Photo: Snapped! by Becca Clark
Whether you’re starting cheerleading at 15 or 50, it’s important you understand that you may have a slightly different learning path in comparison to younger athletes. Age 15 is not exactly old, but considering many cheerleaders age out of the Senior category and end their career at 18, 15 is cutting it close in a way.
As someone who started allstar cheer right after turning 14, I noticed I faced more challenges than my younger teammates who began their cheer careers years before.
Here are 4 tips I have for you if you’re starting cheerleading in your teen or adult years:
1. Understand that things may be harder as you get older
The older you are, the more habits you’ve developed in terms of movement, posture, compensations, etc. If you trained ballet all your childhood, you’re likely to continue moving in a ballerina-like way even after you stop. Your natural posture will be quite good and you may move more gracefully than others.
On the other hand, if you only played soccer throughout your childhood, you likely will have picked up movement patterns that you learned in the sport and will not move the same way as a ballet dancer.
Everyone has some sort of issue or imbalance in their movement, whether it be during walking, running, jumping, or other things. Unless you’ve trained it to perfection, which is unlikely unless you’ve been an elite athlete for many years, there will always be something.
The difficult part of joining cheer as an older athlete is you most likely haven’t developed the movement patterns involved in tumbling, jumps, dance, etc. unless you did a similar activity as a kid (like gymnastics). The younger you are, the easier it is to pick up on these new movements because you haven’t built any/many habits yet.
As you age, your natural movement patterns start to influence how you tumble, stunt, jump and dance. In the case where your movement habit is not beneficial to the skill being learned, you’ll have a lot more difficulty throughout the learning process.
In addition, the older you become, the stiffer you become. You’ll likely have a harder time gaining flexibility and overall range of motion, which can impact how quickly you acquire new skills.
Remember, everything is still attainable as a older athlete, just keep in mind that it may take more work and more time than those who are still children!
2. Don’t worry about skills at the start
It can be exciting to jump right into learning new skills as soon as you start cheer because you’re eager to level up. If you’ve never cheered or done gymnastics before, this isn’t necessarily the best thing to do.
Every stunting and tumbling skill requires a certain amount of strength, mobility and coordination to do it safely and correctly. Without this foundation present, you create a slower learning process for yourself that can result in injury, frustration and burnout.
To progress the way you want to, it’s best to spend at least a few months doing frequent strength & flexibility training, as well as basic tumbling & stunting movements/drills.
3. Expect plateaus
Beginners progress faster than anyone and that’s because they start from 0. You’re most likely going to see a rapid increase in your strength, flexibility and overall skill level in the first few months or years of starting cheerleading.
Then, at some point you’re going to notice that you plateau, or even decline, despite working just as hard as you’ve always been. This may seem like a setback or you may feel that you’ve become too old and lost your abilities.
This is totally normal. Keep working at it and you’ll eventually begin to improve again, just at a slower rate since you’re more advanced.
4. Patience and consistency are key
With everything mentioned above, you’re going to need extra patience in you. Overcoming these challenges will also require you to be consistent with your efforts.
Things will take longer and get frustrating at times but if you’re patient and consistent, you’ll have no problem reaching your cheer goals.
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