In today’s cheerleading world, everyone focuses on the “fun stuff,” like stunts, pyramids, basket tosses, tumbling and dancing. Cheerleaders often forget to practice the most important part of being a cheerleader, which is to lead the crowd. Motions are the easiest form of leading the crowd, but are often overlooked. If you follow the Four P’s of Motion Technique, you can incorporate them more to lead your crowd and good motion technique can be just as effective as other skills.

Placement
When learning or practicing motions, it is important to check to make sure you have proper placement of each motion. Using a partner or a mirror will help you to master motions. Each motion should feel comfortable and be exactly the same for other side. When critiquing each motion, be sure that your arms are completely locked out without hyper extending elbows and the wrist should be straight in line with your arm.

Perfection
Once you’ve mastered the placement of each motion, it is time to learn how to hit those motions perfectly every time. Using motion drills to counts or music will help you develop muscle memory for every motion. It’s important to get proper muscle memory for each motion so that you don’t learn to hit the motions in the wrong place. After creating a motion drill begin to change the order of the motions and gradually speeding up the drill, to begin to learn to be even sharper. Be sure to include both sides of any motion that are created with one arm. You don’t want to have a great right punch and not be able to perform a left one.

Precision
Now it’s time to learn how to have perfect timing with your teammates. The following methods are a few effective ways of getting your team’s motions sharper. First, put your team in
a bowling pin formation. Then make sure everyone knows the same motion drill and then start practicing the drill at a fairly slow pace. Make sure everyone is hitting the motion at the same time and with the same placement. Once everyone has mastered their timing and placement, then it is time to start speeding up the motion drill. When the drill gets fast enough you will notice that the team will begin to develop the same timing and placement in their motions.

Performing
Sharp motions add great visual effect to your performances. This is why it’s very important to drill everyone on the correct technique and placement of their motions. If they practice it correctly, they will perform it correctly. It becomes more difficult for the coach to perfect a routine if you skip these important drills.

Incorporate the Four P’s of Motion Technique into your practices. You will see improvement in everyone’s motions regardless of their talent level. Once everyone is confident and comfortable doing motions you can begin to use them more to lead your crowd at games, which can be just as effective as using stunts, pyramids, etc. If you have a competition team, including these drills as a normal part of practice from the beginning, will mean that you don’t have to worry about last minute run-throughs to clean up motion sequences during competition season.