Building Confidence in Tumbling & Avoiding Mental Blocks
1. Being in the Right Level for Your Tumbling Skills
The best way to build confidence in tumbling is to be in a cheer team level where your skills feel easy and natural. The worst thing for confidence is added pressure—especially when your teammates and coaches rely on you to hit skills within routines. This added pressure can cripple confidence and cause mental blocks with tumbling. Make the right choice early on and avoid rushing through levels.
Ideally, you should spend a full season perfecting and mastering skills in a tumble class before competing the skills on a competition floor. This ensures that when the pressure of full-outs and competition day comes, your tumbling feels as effortless as a cartwheel, reducing stress and avoiding hesitation, ensuring your are confident on competition day.
2. Ask Yourself: Is My Tumbling Strong Enough for Full-Outs?
Tumbling confidence isn’t just about hitting skills when you’re fresh—it’s about being able to perform them when you're tired, giving it your all, mid-routine, on competition day. If a skill isn’t something you can do with ease, mental blocks can develop when fatigue and pressure kick in. That’s why it’s crucial to build strength and consistency before adding difficulty. When skills feel automatic, they remain solid even under the toughest conditions.
3. Recognize & Manage ‘Off’ Days
Every athlete has tough tumbling days, and that’s completely normal. The key is to recognise when you're struggling and take steps to shift your mindset before it impacts your confidence. If you feel stuck, try:
Changing the surface to something easier (like going from the floor to the tumble track).
Going back to drills to rebuild technique and confidence.
Taking a step back to reset your mental approach.
The quicker you adjust, the easier it is to regain confidence and avoid frustration.
4. Build Positive Muscle Memory
Your body remembers how you train. If you rep a skill with poor technique 50 times, that’s what your muscles will default to (muscle memory). But if you focus on executing skills with proper form, your muscles will develop good habits. Since most people struggle to maintain perfect technique in full skills, it's important to break them down with drills. Drills are a fantastic and easy way to build posititve technique muscle memories when done correctly. This ensures that when you put the full skill together, it’s built on strong foundations, utilising the muscle memories you have developed, creating a skill that is not only technically correct but confident. Tumbling if done correctly shouldn’t feel hard or scary, good technique ensures confidence.
Another common mistake is repeatedly practicing a skill with bad form and then trying to correct it later. This can knock an athlete’s confidence when having to take steps back to fix it. Instead, prioritise quality over quantity—train skills the right way from the start to build confidence and long-term success.
5. Trust Your Own Journey
Everyone progresses at their own pace because every body is unique. Your tumbling journey won’t look the same as your teammates', and that’s okay. Some skills may come quickly, while others take longer to master. The key is to stay patient, trust your training, and remain confident in your own path.
It’s also important to avoid comparing yourself to others—especially in a team setting where different athletes have different strengths. Instead, focus on your progress. Set personal goals, celebrate small wins, and remind yourself that consistency and effort will get you where you want to be.
Most importantly, be kind to yourself. Some days will be tougher than others, but if you stay committed and believe in yourself, your hard work will pay off.
I hope these tips help you become a more confident tumbler!
