June 9, 2015
An article in this month’s Hurdle Magazine (which comes out June 14th) will feature a training session with an athlete who needed help breaking the habit of kicking out her lead leg. Here’s a snippet of that article, which is entitled “Learning to Cycle:”
On top of the hurdle, Nadia’s lead leg remains bent so that she can properly cycle it, and then cycle the trail leg as well. A lot of hurdlers will flatten out their lead leg at this point in clearance and try their best to “skim” the crossbar along the length of the entire leg. That’s not what we want to do. We want to create a downhill angle like we have here, so that we are coming DOWN on the hurdle, and will therefore be able to come off the hurdle faster than we went into it. You can also see that Nadia’s forward lean is more pronounced, as she pushes her chest down over her lead leg thigh, minimizing her airtime, pushing herself back to the ground. I’ve always said that the lean is not just about hurdle clearance, but even more importantly about creating speed off the hurdle. Meanwhile, Nadia’s trail leg is in excellent position, with the knee facing the front and the toe cocked to avoid contact with the barrier. The lead arm is crossing the body, but if that’s as far across as it goes, then she’ll be okay.
