A Quick Explanation about the Marching Popover Drill
by Steve McGill
One of the staple drills that I’ve incorporated into my coaching is the one I call “marching popovers.” In this drill, the athlete marches up to the first hurdle on the balls of the feet, then pushes off the back leg to generate the momentum necessary to clear the hurdle. The push raises the hips and also sends the athlete forward, so the idea is to “push forward,” or “jump forward.” Because the athlete has generated no speed while approaching the hurdle, the push off the back leg is essential. Without a forceful push, the athlete will be forced to kick out the lead leg just to get over the hurdle. The reason I created the drill was because, in other drills I had created, like the cycle drill, the quickstep drill, as well as in traditional drills that allowed for a running start or a bounce-on-the-balls-of-the-feet start, the athletes could find a way to cheat the drill by relying on speed to get them over the hurdle instead of employing proper mechanics. “Cheating” usually involves kicking out the lead leg, creating an imbalance as the hips and shoulders twist.
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Of course, whenever you explain a drill to other coaches, they might misinterpret how to execute the drill in ways that you hadn’t foreseen. That happened to me in regards to the marching popover drill recently, when an athlete who came to me for private coaching was habitually locking the knee on the way down instead of cycling the heel back under the hip. This was not in doing the marching popover drill, but in doing starts over one and then two hurdles. His older brother, who I had coached about twelve years ago, was there with us, and he noticed the same problem I was noticing. His brother said, “It looks like you’re marching. Stop marching and just run.”
Upon hearing the word “marching” being referred to negatively, I wanted to make sure that the older brother wasn’t giving the athlete advice counter to what I was teaching, and had already taught the athlete. I informed the older brother that I now have a drill called the marching popover drill, and I showed both of them a video on my phone of another former athlete from a couple years ago demonstrating how the drill is supposed to look. The older brother looked at the video and said to his younger brother, “What he’s doing (in the video) is not what you’re doing. You’re going up and down. He’s cycling.”
That’s when it dawned on me that the athlete’s dad, who coaches him for the most part, was teaching the marching popover drill differently than how I was teaching it. He was teaching it as a literal march. Straight up, straight down. So now, the athlete, when doing any kind of hurdling, was locking his knee on the way down. Oh dear me. So that’s when I explained to the athlete that in all drills we do, we want a cycling action. A 1-2-3: 1) drive up the knee and heel, 2) extend the foot downward, being sure to keep the ankle dorsi-flexed, 3) drive the heel back under the hip.
From there, we abandoned the block work and did some super-slow five-stepping over 30-inch hurdles so he could really focus on executing the cycling action. It clicked, and he did three outstanding reps in a row. I told him that when he goes back home, he now knows what the motion is supposed to look like and feel like.
What I learn from this is I need to make sure that when teaching the drill, I make it clear that the “marching popover” isn’t a literal march like how a military soldier would march. It’s like I always make it a point to instruct athletes to run on the balls of their feet as opposed to instructing them to run on their toes. Although I might mean balls of the feet when I say toes, there’s always the possibility that an athlete will take me literally and point the toes down if I tell him or her to run on the toes. But I can’t really change the name of the marching popover drill because I need to distinguish marching from bouncing or high-knee-ing or running.
Above is the video I showed to my athlete so he could see how the marching popover is supposed to look, and it’s the video I show to any athlete who I’m working with for the first time so that they have a model for how the drill looks when executed properly. If you look at the reps toward the end of the video, from the side view, it’s easy to see that his legs are indeed cycling. It’s not a 1-2 motion, but a 1-2-3 motion. It’s not an up/down action, but a cycle action. With the athlete I’ve been discussing throughout this article, he had ingrained a bad habit that was rooted in doing the marching popover drill incorrectly. In the quickstep drill and out of the starting blocks, the same thing was happening: he kept locking the knee on the way down. His hips would twist a little bit and his trail leg would come through low and a little wide. In those last three super-slow five-stepping reps, the twist in the hips went away, and the trail leg was coming through high and tight. Also, he was transitioning off the hurdle more smoothly.
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