Drills & Block Starts Workout
by Steve McGill
As the outdoor season gets underway, it’s time to start adding more speed to workouts while simultaneously adding more hurdles. For my 100/110m hurdlers, I like to use one day a week working on block starts, building up to five hurdles by the end of the session. Because the outdoor season is still young, these sessions will include some teaching in regard to the block start, which means we’ll do some starts with no hurdles in the way. With athletes who may be new to the hurdles or who have experience but have developed bad habits, we might spend the bulk of a session just learning how to set up the blocks, how to enter the blocks, how to drive forward out of the blocks, and how to accelerate like a sprinter. We’ll do all of that before we put a hurdle up.
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Once we’re ready to attack a hurdle from the blocks, I’ll precede that part of the workout by having the athlete do some type of drilling in order to get their legs over some hurdles first. In some cases we’ll do a few marching popover reps. In other cases we’ll do some easy five-stepping with the hurdles at race height, spaced about two feet farther apart than race spacing. Then we’ll go ahead and begin the heart of the workout: block starts over the hurdles, starting with just one hurdle.
We’ll stick with just one hurdle until it’s clear that we’re getting the take-off distance we want, and the drive through the hurdle that we want. When we add a second hurdle, it’ll be moved in a foot from race spacing, or maybe two feet in if we’re facing a headwind. I always discount the spacing in practice to compensate for the fact that we’re doing multiple reps in practice but only one rep in a meet.
I’ll continue to add one more hurdle every time we look good at the previous amount. I don’t like to put specific numbers on how many reps we do, because quality matters as much as quantity, and I don’t want to add more hurdles if I’m seeing mistakes. All that does is allow for the mistake to become more ingrained over more hurdles.
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In the video above, featuring one of my regulars, Raelle Brown, we warm up with some popovers, then do block starts over one hurdle, building up to five hurdles by the end of the session. This type of session is all about speed and acceleration, so I’m not nit-picking technical details as much. I don’t want to put too many thoughts in the athlete’s head because I don’t want them thinking too much and losing some of their focus on being aggressive. I’ll save the more technical instruction for workouts where we’re drilling a lot.
By getting over five hurdles, we’re getting through half of the race, and we’re getting into the top-end speed part of the race. Later in the year we’ll add two or three more hurdles, but for March, five is enough.
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