Teaching Hurdlers to Cycle the Legs
by Steve McGill
In the past month, I’ve started working with two hurdlers from a nearby high school—both girls, both juniors. One, Kate, is really good and hopes to run in college; she ran 46-low in the 300 hurdles last year, and is looking to get down to a range that will earn her a scholarship by the time she graduates. When her dad contacted me, he told me she needs to work on alternating lead legs and developing a stride pattern. In looking at a video of one of her races from last year, I noticed that she didn’t run with much knee lift. Though tall (about 5-9), she wasn’t taking advantage of her height. The low knee lift made the hurdles higher, making her have to work harder to go over them.
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Meanwhile, the dad told me that she wasn’t as proficient in the 100m hurdles, where she was having trouble three-stepping a whole race. Indeed, I did remember seeing her race once last year in a meet where my school team competed, and Kate did have to switch to five-stepping over the last two or three hurdles. I told myself when her dad contacted me that I didn’t want her to abandon the 100m hurdles, as I felt (and feel) that progress in the 100m hurdles could lead to progress in the 300m hurdles. But first, it seemed that we’d have to address sprint mechanics first, before we could address either hurdle race or any of her hurdling issues.
Kate and I hit it off from the very start. We found ourselves to be very like-minded—locked in and all about business, but also congenial and easy to get along with. From the outset, it was obvious that she was eager to get better, had a high IQ that enabled her to grasp new concepts quickly, and had a very positive attitude toward training. We started off by addressing her sprint mechanics. As I explained to her, before we could get to any of the issues her dad wanted to tackle, she had to learn how to sprint properly. “You run like a distance runner,” I told her, noting the low knee lift, the lack of dorsiflexion, and the tendency to heel-strike. Even distance runners don’t want to run that way, I thought to myself, but didn’t say it out loud. She explained that she had been doing a fairly good amount of mileage to stay in shape. “Well that needs to stop,” I said, explaining that it was teaching her to ingrain bad habits in regard to running posture, and that she needed to learn to run like a sprinter if she wanted to get her time down.
So we started by focusing on learning to run on the balls of feet, which meant learning to keep the ankles dorsiflexed, and to push off the ball of the foot every stride. We made incremental progress in our first couple sessions, but it wasn’t until the third session that we took a major step forward. She had grasped the idea of running on the balls of her feet and was beginning to apply it regularly, but I was still seeing the heel kick back a little bit, thereby lowering the knee height. And she was a “kicker” in the sense that her lead leg kicked out and locked at the knee, even when going over 21-inch practice hurdles. I knew there was no way we’d be able to eradicate that kicking action if she didn’t learn to cycle the legs.
So, in that third session, which was two weeks ago, I spent the first part of the session focusing on sprint mechanics, leaving my practice hurdles in the backseat of my Honda Civic. I instructed her to do some easy sprints at about 80% of full speed, exaggerating her knee lift. “Let it feel weird,” I said, “let it feel like you’re lifting your knees too much.” That worked, but not really. I then told her to slow it down even more and over-exaggerate the knee lift. I still wasn’t seeing what I wanted to see. So I scrapped the sprints altogether and transitioned into high-knee drilling. “Every stride, your thigh should be parallel to the track,” I said. “Get your knees up.” I walked beside her, facing her, starting a little in front of her, instructing to go at the pace I set. This is a drill I’ve used at camps in the past with success, so I found myself feeling stupid for not having tried it with Kate sooner. For the first time, I saw the results I was looking for. She was popping off the ball of the foot every stride, with the knee and heel driving up as one unit. The back-kick was disappearing, and she was retaining a slightly-forward upper body posture. “That’s how we want to run,” I explained to her. “That’s an exaggerated version of how we want to run. When the legs are cycling, the knee is leading the way every stride, and then you’ll just need to continue that knee-first cycle action over the hurdle.” And I finished the lesson with my favorite line that I’ve repeated many times over the years: “When you do it right, it feels like you’re just stepping over a bookbag in the hallway.”
After about 8-10 high-knee reps of 20m each, I walked to my car and grabbed my five yellow hurdles. I kept them at their lowest height—21 inches. Even with the improved running posture gained from the high-knee drilling, the lead leg was still kicking and locking at the knee on some reps. Old habits are hard to break. The body knows what it knows, and it’ll always cling to what it knows. That’s why you have to talk to it, and explain to it that we are going to do things differently now. That’s why cues are so important. Cues remind the athlete of what to focus on so they can untrain the body out of its old habits and begin to ingrain new ones. What helped with the problem of the lead leg locking at the knee was instructing Kate to clear the hurdle with an A-skip action. “Drive the knee up, drive the foot down,” I told her. The leg will extend instinctively because the hurdle is there, but don’t cue it to extend; cue it to attack the ground.
That cue helped a ton. Finally, I started seeing the cycle action over the hurdles. We were able to raise the hurdles to 24 inches, and then to 27 before we wrapped things up for the day. As I explained to her afterwards, we’re in the process of tearing her down and rebuilding her—in regard to running form and hurdling technique. The rewards won’t be as immediate this way, but they will be much greater in the long run than if we were to just try to work through her flaws and compensate for them with adrenaline and willpower. “You’ve had success because you’re a warrior and you’re a competitor,” I told her. “But now that you’re learning how to sprint, and how to hurdle efficiently, there’s no limit to what you might be able to do.”
The video below includes reps that I filmed from the breakthrough session. We haven’t been able to meet since then because of snow and cold temperatures, but we’ll be back at it again soon, and I’ll continue to document her progress.
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