High Intensity 400 Hurdler Workout
by Steve McGill

I just started coaching a girl in her junior year of high school who ran a personal best of 46.12 last year. She had a lot of potential, and wants to run in college, so her school coach (whose daughter I had coached in the hurdles about eight years ago), connected us. As of this writing, we’ve only had one session together, but it went very well and I’m very eager to build the relationship and coach her to greatness. One of the things I noticed in the race footage from last year that she sent me prior to our first session is that she wasn’t sprinting. She was running hard, but her knee lift was low, she wasn’t applying much force to the ground, and her arm carriage was low.

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So when we met last week, we spent the bulk of the session working on her sprint mechanics. I had her do high-knee bounds, but with an emphasis on pushing the hips forward to eliminate the vertical element associated with most blinding drills done by long jumpers and high jumpers. Apply the same force as a jumper, I told her, but push forward instead of upward. At first she was doing the same old same old that I had seen in the video. Then I told her to exaggerate everything—exaggerate the push off the track, exaggerate the knee lift, exaggerate the heel recovery. It wouldn’t feel good, I said, it should feel awkward and wonky. If it doesn’t feel weird, you’re not doing anything that you don’t usually do. 

A few reps later, she did it right. A few reps after that, it wasn’t starting to feel “right” to her, and I could see that she was learning to run forcefully but fluidly. At the end of the session, I put up a 27-inch hurdle and instructed her to attack it from the 100h start line, using an 8-step approach. Her first rep, which served as my chance to evaluate her hurdling technique, looked kind of “mid,” as kids these days say. Trail leg lagged and plopped in her first stride off the hurdle. This girl is 5-9 and she was telling me she had been having trouble maintaining her 3-step in races last year. A girl running 46 in the 300h struggling to 3-step in the 100h? It didn’t make any sense to me. I had to figure this out. 

After that first rep I added, “focus on the same things we were focusing on without the hurdles—applying force, staying dorsiflexed, driving the knees, maintaining high heel recovery—and just take that over the hurdle.” That cue proved to help a lot. The trail leg issues disappeared, she looked more aggressive in her drive to the hurdle, and she looked faster coming off of it. “If you attack the first hurdle like that,” I said, you’ll be three-stepping all day long till the breakadawn.” 

I added a second hurdle, moved two feet in from race distance because she wasn’t wearing spikes and it was pretty cold outside, and she continued to look really good by focusing on the same cues. 

So all that I wrote above is background for the workout I want to use with her the next time I see her, or the next time we get some weather with the temperatures at least higher than the 40s. Since the long hurdles is her best event, I’m building a foundation of sprint mechanics and hurdle mechanics (100h work) first so that once we have those things in place, we can get down to business in the 300h.

So here’s the workout—one that I’ve used in the past with a high level of success, and that I’ll soon be using to help this girl run some personal bests this year:

• 2×400, clearing the first two hurdles of the 300h race, then continuing the rest of the rep with no hurdles. 
• Target time for the 400s should be within five seconds of the athlete’s open 400 personal best.
• Rest period should be ten minutes between reps so that both reps can be all-out.
• After the second 400, the athlete gets another 10-minute rest before finishing the workout with 1×150, all-out, with no hurdles. 
• This last 150 serves a psychological purpose, as it reminds the athlete to finish strong. 

This is a once-a-week workout that can serve as a race indicator if done 2-3 days prior to competition. If the times in this workout keep getting faster every week, there is reason to feel confident that race times will improve right along with them.

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