20 Reasons Your Pre-Teen or Teen Should Try Cheerleading

Not all sports are created equal. Some build strength. Some build friendships. Some build character. Cheerleading builds all of it, at the same time.

If you're a parent looking for an activity that genuinely challenges your child, develops them as a person, and sets them up for a healthy, capable adult life, whether your child is a boy or a girl, cheerleading deserves a serious look. Research is clear that organized sport participation during adolescence shapes who a child becomes: physically, mentally, socially, and professionally. Cheerleading does all of this more completely than most parents realize.

Here are 20 evidence-backed reasons it's worth considering.

TL;DR — Cheer develops leaders.

This sport helps teens grow into focused, disciplined, confident young adults by strengthening mental health, leadership, communication skills, stress resilience and focus. All while keeping them active, motivated and connected to a super positive and inclusive community!

Physical Development

1. Full-Body Fitness

Cheerleading trains cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, and coordination simultaneously, something few sports do as comprehensively. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity (NIH/PMC) found that youth sport participation produces positive, statistically significant effects on physical activity levels and overall health, with benefits that persist well into adulthood.

2. Flexibility and Mobility

Cheerleading incorporates progressive stretching routines that build genuine range of motion over time. Unlike sports where flexibility is a secondary concern, cheer treats it as a foundational skill, one that continues to benefit athletes long after their competitive years.

3. Explosive Power

Jumps, tumbling, and basket tosses require athletes to generate force rapidly and with precision. This develops fast-twitch muscle fibers in ways that complement almost every other physical discipline a young person might pursue.

4. Isotonic Muscle Conditioning

Stunting (the practice of bases supporting and elevating flyers) requires sustained muscular effort under load. Holding a flyer overhead, stabilizing a transition, or catching a dismount engages the deep core, shoulders, and legs in ways that traditional weight training doesn't replicate. This kind of conditioning builds functional, postural strength that supports a healthy body long-term.

5. Body Awareness and Spatial Intelligence

Cheer formations, pyramids, and synchronized routines require athletes to know exactly where their body is in space, and where their teammates' bodies are too. This spatial intelligence, developed through repetition and coaching, is a transferable cognitive skill with applications well beyond the gym floor.

6. Rhythm, Timing, and Musicality

Every cheer routine is performed to music. Athletes learn to count beats, interpret rhythm, and synchronize movement with their team. Understanding how to move with music is a nuanced capability that overlaps with dance, music education, and broader cognitive development — and it takes real training to develop.

7. Movement Education That Lasts a Lifetime

Most adults exercise without ever having been taught how to move properly. A child who trains in cheerleading grows into an adult who knows how to lift safely, stretch effectively, warm up before physical effort, and engage the right muscles for the right tasks. That foundational movement education — built over years of coached, structured training — makes it significantly easier to maintain an active lifestyle as an adult, whether that means going to the gym, playing recreational sports, or simply staying mobile and injury-free as they age. It's a gift that keeps paying off long after the competitive years are done.

Mental Health and Emotional Development

8. Builds Real, Earned Confidence

Performing a complex routine in front of a live audience (judges, parents, coaches from other gyms) is genuinely challenging. Doing it well, repeatedly, builds a specific kind of self-assurance that has to be earned through experience. A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that 16 weeks of cheerleading significantly improved physical self-esteem in participants and reduced symptoms of anxiety, depression, and somatization. The confidence gain was measurable and lasting.

9. Supports Mental Health and Reduces Anxiety

Physical activity is one of the most accessible and effective tools for managing adolescent anxiety and stress. The same NIH systematic review found that youth sport participation shows significant positive effects on wellbeing and mental health outcomes, with gains that compound over time. For teenagers navigating one of the most psychologically demanding periods of their lives, having a structured, coach-led environment to show up to several times a week is genuinely protective.

10. Shifts the Relationship with the Body

Cheerleading asks athletes to focus on what their body can do: what it can lift, jump, hold, and execute. This performance-oriented relationship with physicality tends to improve body image and self-esteem in ways that mirror-focused fitness environments rarely achieve.

11. Reduces the Risk of Harmful Behaviours

Structured sport participation during adolescence is consistently linked to lower rates of substance use, disengagement from school, and other risk behaviours. According to research cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, teens involved in organized sports show meaningfully better behavioural health outcomes compared to non-participants. A demanding practice schedule, a team that counts on you, a coach who notices your absence, and a competition season to work toward are all powerful protective factors.

12. Creates a Genuine Sense of Belonging

The pre-teen and early teen years are among the most socially turbulent of a person's life. Being part of a team that trains together, travels to competitions together, and shares both wins and difficult losses provides a reliable, structured sense of community at exactly the right developmental moment.

13. Develops Emotional Resilience in a Safe Environment

Cheerleading asks athletes to manage performance pressure in a structured, coached setting. The stakes are real enough to produce genuine stress, and low enough that failing is survivable and instructive. That combination is precisely what builds emotional regulation over time.

What Competitive Sport Teaches

14. Learning to Lose — and Come Back

A missed routine at a competition, a score that doesn't reflect the team's effort, a placement that stings: these experiences are painful in the moment and invaluable over a lifetime. Cheerleading teaches young people how to process disappointment, reset, and return to training with renewed determination. That kind of experience is rare, and it sticks.

15. Managing High-Stakes Pressure, Progressively

The cheer competitive season is structured in a way that gradually raises the stakes. Athletes move through showcases and friendly meets early in the season, then progress to regional events, and eventually face higher-pressure provincial or national competitions. Each step raises the emotional ante. By the time an athlete stands on the floor at a major event, they've already practiced managing nerves across multiple different contexts, in front of different audiences, with increasingly meaningful results on the line.

16. Group Communication — The Kind That Actually Matters

Cheerleading develops communication skills that go well beyond general teamwork. Teams hold circle discussions where athletes are expected to speak up: to encourage a teammate who is struggling, to acknowledge what the group is doing well, to raise a concern tactfully when something isn't working, or to voice an idea that could make the whole team better. Learning to say "I think we could approach this differently, and here's why it would help all of us" is a sophisticated interpersonal skill. Practicing it at 13, in a gym, with a coach facilitating the conversation, is an extraordinary head start on adult professional life.

17. Goal-Setting as a Process

A competitive cheer season unfolds over many months. Athletes set goals at the beginning (learn this skill, hit this stunt, qualify for this event) and then live through the unglamorous reality of working toward them step by step. The experience of breaking a large goal into executable steps, tracking progress, and adjusting when things don't go as planned is one of the most transferable cognitive skills a young person can develop.

18. Time Management and Discipline — Built In

Balancing a demanding practice schedule with school, homework, and a social life requires real organizational skill. Young athletes develop the habit of managing competing priorities, protecting their training time, and following through on commitments — habits that compound over time and show up powerfully in adulthood.

19. Leadership Skills

A 2024 report by the Women's Sports Foundation found that 49% of women credit sport-acquired skills as central to their leadership development. Research by EY's Women Athletes Business Network found that 94% of women in the C-suite played sports, with 74% saying their athletic background helped accelerate their career. A study published in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies found that men who participated in varsity-level sport in high school went on to demonstrate higher levels of leadership and achieve higher-status careers across industries.

Academic Success

20. Higher Academic Performance

The evidence here is stronger than most parents expect. A large-scale study drawing on U.S. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance data (NIH/PMC, 2021) found that high school students participating in organized sports were between 1.5 and 2.7 times more likely to report strong academic performance compared to non-athletes, and the more teams a student played on, the stronger the effect. Canadian longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Canadian Children and Youth (Statistics Canada) found that participation in organized sports at age 12 predicted higher grades and greater high school completion rates by ages 18 to 20.

The mechanism is well understood: regular physical activity increases blood flow to the brain, improves sleep quality, reduces anxiety, and reinforces the self-discipline that academic success depends on.

Cheerleading is a predominantly female sport, but it warmly welcomes boys and young men too!

The skills that carry a team through a difficult competition season (clear communication, personal accountability, composure under pressure, the willingness to put collective success ahead of individual recognition) are the same skills that make someone a valued colleague, a trusted manager, and a leader worth following.

A Note for Gym Directors

This post is written to be shared directly with your cheer families and prospective parents. The "why cheerleading?" question comes up at every open house, every information night, every tryout season. This resource gives families a thorough, evidence-grounded answer without requiring you to build that case from scratch every time.

Share it through your newsletter, your social channels, or your gym's website. If it helps one more family say yes, it's done its job.

At Cheer Action, we support Canadian cheer gyms throughout every stage of the season. When your roster is set and your teams are ready to represent, make sure they look the part. Browse our 2026–27 catalog for custom uniforms and gear built for Canadian competitive cheer.