Cheerleading dancing videos and lessons

Cheerleading is a sport that combines dance and gymnastics to create visually dynamic choreographed sequences performed by a group known as a cheer squad. Routines are performed accompanied by music or by vocal cheers chanted or shouted by the cheerleaders and, often, the crowd. Cheerleading is performed as accompaniment to a sporting event and is a competitive sport in itself.

Cheerleading – in the sense of leading a crowd to cheer or chant encouraging songs and slogans – was invented in the late eighteen hundreds on American college campuses. The first organized cheer on record occurred at Princeton University in 1884. In 1898 a University of Minnesota student named Johnny Campbell led a crowd in an organized cheer, and the first “yell-squad” was formed there soon after.

Cheerleaders in the early days were all male. Famous cheerleaders of the old school include US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan; and actors Jimmy Stewart and Kirk Douglas. Women began participating in college cheerleading in 1923, and gymnastic and tumbling routines were incorporated into the cheers at about that time.

After that, the activity developed quickly. From the late 1940’s on, cheerleaders held clinics and began to adopt more athletic routines and borrow from a range of dance styles, including ballet and modern dance, jazz and swing dance, and eventually hip-hop.

The NFL introduced professional cheerleading to the world in the late 1960’s, and in the early 1970’s the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders became a sensation and set the dance- and performance-oriented standard for professional cheerleading.

Competitive cheerleading was born in 1967, with the first annual ranking of the "Top Ten College Cheer Squads" and the first International Cheerleading Foundation "Cheerleader All America" awards. The Collegiate Cheerleading Championships were broadcast nationally by CBS-TV in 1978. Since then, high school, college, and all-star cheerleading competitions have been popularized by coverage on ESPN and by the high school cheerleading movie Bring it On (2000).

The three major physical elements of cheerleading today are dance, tumbling, and stunts. Stunts include lifts and tosses, preps – where the “base” supports the feet of a standing “flyer” at shoulder level, extensions – where the base supports the flyer with arms extended over the head, and basket tosses – in which the flyer is tossed high in the air, performs a trick, and is caught in a “cradle” position by the base(s).

Stunts can be dangerous, and cheerleading injuries are not uncommon. Some of the cheerleading stunts shown at all-star cheerleading competitions (and in Bring it On) are not encouraged at the high school level. These include stunts more than two bodies high, fly-overs, and basket-tosses with head-over-heels rotation.

There are an estimated 1.5 million participants in All-Star cheerleading in the United States, not including the millions more at the high school, college, and little league levels. Cheerleading is, according to Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores, "the most quintessential of American sports." Due to the sport’s increasing exposure in pop-culture and the media, there are an estimated 100,000 participants scattered around the rest of the world in countries such as Australia, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom.