Exercise for Mental and Emotional Pro Cheer Health: 5 Benefits
Most women who exercise daily do so for the reasons of losing weight, staying in shape, and being fit. But for pro cheerleading, a cheerleader needs to be more than just being beautiful, sexy, strong, and enduring.
You need to be optimistic, focused, and intelligent as well to do your job properly. That begs the question, “Does working out improve your brain’s condition? If yes, then how?” Let’s find out.
1. Exercise alleviates anxiety
Working out stimulates the release of endorphins - the hormone that makes you feel good. With regular exercise, your mind will get used to the feeling of being brave and confident. This results in you feeling less scared of negative events in the past and the ones you predict will happen.
For example, you might feel anxious about dancing in front of strangers and say, “I might trip and cause an epic failure. They’ll laugh at me!” This type of thinking can be the default way of thinking in some heads including yours. But if you work out every day, that default thought transforms into, “It doesn’t matter if I trip. I’ll just do my best and nothing will go wrong.”
2. Exercise alleviates depression
If anxiety is caused by irrational fear, then depression is caused by disappointments in life. And life is full of disappointments. You could be disappointed in yourself for breaking your diet plan or it may be caused by someone else who has wronged you.
But what truly matters is how you prevent yourself from brooding. So train your mind to stay positive no matter what. Be a fighter by working out daily! Endorphin release doesn’t only make you confident and brave, it also keeps you happy and optimistic all the time even in the darkest of days. You can also use physical activity as a means to release stress and frustrations.
3. Exercise sharpens and improves your focus
Focus and attention are all very important in the pro cheer career and your personal life. You need focus to avoid procrastination and other impulses for finishing your audition prep tasks. You also need focus and attention to learn various dance routines for arena dancing.
Aside from endorphins, working out boosts your brain's production of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These hormones affect your focus and attention. Through regular workout sessions, your brain will find it easy to release these focus hormones whenever and wherever you need to get things done.
4. Exercise improves your memory
When performing physical activities, more blood is pumped throughout your veins and brain. Your individual brain cells and certain areas are opened and connected to other brain regions that are normally distant. This makes your brain very active and memory retention is increased.
That could be the reason why Falun Gong and Tai Chi practitioners are smart, alert, and wise even in their senior years. To apply that into pro cheerleading, you’ll need daily workouts to improve your memory, especially when following fitness routines and memorizing dance moves for pro cheerleading.
5. Exercise grows your brain
Everyone knows that working out reduces weight or makes the body more muscular and lean. But what a lot of people don’t know is that daily exercise reshapes our brain. A study noted that: "aerobic exercise differentially targets the dentate gyrus, a hippocampal subregion important for memory and implicated in cognitive aging."
For short, working out stimulates the growth of new brain cells in the dentate gyrus - this is the part of our brain where learning happens. This could benefit you a lot because in pro cheerleading, you’ll need to be very receptive to immediately understand and apply the various essentials on how to be a proper pro cheerleader.
In a nutshell, daily workouts do make you a confident, happy, and smart pro cheerleader. You just need to understand how your brain works, keep it healthy, train it to release the mind-boosting hormones whenever you need it to.
To improve brain performance and mood, it’s also important to eat healthily. Here are food-related articles to match your workouts for better brain power:
- The Best (and Worst) Foods to Boost Your Energy
- What Is A Pescatarian Diet? How It Works, Benefits, Food List
- 10 Healthy Breakfast Recipes for Weight Loss
- 9 Smoothie Recipes for Beautiful Skin
- 10 Foods With High Water Content to Help You Stay Hydrated
- 10 Foods That Boost Your Immune System
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