are not doing. They have trained their brains to be unfocused. 

The reason this is important for cheerleaders is because cheerleading – especially tumbling and stunting – require laser focus, meaning focusing on one thing only.  A distracted cheerleader is vulnerable to being injured or causing injury. 

So the next time you are tempted to do 3 things at once, remember that you are actively training your brain to be inefficient and distracted.