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Hello, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope, advanced episode. Hi, Lulu.

Hi James.

So let's continue our talk about cheerleading.

Yes, let's talk about cheerleading. Last time you mentioned cheerleading is not just shouting加油加油. It's actually a lot of gymnastic moves, there’s human pyramid, there’s tumbles, flips and all that…

It's very physical activity.

Yeah, it sounds super challenging though.

Yeah, so sadly cheerleading there’re quite a bit of dangers to it.

I would say, because tumbles, flips.

So, surprisingly it's not uncommon for girls to do cheerleading, to get hurt. Now you get the standard sports injuries like bumps, bruises, scrapes and stuff. But because of cheerleading and the flips, tumbles and pyramids they make, it does have kind of an abnormally higher risk injury rate.

Just imagine if you're top of the human pyramid, and you fall. And you fall and then the guys like down, they can't catch you or they fail to catch you.

So broken legs, broken tailbones, backs, necks, it does happen. So like parents want their kids to do competitive cheer, especially competitive cheer, you gotta keep that in mind. Now not all schools do the competitive stuff, like my high school, they didn't do any of the pyramids. So in that case, that kind of cheer was a lot lower risk because I know like my high school they did not want to basically pay for the extra insurance they would need to cover their butts because some schools aren’t like… willing to pay for that extra insurance.

Yeah but maybe if the schools are supporting the sort of really competitive type of cheer or cheerleading, it could also be that they can enter into tournaments and then they can probably win the school some reputation or things like that.

Yeah, definitely.

And the other thing is the cheerleaders, what do they do in the … I would just say in general, because you have seasons for these football matches or football games or basketball games, right? But do they also rest during the off season?

So cheerleading like if you're a regular cheerleader for your school, then you will go with the sports seasons. But if you're in competitive cheer, that's a year round thing ‘cause the competitions are … ‘cause they're indoor. So they can be at any time.

And it's also because competitive cheerleading it's in itself a sport, you're not an accessory to a sport.

No, so competitive cheer, you'll spend a lot of your time practicing just like you do for any sport. But the thing is you might be practicing yearlong for tournaments, and tournaments might come up like throughout the year. Sometimes they might do it during school breaks, like winter break or summer break. So that the competitions don’t interfere with school.

I see.

That's pretty common, doesn't happen for like basketball or football.

And cheerleading as far as I've heard, it sounds a lot similar to gymnastics.

There are a lot of similarities. In general, a lot of the body type and the body movements are similar, the ability for coordination, balance. Now you're being able to tumble. All these things are similar. Gymnastics probably requires a lot more finesse than cheerleading does.

A lot of coordination, especially with your team.

That's one thing that gymnastic does not have the team element that cheerleading does, because gymnastics is always an individual event.

Another thing I've been meaning to ask, does cheerleading, do they have background music for cheerleading?

Sometimes, but not always.

Do they always have to chant?

Yeah it's gonna be with the cheer though. So you won't be just doing the pyramid without a cheer. So you’ll be like preparing it, and there'll be cheers and steps to go along with it. So it's a combined thing. The other thing is cheerleading can be a bit harder than gymnastics. Because when you do gymnastics tumbling, you're on a gym mat, which is springy. When cheerleaders do it, they do it on a basketball court. So it's on a hard floor. And cheerleaders need to do this in shoes.

I see.

Gymnast don't wear shoes. There's a bit of a difference. So cheerleading can be a bit harder on your joints because you're not on the more cushioning floor.

Now this not taking away from gymnastics because those women beat up their body to do that sport. But there's a lot of bodies being beat up in both of these sports.

Both sound super athletic, competitive, especially if we're talking about competitive cheerleading. By the way, but bringing back a little bit to just general cheerleading not like the super hardcore one, I've heard of a phrase called pep rally. What is a pep rally? It's a preparation event?

So when I was in high school, I was in band, I was at those pep rallies. And pep rallies are a big schoolwide event. It's usually after school where it's before a big game or the principal and the Coach will give speeches about “you know we're going to beat that other teams, balabala, like a motivation. It's a motivational thing. So when I was in band, we would go there. We would play like our high school theme song. We would play songs with the cheerleaders, the cheerleaders would dance and move to the songs we played in the band. So it's a whole big thing.

So that's pep rally to just give the players a bit of a cheer motivation to…and so that they compete better in the big game. So far we've talked about more the sport’s side of it. But honestly, if you think about the stereotypes of cheerleaders, you can't help noticing. It is still kind of a… there's also the objectification, sexualization elements.

Yeah, that is a competitive thing, but there is a lot of aspects of it about beauty. Like cheerleaders are expected to have a certain beautiful appearance, smile, makeup, hair done, because they’re supposed to represent the schools. A lot of times the schools, they won't directly say it's like any girl can apply, but they wanna make sure that they fit a certain image.

Yeah, and I'm sure once you are on the cheerleading team, you are trying very hard to, for example, maintain your weight, your figure and then do all sorts of things to look beautiful; and there's.. I would imagine there's a lot of pressure, because peer pressure, right? You're in that environment.

Peer pressure, pressure from coaches. It's like it wouldn't hurt if you lost a few pounds type of things. So that does exist. It's probably getting a bit better nowadays. The competitive cheer has a bit more rules about that because it's a lot more athletic. And you gotta, it's like, you can't be like unhealthy diet and do that. You just couldn't do the movements, everybody would be like “Um, no.”

Yeah they're more like true athletes in that way, they need balanced diet.

But there is also this, I mean, if you think about the real world as we were describing the realistic cheerleading and then this oversexualized image on TV, in pop culture, in often TV series and movies, they're always trying to stereotype them. It's not just the sexualized image. It's also for example, maybe a little bit of hinting that they have perhaps too casual a sex life or maybe they’re mean to other girls. It's almost like this stigmatization of it. But why do you think is that, I mean, just your personal…

Media, it's gonna because of media, because there's been an image in that for … forever because there’ve been movies from the 60s and 70s that sexualize the cheerleader being the beautiful girl with the handsome guy in the … all things like that, whereas in reality, they're just students who chose this as their school activity.

I suppose it's like an old-timey, old-fashioned fantasy, like a beautiful woman being almost like an auxiliary, a cheer lead like a cheerer, for the guy who's actually going out to get the trophy to get the championship.

Okay. But as we've discussed in these two episodes, obviously real cheerleading sounds really tough. It's definitely not for people who are auxiliaries, it’s definitely for winners themselves.

So if you have had any contact with cheerleaders or if you have tried these sports, it is a sport, let us know in the comment section or any other questions you would like to ask. We'll be waiting for your comments.

Thank you, James for coming to the studio again.

Thank you for having me.

We'll see you next time.

Bye everyone.

Bye.