Cheerleading!

After two not very extra-curricular based university years, me and my best friend decided to join cheerleading this year! We thought it would be fairly easy and relaxed... no. We had to drag ourselves to practice every Friday evening and Sunday morning for weeks on end (with some extra training thrown in during the week), to do very INTENSE exercise -  throwing people up in the air, catching them/having them land on your face, learning to do backflips and frontflips (or in my case, handstands...) and the dreaded conditioning which is intense strength building exercise so that we are better equipped to do the above.

I am not a very sporty person. But our coach was so inspiring (and terrifying), and we weren't allowed to miss a single session so we fully committed and went every week and learnt to do some amazing things with some amazing people. Last weekend we had our very first competition, which was so much fun!

We had a practice run on Friday for our friends and family..

And then rested until Sunday, the real thing! We went up to Bath University which has the most amazing gym  ever, complete with olympic size swimming pool, running track, squash courts and so on! There were about 1,500 cheerleaders there which was quite surreal but nice as they were all running around excited and nervous (just like we were!). There were many divisions and our team was level two co-ed (boys and girls).

For some reason blogger won't let me upload our video, but above is our level 6 division who recently went to compete in Florida at the world championships, they are literally incredible and help us all out so much!  Here's the link to ours... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz6IcStfQFc&feature=youtu.be

Overall we were one point off first place, placing second which was absolutely amazing, after knowing how much hard work and effort we had all put into it! Our team was mostly made up of cheer-freshers so to come second out of 14 teams was amazing! It was so nice at the competition because every team got a trophy for competing, and watching the teams jump up with excitement and scream when they were called was really nice :)

Here are a few pics from the day..
 

my amazingly talented stunt group  :)

me and my best friend :) 

It was such an amazing day, I definitely recommend joining a society like cheerleading at uni because it is just basically a lot of fun with amazing people! (and also something different to put on your cv!) 

xxx