Over Seven Hurdles Workout
by Steve McGill
In outdoor track and field, there’s an endurance element to every running event. Indoors, the short sprints and hurdle races of 55 or 60 meters don’t include a fatigue factor. By the time anybody gets tired, the race is over. That’s why the start is ultra-important indoors, but there needs to be a shift in mindset when the outdoor season arrives and the distance increases to 100/110 meters. As discussed in previous articles over the years, I like to think of the race in three parts — the drive phase (start line to hurdle three), peak velocity phase (hurdles 4-7), and deceleration phase (hurdle 8 to finish line). So an indoor race consisting of five hurdles doesn’t even get us through the end of max velocity phase, when h is why we can never assume that success indoors will translate to the same level of success outdoors. Also, training strictly for indoors and placing too much emphasis on the start in the winter months can lead to the need to build speed-endurance once the outdoor season starts.
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Personally, I like to include high-volume drill work in the fall and winter so that my hurdlers don’t have to make up for lost time by doing base training in the spring. If that means sacrificing some indoor success, so be it. I train my athletes for a 10-hurdle race.
But when it comes to block starts, in the winter, I won’t do block starts over more than four hurdles. In that sense, we do train for the shorter distance, as four hurdles is almost the whole race indoors. Not until the spring season arrived so I increase the number of hurdles we clear out of the blocks, and the magic number of hurdles I want to get to is seven. Two or three quality reps over seven hurdles indicates that the athlete is ready to do one quality rep over ten hurdles on race day.
With that thought in mind, one workout that I’ve been doing once a week with my sprint hurdlers involved block starts over hurdles, starting with one and building up to seven.
There are two ways to get there — adding one hurdle at a time, or adding two hurdles at a time. I prefer adding two hurdles at a time because that’ll allow us to get in more reps over seven. So if we’re able to do it that way, the key part of the workout will look like this:
One rep over one hurdle
One rep over three hurdles
One rep over five hurdles
Three reps over seven hurdles
In such a workout, all the reps before we get to seven hurdles are serving as warmup for the reps over seven.
For athletes who are less experienced or less confident, we might have to progress at a slower pace, leading to less reps over seven. It would look something like this:
One rep over one hurdle
One rep over two hurdles
One rep over three hurdles
One rep over four hurdles
One rep over five hurdles
One rep over six hurdles
One rep over seven hurdles
With athletes who are having significant technique-related issues, I might need to add more I structure between reps, leading to more reps over just two or three hurdles, and we might not get to seven. An athlete who didn’t run indoors and is just starting to hurdle at the beginning of the outdoor season, for example, will most likely not be ready to clear seven in a quality manner until later in the season.
The workout is a speed-intensive workout, so there’d be two minutes or more of rest between reps, with a good deal of communication between coach and athlete between reps. Coach should give starting commands each rep. Athletes should be in spikes.
The purpose of the workout is to build speed-endurance over the hurdles, with the logic being clearing more than seven hurdles isn’t really necessary and could increase the risk of chronic pain or an overuse injury.
Below is a video of my athlete, Janie Coble doing reps in this workout from a couple weeks ago.
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