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I first walked into the weight room as an 85lb 7th grader. I looked around at the massive high school students and thought, “I wish I could be as strong as them.” That day I started weight lifting for the first time. My middle school wrestling coach was also a weight lifting couch and he showed me how to do everything. We started with the big three lifts of squats, deadlifts, and bench press. When I began weight lifting, I wasn’t even able to lift the 45lb bar. I struggled moving any weight and after two weeks I was finally able to move the bar for all three lifts. I now have over a 405lb deadlift, 365lb squat, and 310lb bench press. If you would have used my initial performance to try and predict how I was going to be at weight lifting now you would be completely wrong. This goes to show how bad early performance is at predicting performance later on.

I imagine this I what I looked like when I started to lift weights.

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After a couple years of weight lifting, I started getting into Olympic weight lifting. The two lifts that are considered Olympic lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Both lifts require you to explosively move a weight from the ground to above your head. Fast-forward to the end of my sophomore year of college. I was approached by a friend to tryout for the cheerleading team. I didn’t know how I felt about it at first, but I went to an open stunt to try it out. Most of the stunt we did involved me throwing a girl up to my hands and pressing her above my head. I found that a lot of the mechanics were very similar to the clean and jerk. The speed and the timing of my hips and arms were very similar. I was able to pick that part of the stunting up quick because of positive transfer. However, moving a girl is a lot different than moving iron. Even though the mechanics of throwing were similar, the way you hold a girl is a lot different. This part of the stunting was a lot harder for me to pickup because I already had a muscle program on how to do it. I experienced negative transfer with this part of stunting. Overall, my background with Olympic lifting allowed me to progress quicker than the average person.

This is a picture of me hitting a chair for a fight sing at the Michigan football game. A chair is the first stunt we learn. This stunt also helped show me how much my lifting background was going to help me with stunting.

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The first time I hit a toss hands at an open stunt I was ecstatic. I didn’t understand how I was able to throw someone up to my hands and catch their feet. It felt like it was a fluke technique. It took me a couple more tries to get it again. After I figured out what technique worked for me and where I needed to focus my attention, I started hitting hands very consistently. This is because I was in the first stage of learning, the cognitive stage. I was doing trial and error method of trying new techniques. When I found something that worked for me, I made a mental note of that and focused on repeating that motion on my next repetition. As I moved onto the next stage of learning I spent less time mentally focusing on my technique and paid more attention to the way the stunt felt. For example, the stunt below is called a liberty. This is the first step to learning more advanced skills for male cheerleaders. It required a lot of attention on specific parts of the stunt early on. If something were to change with the girl, I would assume it was my fault and use that as feedback to change my technique even if my technique was initially good. Once, I got better at the skill I was able to focus less on the mechanisms of the skill and “feel out” the stunt. If the girl did something different than normal or I started to do something different I could feel it and adjust appropriately to save the stunt. Something that I wouldn’t have been able to do in the first stage of learning.

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Stunting in cheerleading is one of the most difficult physical tasks I have ever tried to learn. Stunting requires the perfect combination of strength, speed, accuracy, and balance. If one of these components is off the stunt will fail. Trying to learn a specific stunt based on proprioception and visual feedback alone is almost impossible.  Augmented feedback is necessary to progress because the task is so difficult. When I began to learn how to stunt, I asked for augmented feedback a lot. I would have experienced cheerleaders give me vocal feedback on what they saw was wrong. This helped a lot at the beginning but when I tried to learn more advanced stunts it didn’t help as much. My proprioceptive feedback disagreed with what they were telling. I was only confused by their feedback and my stunting technique got worse because of it. For more advanced skills I started to rely on video recording of me stunting for augmented feedback.

Below is a video I took to watch the mechanics of my toss. Tossing to hands isn't the most high level skill but it can always be improved upon. This video helped me detect and correct a minute mistake I was making with my toss.

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As you can see from previous examples, stunting in cheereading is a difficult task. It takes a lot of coordination and strength to be successful. Stunting takes a lot of physical energy and has a high chance of injury if the stunt fails. Veterans on the team would often tell me to perform “mental reps” to reduce the risk of injury. I would envision myself holding a girl in my hands and focus on performing the precise motion for the stunt over and over again. These mental repetitions were a form of mental practice. Now I use mental practice in a completely different way. Before I do any stunt, I envision myself performing the stunt from an internal perspective. I imagine the speed and power I need to get the girl up in the air and I imagine how it feels to find her feet and catch her. After I perform the task, I always reflect on how I did. Did it feel the way I imagined it should? If not, what do I change so it does? This is very similar to Singer’s mental practice strategy.

This is how I feel before and after every stunt I throw.