Ingraining the 3-Step Rhythm

I don’t know if this is true for all coaches, but I often find myself following trends of my own design, finding ways to implement a single idea into multiple aspects of training. Usually this activity occurs on a subconscious level before I realize it’s been happening. Then I find myself consciously looking for ways to push the limits and expand beyond them.

Most recently, over the past year and into this fall, I’ve found myself adopting the philosophy that hurdlers who specialize in the 100/110m hurdles should do as many drills and workouts as possible to a three-step rhythm. In this article I will discuss the evolution of this philosophy, the ways in which I have modified some of my drills and workouts, and what I perceive to be the benefits of these modifications.

Keep in mind that the things I’ll be saying in this article apply almost exclusively to athletes who have no problem whatsoever maintaining a three-step rhythm for an entire race, and who more often than not face the opposite problem of running up on hurdles and getting crowded in between.

[am4show not_have=”g5;”]

[/am4show][am4guest]

[/am4guest][am4show have=”g5;”]

Drills

Let’s start with walk-overs – one of the most fundamental teaching drills and a warm-up staple for hurdlers at all levels. Walk-overs are usually done with one-step in between or with no steps in between as a continuous flow. In that sense walk-overs are used more as a hip-opening drill than a technique drill, valuable for sprinters and jumpers as much as for hurdlers.

So what I’ve done is increase the spacing a bit so there’s room for a three-step march between the hurdles. For walk-overs over 30” or 33” hurdles, my standard spacing is 12 feet between each hurdle. And I’ll adapt the spacing to the needs of the individual hurdler. More on that later.

***

Same thing with the one-step drill. In this drill, the hurdles are spaced anywhere from 6’ to 10’ apart, forcing the hurdler to get up and down quickly, to be explosive on the way up and forceful on the way down. It’s one of my favorite drills, and I know plenty of hurdlers who swear by it as a drill that has helped them to break bad habits (such as locking the lead leg knee) and reduce their airtime.

With this drill too I have increased the spacing. I put the hurdles in the range of 12’-15’ apart for a super-quick three-step that allows minimal room for knee lift and that therefore still emphasizes the need to explode up and push down.

***

A drill I’ve created that is sort of a hybrid of the one-step drill and A-marches, and an extension of the three-step walk-overs, is one I call the three-step marching pop-over. As with the three-step walk-overs, the hurdles will be spaced about 12 feet apart over 30’s and 33’s. I recently had an athlete do the drill over 39’s, in which case I increased the spacing to 14 feet.

With this drill, unlike with the walk-overs, both feet will be off the ground at the same time, which mimics the type of explosive action required in a race.  The march between the hurdles will speed up on its own because of the momentum created over the hurdle. As a result, the hurdler will encounter crowding issues similar to those he or she will encounter in a race.

Workouts

My favorite hurdle endurance workout used to be the back & forth workout that Jean Poquette designed to help make Renaldo Nehemiah the first high school hurdler to run under 13.0. The workout consists of five hurdles up and five hurdles back, with the hurdles on the regular race marks. The hurdler takes five steps between the hurdles. The first two steps are slower recovery steps, then the last three steps are sped up to match the race rhythm. Upon clearing the first flight of five hurdles, the athlete turns around and clears the other five facing the other way in the adjacent lane. It’s like a one-man shuttle hurdle. It’s a killer workout.

The benefits of the workout are obvious. You can work on technical flaws, you increase your hurdling endurance, you strengthen all the muscles involved in the hurdling action, you learn to relax and focus through fatigue, and because the fatigue level gets so high so fast, you are forced to minimize all extraneous motions, so you become very efficient.

A few years ago I began replacing that workout as my standard hurdle conditioning workout, choosing instead to go with the quick-step workout I now use regularly. My problem with the back & forths was that, for most athletes, it was simply too demanding. Technique would fall apart early in the workout and the fatigue got so bad that I feared for my athletes’ safety. I figured there’s gotta be another way to reap the same benefits without doing what basically amounts to a distance workout for hurdlers.

My other problem with the workout was that I didn’t like the two recovery steps coming off each hurdle. In a race there is no recovery, and I didn’t want to ingrain in my athletes the habit of relaxing when they touch down. I preferred a three-step rhythm between the hurdles.

With the quick-step workout, anywhere from 5-10 hurdles are set up, spaced about 8 yards apart for males, about 7 for females. From a standing start, the hurdler bounces/high-knees to the first hurdle, then speeds up the last three steps into the hurdle, then maintains a quick three-step rhythm over the rest of the hurdles. For recovery, the hurdler, bounces/jogs back to the starting line and goes again. I decide on the number of reps and sets.

With the recovery jog, the athlete has time to gear up before going again, so I can get the kind of speed between the hurdles I want to see. Hurdlers can still work on various technical aspects of their race, and they can clear more hurdles at a higher level of quality. Most significantly, hurdlers gain a true “race feel” when doing this workout. The speed, the cadence, the height of the knees, the height of the hands, will all be the same as they will be in a race, when they’re coming out of the blocks at full speed.

For hurdlers who aren’t as confident or consistent with their three-step, however, the quick-step workout can be counter-productive if done too often. When it comes time to run with the hurdles moved out to normal spacing, they have to reach because they don’t have the speed to naturally transition from quick-stepping to full-speed out of the blocks and maintain the same rhythm. For such athletes, the quick-step workout is okay in small doses, and should be complemented with non-hurdling-related speed work with an emphasize on high knee lift and significant force application.

***

About four or five years ago, 110 hurdler Hector Cotto, whom I was coaching at the time, introduced me to a workout in which he would run 110m sprints with a cone at each hurdle mark. The cones were placed in the middle of the lane, so they served as a visual reminder of a hurdle being there. The point was, he had to run his sprints to the three-step rhythm of the race. He wasn’t allowed to open up his stride freely, as a sprinter would. He had to keep his hands low, his knees low, keep a quick shuffle between the cones, and still hit his target time.

This is a workout I’ve recently come back to after forgetting about it for a while. And I’m beginning to create my own variations on it, such as:

• Have the hurdler sprint 60 meters one way, turn around and sprint 60 meters the other way.
• Move the cones in closer to make the three-step rhythm feel even more crowded.
• Instead of cones, use the crossbars of training hurdles, laid flat on the ground.
• Have the athlete mimic the hurdle motion over the cone or crossbar, just to instill muscle memory.

Benefits

The greatest benefit of doing drills and workouts to a three-step rhythm is that it allows the athlete to become totally dialed in to the race rhythm. The body learns the cadence and performs it automatically. Regardless of spacing, the cadence stays consistent. And when it comes time to speed up the cadence, the body knows how to adapt. If the hurdler is getting crowded in races, we can make spacing adjustments to the marching pop-overs first, and then to the quick-step workout, thus allowing the body to feel the difference before making spacing adjustments in full-speed workouts.

I also like the fact that three-stepping everything in practice gives the athlete an opportunity to visualize the race even when doing the simplest of drills. When doing the one-step drill or regular walk-overs, you can’t “see” yourself racing. But when making that same drill a three-step drill, all of a sudden you can see yourself racing. So, once it’s time to race, it feels like you’ve been here so many times before.

Overall I feel that the more race-specific you can make your training, the better. If the 110 hurdles is your specialty event, then you shouldn’t be training like a sprinter who runs over hurdles. You should be training like a hurdler. A lot of things that apply to sprinters do not apply to hurdlers. For a sprinter, opening up the stride and covering ground will never cause problems. For a sprinter, getting faster as the season progresses will never cause problems. For hurdlers, these types of things cause all kinds of problems. So hurdlers constantly need to be ingraining the rhythm, to the point where they become the rhythm themselves.

[/am4show]