Hi! I am Ben Canty with All Star Legacy and I am here with Lauren. We are teaching you guys today cheerleading jumps and techniques. We are going to move on now to our strength training and core exercises. This is going to be help you gain the flexibility and the strength that it takes for you to be able to perform the jumps successfully. We are going to start with basic crunches. As you watch Lauren here, her knees are up to the ceiling. As she goes, she is going to be picking up her shoulders off the ground, good. You also want to make sure that you are looking up to the sky, focus on something on the ceiling and almost that you want to reach towards it.
There is also three different variations you can do with these crunches. We can do the standard crunch, we can also put our knees up. Remember to focus on that point on the ceiling. Also, leg straight up and knees to either side. This will help to develop the core muscles that it's going to take for you to get your legs up in the air. It's going to help to strengthen all the abs that are on each side and then also your upper abs and your lower abs. Next, we will move on to hip flexors. All you need to do for these is just sit in a straddle, latch your legs out and you want to do one leg at a time. We'll start with our left leg first. All you need to do, keep your chest up, lift your leg up, lock your leg, and point your toe and you want to move your toe around in circles, about 10 on each leg should be good.
Then we will do right leg. Then we will do center. To do the middle or both legs, you want to have your hands in front of you and you want to lift your legs up, don't lean back too far and again 10 circles there. Then drop them, good. In our last exercise that we do on the ground, we are just going to lay on our back. We call these V-ups. You are going to start with your arms up by your side and your legs completely locked out. You are going to start also with your legs and your arms 6 inches from the ground. You are going to lift up and pull through your legs and come right back down. Keep your legs locked and point your toes. We can do about 30 of those, good and relax. It's going to be really important that you don't slam your arms and legs to the ground. It's going to help you build up your core muscles in here and also in your shoulders.
Okay, so we are going to move on to high kicks now for our last exercise. The first one that we are going to do, we are going to hit a tight 'T' motion, squeeze your fists, squeeze your elbows, squeeze your biceps. In this one, we are just going to alternate legs, you can do both legs; and we are going to bend our bottom leg and keep our other leg that we kick up locked out.
In this one the reason why we bend our bottom leg is, so that we can sit down a little with our hips and rotate our hips backwards, almost like when you do your toe touch, you are rotating your shoelaces and your knees to the back wall. We can do 10 on each leg.
Then we will move on to high 'V' kicks. We are going to hit our nice, tight high 'V', squeeze your fists, squeeze your elbows, squeeze your biceps. In this one, you don't want to bend your bottom leg. So keep both legs locked out and this one can move a little faster. It's just a repetitive high kick motion up to your arms. Make sure that when you do any of these high kicks, you want to keep your hips squared to the front. You don't want them to turn out. You want to make sure that again in the first one that we do, bend your bottom leg, turn your hips out. For the second one, keep your bottom leg locked out and kick all the way up to your arms.
That's it for our strength training exercises. Next, let's learn how to jump with a team.