Quick-Stepping to Hurdling Success
by Steve McGill
I feel pretty confident in saying that every hurdle coach has his or her favorite drills — their go-to drills that they rely on to improve their athletes’ technique, rhythm, and overall race sensibility. For some it’s the zone drill, for others it’s the one-step drill, for others it’s back & forths, and there are plenty more as well. For me, it’s the quick-step drill – a drill that I kind of stumbled upon (or came up with if you want to call me innovative) when looking for ways to increase my hurdlers’ endurance in the 0ff-season.
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Prior to settling on the quick-step drill as my go-to drill for off-season hurdling conditioning, I used to focus on the back & forths that Renaldo Nehemiah used to do under the tutelage of his high school coach Jean Poquette. The back & forth drill, when done as a workout, is severely fatiguing. Five hurdles are set up in one direction, and five more are set up next to them, facing the other direction, on the race marks. The hurdler clears all five hurdles going up, turns around, then clears all five hurdles coming back. Ten hurdles comprise a set. But as the athlete’s condition improves, he or she will go up and back twice, then three times, etc. In Nehemiah’s case, he got up to 100 hurdles in one set – up and back 10 times! And he did four sets of it for a total of 400 hurdles! Oh my God!
I did this workout several times myself when I was in my late 20’s and still had the urge to train and compete on occasion, and I found that I could never get above 30 hurdles — up and back three times — for one set. Four sets of that got me up to 120 hurdles, with the last set getting very sloppy. With the high school hurdlers I was coaching at the time, I found that they were having the same issue. Once fatigue set in, the quality of the workout deteriorated rapidly. And that’s what bothered me. The lack of rest within a set made the workout almost undoable. To this day, I don’t know how Renaldo did it. I feel like completing a marathon would be easier than doing 400 hurdles worth of back and forths. No exaggeration.
The other thing I didn’t like about the back and forths was that it was done to a 5-step rhythm. The first two steps off the hurdle were recovery steps, giving you a chance to relax a bit before getting back into the quick 1-2-3 into the next hurdle. What I didn’t like was the possibility of ingraining the habit of relaxing when landing off the hurdle. So, when modifying the drill for my own purposes, I decided to space the hurdles closer together. Instead of keeping them on the race marks, I spaced them 24 feet apart for a quick three-step rhythm that more closely mimicked the race rhythm. Finally, instead of the back and forth model, I had my hurdlers clear the last hurdle and then turn around and jog back to the start line. The jog-back served as a recovery period between reps that allowed for a higher level of quality for the whole workout, and it also allowed them to clear more hurdles at that higher level of quality.
With the quick-step workout, I could set up more hurdles in one direction. With the back and forths, I found that the turn-around part was a major source of fatigue. It took you out of your rhythm and forced you to crank yourself up all over again, which got to be exhausting. With the quick-steps, I could set up six hurdles, seven hurdles, and I ended up making ten hurdles the max, as, again, it mimicked the race rhythm the best. Personally, the most I ever did of the quick-step workout was 240 hurdles – three sets of ten reps over 8 hurdles. The most ever done by an athlete of mine was 300, by Johnny Dutch, who did three sets of ten over 10 hurdles. Running down a lane of ten hurdles ten times can get quite dizzying, so the concentration level required to maintain quality is extremely high.
If you’ve been following my YouTube channel lately, you’ll notice that I’ve been having my athletes do the quick-step drill throughout the fall thus far. One of my athletes, Matt Garrett, has been doing it as a workout. He is up to 120 as of now, and we’ll make 200 hurdles our target goal, as this is his first year over the 39’s. Doing the drill as a workout is speeding up the acclimation process, making the 39’s feel less daunting psychologically, and teaching his body to continually make the necessary adaptations to clearing these higher hurdles.
Another of my athletes, Sofia Rooney, does the drill more so as a drill. I allow her to walk back between reps, and I’ll discuss with her the things that went well that rep and the things she needs to keep working on. With Sofia, because she’s so new to hurdling (I just started with her last spring), I have to be more of a teacher on the track, so the focus isn’t as much on volume as it is on really learning how to hurdle efficiently.
In both cases, the quick-steps are serving to smooth out technical flaws, to ingrain race rhythm, and to build hurdle endurance. Sofia and I were joking that we do the same thing every week, but it’s never the same. And that’s the beauty of this drill. The athlete can literally feel the progress he or she is making, and the coach can literally see it. With Matt last year, we did this workout once a week for the entire fall before we ever practiced any hurdling out of the blocks. Then, once we put the blocks down, we could put 100% of our focus into the start because we knew the hurdling part would be on point as long as we hit the ideal take-off distance to each hurdle. He didn’t have to “think” about the hurdling part — lead leg, trail leg, etc. — he could just be fast and aggressive while trusting his hurdling instincts. Many hurdlers bemoan the fact that they can fix technical mistakes in drills, but that the mistakes come back when they go full speed. That’s because they didn’t do enough drilling in the off-season. It’s very hard to address technical flaws and prepare for races. In fact, it is often inadvisable. Races require a beast-mode mindset, so over-thinking technique can get in the way of attacking the barriers. With Sofia, I repeatedly told her last spring that once the season is over and there are no more races left, then I’ll teach her how to hurdle for real, which is what I’m doing now. But if I had done that during the season it would’ve messed her up.
Even though there’ll be one or two meets prior to the Christmas holidays, I won’t stop with the quick-step workout until after the new year, when the indoor season starts to really crank up. I might include it in smaller doses during the winter, but it will no longer be a staple, as it will have served its primary purpose of establishing a technical, rhythm, and endurance-based foundation by then.
For males, I will space the hurdles 24 feet apart, and for females I’ll space them 21 feet apart. Those spacings are open to change based on the talent level of the individual athlete. The key for me is that the tempo in between the hurdles be quick. You want to feel like the hurdles are rushing up at you, and that you are being forced to react quickly to each obstacle. The athlete should not feel comfortable between the hurdles.
One last note: this workout should not be done by four-steppers, as it does not fit their race rhythm, and does not facilitate a transition to three-stepping at race spacing.
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