After watching Cheer it became clear to us that cheerleading is very much a sport. The athletes at Navarro College’s 14-time National Championship cheerleading program are in tip-top shape and their workouts don’t stop one cheer season is over and Gabi Butler’s here to prove that.
Butler’s trainer Marc Bowron posted several Instagram Story videos of Butler doing an intense outdoor workout which included tire flips and pylo jumps, and he captioned the clip, “Zoned in as usual.” Her workout also included single-arm dumbbell thrusters while standing on a plate and medicine ball slams with lateral shuffles.
In another post on Bowron’s Instagram you can see Butler completing hand-over-hand plate pulls with a rope, Spider-Man dumbbell crawls, and backward sled pushes.
Butler works out with Bowron two to three times a week, depending on her cheerleading schedule, and each session is an hour. The sessions include indoor and outdoor workouts.
Bowron told Shape that Butler’s workouts are intense for a reason, “Competitive cheerleading puts a lot of stress on the body. That’s why I structure Gabi’s workouts to target key principles such as strength, power, and endurance.”
The exercises are meant to help Butler with cheer-specific movements and training. For the endurance workouts, the exercises include thrusters, walking lunges, sprints, and burpee broad jumps to help the cheerleader build stamina. For strength days, the exercises are usually upper or lower body-specific to focus on certain muscle groups. The power workouts are meant to help Butler with explosive and controlled movements and they include deadlifts, medicine ball slams, and pylo jumps.
