Jumping is Good
In hurdling, jumping is good. Before you scream out loud and call me a heretic, let me explain. I know that in the past I’ve claimed that hurdling is not a jumping event, like the long, triple, and high jumps. In the past I’ve argued that the motion over the hurdle is an elongated sprinting stride, that jumping causes you to float, to sail, to spend too much time in the air. Hurdlers who jump over hurdles, I contended, lose speed over the hurdles and have to work a lot harder between the hurdles to maintain their speed.
I still contend that hurdlers don’t want to jump like a triple jumper, or a long jumper, or a high jumper. Hurdlers don’t want to elevate. Hurdlers don’t want to jump up. They want to jump forward.
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The key to jumping forward lies in the hips. If the hips push forward when you take off, your momentum will still be going forward. You will drive through the hurdle. If the hips rise during take-off, your momentum will be going upward. Which is bad.
Another way to think of it, instead of thinking of it as jumping up, or even jumping forward, is jumping into position. In last month’s issue of this magazine, I discussed the positioning of all limbs and all parts of the body when you are on top of the hurdle. In order to get into this position successfully, you have to jump. The forcefulness of the jump off the back leg will be no different than that of a long jumper, but the angle will be different. Both long jumpers and hurdlers want the last stride to be the shortest stride, and want to attack the ground with force, then explode into the air after fully extending the take-off leg.
This jumping action, instead of causing you to lose speed, enables you to accelerate off the hurdle. To put it another way, The jump enables you to be in sprinting position on top of the hurdle. From here, you can now sprint. Some of my athletes compare it to re-entering the starting blocks. With a deep forward lean, with a slightly bent lead leg and a trail leg knee that rises higher than the crossbar, you’re in position to explode again the same as you explode out of the blocks. My way of explaining it would be, the jump puts you in position to cycle the legs, to continue the rotary motion that is the foundation of solid sprinting mechanics. Not to mention, you’ve already been employing this cycle motion in the strides between the hurdles. So, instead of running between the hurdles and hurdling over the hurdles, you feel like your legs are in position to run over the hurdles.
In traditional hurdling, the hurdle motion is a 1-2 thing. Lead leg first, trail leg second. The lead leg does 90% of the work. It extends until it locks at the knee, and then it snaps down with force. While it extends, the trail leg lags behind, with the knee well below the crossbar. Then when the lead leg snaps down, the trail leg raises and whips to the front. This type of hurdling causes a lot of groin strains because the trail leg opens up so widely before shifting direction and moving forward.
To jump into position means that there is no 1-2. It’s not lead leg first, trail leg second. In jumping into position, both legs rise into position together, as one. Obviously, you can’t literally raise both legs at the exact same time because the trail leg is still pushing off while the lead leg is in the air. But you want to minimize the time gap of the two legs, so that both legs are virtually exploding into position together, as a single unit.
When you jump into position, the lead leg is not exceedingly long, and the trail leg is not low. On top of the hurdle, both knees are able to remain close to each other, so that the cycle motion is easy to execute and feels quite natural and quite fluid, not to mention forceful and powerful. Also, there are no pauses in the hurdling action. With traditional hurdling, there is a pause in the lead leg before it snaps down, there is a pause in the trail leg before it whips to the front.
If the hurdling action is to be truly comparable to the sprinting action – if the aim is, in fact, to run over hurdles – then you have to look at sprint mechanics for your cues. In sprinting, the knee of the leg in front is never supposed to lock, so why do you want it to lock when you sprint over hurdles? The back leg does not pause then whip when you sprint. It pushes forward to the front as soon as it leaves the ground. So why should it be any different when you sprint over hurdles? The act of jumping into position allows you to sprint over the hurdles in a manner very similar to how you sprint on the ground.
Because it’s difficult to show the jumping action in a still photo, I’d like for you to take a look at the following YouTube video of Liu Xiang warming up prior to a race:
In this video, it is evident that Liu is “jumping” into position. The lead leg attacks the crossbar and the trail leg rises very high into position on the front side of the hurdle before driving forward and sprinting off the hurdle on the backside.
Jumping into position is more of a male hurdler’s thing than a female’s because women’s hip height is generally high enough that there is no need to jump. But even women and taller male hurdlers can benefit from jumping forward, from jumping into position, because of the acceleration factor, the propulsion factor. The point of jumping as a hurdler is not to just get over the hurdle, but to create speed off the hurdle.
As mentioned earlier, the reason the jump does not cause elevation or floating or sailing is because of the hips pushing forward and the lean from the waist. The hips thrusting forward enables you to maintain your forward momentum, while a deep lean from the waist pushes you back to the ground, so that airtime is minimal. So there are two big pushes – a push up and a push down. The push up occurs during take-off. The push down occurs on top of the hurdle.
As I have become convinced of the benefits of jumping into position, I have adapted my drills accordingly. I have gradually phased out any drills that emphasize isolation of a single leg, except for when I’m teaching mechanics to beginners. With one-steps, with pop-overs, etc., I like for my athletes to do everything over the top. I don’t want them to get in the habit of thinking in terms of 1-2, lead leg then trail leg.
In terms of one-legged exercises, I have my athletes do one-leg plyometric bounds and one-leg jump-rope exercises to strengthen the back leg and to get it in the habit of pushing off with force. I also like one-leg jumps over cones or banana hurdles so that athletes have to go upward and forward over something.
My favorite drill is the marching pop-overs, in which the athletes march between the hurdles instead of running, so that they cannot rely on their speed to get up and over the hurdle. Instead, they have to rely on the jump into position – the push off the back leg and raising both legs together. Usually with this drill I’ll set up five or six hurdles, spaced 15-18 apart for an easy marching three-step rhythm. For males I’ll put the hurdles anywhere from 30-36 inches high. For girls I may break out the practice hurdles so they can start at 27 or even 24 inches.
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