The importance of hip health for cheerleaders in the sport of cheerleading. We utilize our hips for many different aspects from tumbling to jumping, to stunting the variation on how intense that hip range of motion is being utilized, obviously varies from the skill.
In jumps, we’re gonna be using a lot of hip movement to get the legs up and around stunting. We’re still utilizing that because when we’re in this squatted position, we start to get a little bit of external rotation of the hips. So being able to independently move your hips from the rest of your body is gonna start helping keeping those athletes on the floor for longer and healthier.
Hip CARs For Cheer Athletes
Let’s go over some exercises, we’re gonna do what we call hip CAR. To start with, let’s hold onto something here for support, and we’re just gonna move through this hip, trying to keep the rest of our body. Nice and stable, tight core brace through here. And we’re gonna slowly move this knee up towards your chest. You wanna make sure you’re not dumping or moving through your lumbar spine at all.
Let’s take it nice and slow until we hit a wall. Once we hit that wall, we’re gonna rotate down and bring this knee back behind you. All the way into hip extension, making sure we’re not compensating through the low back. Once we get to the bottom, we’re gonna pause, squeeze the glute and reverse that process.
Adding things like hip CAR to your practices are just homework for your cheerleaders to do is gonna be a great way to help start them, keeping their hips happy and healthy throughout the whole season.
