When you’re a cheerleader, like in any other sport, you want to protect yourself from injury. You should do conditioning and strength exercises and do some stretching before, during or after your workout. Stretching is what helps you prevent injury and improve your performance when integrated with your other workouts.
For one, stretching will increase your range of motion, which will help prevent muscle pulls or strains. In cheerleading you also know how important it is to be flexible for stunts. Obviously, being flexible through stretching does double duty. Here are a couple of tips for stretching exercises.
The most basic stretch you can do is touch your toes. Sit on the floor with your legs stretched out in front of you fully extended. Lean forward at the waist reaching your toes. Your goal is to touch your toes and eventually touch your knees with your nose. A variation is to sit with one leg bent behind you to straighten only one leg at a time.
Try to sit on the floor and spread your feet as far to the sides as possible. Lean forward and reach as far as possible. You should feel the stretch in your inner thighs because of this. You can ask someone to gently push your feet further apart and hold for a few seconds to get that extra stretch. Also have someone gently push your back down so that it is lower to the floor for a little more flexibility.