Hi, we are Emily and Matej Kavcnik. We are excited to welcome you to our page and to our blog. We would love to properly introduce ourselves and tell you all about how we got to this point, what we have achieved so far and all the cool things we have experienced along the way, but we will leave all that for another post.
The main purpose of this post is to introduce you to our blog. So, why did we decide to start a blog? Well, Instagram was just not enough. We started posting content with technique tips for cheerleaders and we felt like we were limited with the number of pictures and the length of the videos, we also guessed that no one really wants to read essays in Instagram posts. So, we decided to start our own blog.
What kind of posts can you expect here? As much as we want to say everything cheerleading related, we know that might be a little hard, so we will mostly start with technique posts. Cheerleading is such a young sport and not a whole lot of studies have been done to explain movements and techniques that cheerleaders are using every day. Technique in cheerleading is not unified and for pretty much every skill, you will find two or three or more different ways of doing it. Nothing wrong with that, but the questions that we keep asking ourselves are: out of three different techniques that someone used, which one was the easiest to execute, meaning which one required the least energy, which one would give them the highest chance of hitting consistently and which one would allow their bodies to do it repeatedly without getting injured. We will not say that the techniques that we will be explaining in our posts are the most optimal techniques out there, simply because they had never been tested, but we will do our best to break them down and explain why we do what we do.
We know there are a lot of people trying new stunts every day. We were once those people. I remember trying to learn how to do a rewind. It was a nightmare! At that time there were no coaches that would be able to help me out with that skill. The best attempt was when my friend brought a cheerleading book to practice one day and it had a picture of a couple doing a rewind with a brief explanation on how to do it, mind you, the technique they explained in the book was completely opposite of what is used today. We tried that technique with every other possible wrong technique and it didn’t work until 2 years later. 2 years, every possible wrong technique and a wrist injury to hit a clean rewind!!! Now when we teach rewinds, kids usually get it in a couple sessions.
Our goal is to share our knowledge and hopefully people can get skills faster with less injuries.
We will start posting tips for techniques and try to explain them as well as we can. Eventually our goal is to take a little more scientific approach and start measuring more and more variables that would allow us to determine what techniques work the best.
We hope you enjoy our posts!
Emily and Matej