A Sixth Excerpt from The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling
by Steve McGill
Below is an excerpt from Chapter Six of the first draft of a new book I am currently working on. Here, I discuss the importance of simplifying things so that athletes can understand the instructions and execute them.
In my younger days, I had my athletes do the drills I had done myself in my own competitive days. Five-stepping with the hurdles at race spacing, isolating the lead leg. Five-stepping isolating the trail leg. Five-stepping over the top. One-step drills. Added in some flavor by putting three hurdles on the right side of the lane, three more between each of them on the left side of the lane, and one more at the end in the middle of the lane. The athlete would one-step with lead leg, trail leg, lead leg, trail leg, lead leg, trail leg, over the top. I remember Wayne Davis made a race out of it by having me time him and the other guys on the team. It was cool and it was a lot of fun.
But as the years went on I started questioning things. I noted that when doing side drills, I was always reminding the athletes to make sure that the leg not going over the hurdle still fully performs the motion it would if it were going over the hurdle. That made me ask, why do side drills at all? Why not just do everything over the top?
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As I gained more awareness of how acutely significant rhythm is in a hurdle race, I began asking myself why I was still having my athletes do five-step drills and one-step drills. If we want to three-step in a race, every drill we do should be done to a three-step rhythm. That way, we’re ingraining race rhythm all the time, often unconsciously on the athlete’s part, because the race rhythm becomes all they know.
Once I developed my own philosophy about the need for hurdling to be a continuous fluid motion, with no pauses in the action, I pushed walk-overs out of my regular repertoire, with the logic being that real hurdling involves both feet being off the ground at the same time. Why have my athletes do drills that teach pausing when I don’t want them to pause in races? Why teach my athletes to think in terms of lead leg, comma, trail leg? We want to think in terms of leadlegtrailleg. One right behind the other. Ultimately, I replaced walk-overs with marching popovers as my go-to foundational drill to teach all aspects of hurdling mechanics, as that drill, which I created through experimentation and out of a sense of desperation, involves both feet being in the air at the same time, and the spacing allows for the three-step rhythm that mimics the race rhythm.
Then, one day when I was working with Hector Cotto around 2013, we were experimenting in practice and came up with the idea of the cycle drill, which has a variation called the cycle ladder drill. The idea is pretty simple: cycle the legs like in a high-knee drill, and then continue to cycle the legs over the hurdle. The aim is to avoid “hurdling,” and to just maintain the cycle action. This drill, like the marching popovers, is generally done with hurdles well below race height so that the proper movements can be learned and ingrained.
The third go-to drill I use is the quickstep drill, which I discussed in an earlier chapter, as a hurdle endurance workout, but also as a way to develop rhythm and technique.
So when it comes to building a hurdler from the ground up, those are my three go-to drills, in that order: the marching popover drill, the cycle drill, the quickstep drill. Once we master one drill, we move on to the next one. And once we move on from a drill, we rarely, if ever, come back to it. An athlete who has mastered the marching popover doesn’t need to keep doing it because they’re no longer benefiting from it. The drill has served its purpose, so there’s no reason to continue doing it. Some coaches will have their athletes do drills as part of their race warmup, but I’m not big on that. Race day is all about speed. Technique-wise, go with what you got.
So, once the athlete has mastered the quickstep drill, we pretty much stop doing drills altogether in our hurdling sessions, except maybe as a way to get the legs over hurdles prior to going over them at full speed. If the purpose of drills is to ingrain proper technique, and they have served that purpose, then there’s no need to keep doing them. You’ve graduated from that. A high school graduate doesn’t go back and take more high school classes; they go on to take more challenging college classes. Similarly, a hurdler who has mastered the drills doesn’t need to drill anymore, but can now graduate to doing full-speed reps all the time.
When I was coaching Ayden Thompson from 2021-2023, we got to a point where our hurdling sessions wouldn’t last more than 55-60 minutes, including the warmup. By the end of his senior year — our third year together — he didn’t need to do any drills. I had drilled him to death up to that point. Now, he could go straight from his warmup to the blocks. The reps over one hurdle and the first two hurdles would serve as the last stage of his warmup. For the workout we’d do about six high-quality full-speed reps out of the blocks over the first six hurdles, and call it a day. That’s the kind of efficiency you want late in the competitive season. You don’t want to still be drilling and teaching technique. When it’s time to rock and roll, we gotta rock and roll.
Sometimes I’ll receive emails or DM’s from athletes or their parents asking me to critique their technique. I might mention a flaw or two that I see, and they’ll respond with “What drill should I do to correct that?” My answer is always, “marching popovers.” Coach, what should I do to get my lead leg knee to drive higher? Marching popovers. Coach, what drill should I do to work on my arm action? Marching popovers. Coach, do you have any drills for working on the trail leg? Marching popovers. There are no magic drills. There are no drills for this over here and drills for that over there. It’s not the drill that matters; it’s the cue that matters. What are you instructing yourself to do? What instructions are you giving yourself prior to each rep? And because it’s easier to correct ingrained flaws at slower speeds, we start with the marching popover. To speed things up, we graduate to the cycle drill. To speed things up more, we graduate to the quicksteps. Not until we’ve mastered the quicksteps can we even hope for everything to click into place when moving at full speed. So don’t tell me that you’re able to do it right in the drill but can’t do it right in a race. Of course you can’t. You haven’t gone through the full progression of drills yet.
I was watching an episode of former NBA star Carmelo Anthony’s podcast a little while ago, and he was saying something similar to what I’m saying. He was saying that when he would practice moves to add to his arsenal, he would do the same drills over and over again. People watching him might think that what he was doing was boring. Same stuff over and over. But the whole point, he said, was to master the drill. Yes, exactly!
I don’t get it when people get bored doing the same thing over and over. It might be the same drill, but it’s new every time you do it, because you’re trying to do it better than you did it last time. If a football team were to practice its 2-minute drill three days a week, would that get boring? No! Because they’re trying to master it, so when it comes time to run their 2-minute offense in a game, they know exactly what to do, and they can do it without feeling any pressure or nerves.
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