Long Hurdler Back-and-Forth Speed Style Workout
by Steve McGill
Because I’ve been working with a few really good 300 hurdlers recently, I’m adding a second workout to this month’s issue that I use late in the season for long hurdlers. This one is a variation of the “back and forth” workout that I used to often use in the off-season as a conditioning workout. In the original version, there are five hurdles set up on the straightaway facing one way, and five more beside them facing in the opposite direction. The hurdles are set up on every other 110h mark (males) or every other 100h mark (females); the hurdler clears the first five, trying to maintain a consistent stride pattern, then turns around and clears the other five hurdles, still trying to maintain the stride pattern while fatigued.
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Again that’s an off-season workout, and I actually haven’t used it very often in recent years—not because I don’t believe in it, but because the 300 hurdlers who’ve come to me in my private coaching have been finding me after the fall, when the indoor season is about to start, or in the spring, when there is zero time or logic for conditioning work.
Throughout my career, I’ve always liked to take fall conditioning workouts and modify them into faster versions that can serve as competitive workouts to be done during the outdoor season. In this case, I recently created a new version of the back-and-forth workout based on the needs of an athlete I’ve been working with this spring named Nyle. Because he lives 90 minutes away from the track where we train, we can only meet on weekends during the season, and because he (and I) often have meets on Saturdays, Sunday becomes our only option. Three weeks ago, he had a meet on a Saturday in which he competed in three events, including the 300h and the 4×400 relay, so I didn’t want to follow up the very next day with even a medium amount of volume. In addition, the intensity level couldn’t be 100% either.
In the past, I’ve had my 300 hurdlers do 120’s over the last 3 hurdles, so I was thinking of having him do some reps of that. But Nyle’s issue in races was an inability to maintain his stride pattern in the last part of the race, so I had to think of a way to create the fatigue element, which the 120s wouldn’t really do.
So I decided on the following workout, which, after a bit of trial and error for a rep or two, worked very well:
- 3 sets of back-and-forths over two hurdles—hurdles 6 and 7 of the 300h race.
- His start line was the mark for hurdle 5.
- As a 15-stepper between the hurdles in races, I had him take 17 steps to hurdle 6 (because the distance is farther than it would be if he were touching down off hurdle five like he would be in a race).
- Coming off hurdle six, the aim was to 15-step hurdle seven.
- Then, I had him let his momentum off hurdle seven take him to the mark for the 8th hurdle.
- He turned around at the 8th hurdle mark and faced the two hurdles facing the other direction.
- He followed the same pattern: hurdle eight as the start line, 17-step to hurdle seven, then 15-step to hurdle six, with hurdle five being the finish line.
Between sets, I didn’t put an exact amount of rest time on the recovery periods. I told him that once he was breathing normally again, he should go again. He’s a mature enough athlete to know when he’s ready to go full speed again.
This workout proved to be challenging without being too high-intensity. The demanding part was maintaining the 17-15 rhythm on the way back. Being able to do that for three reps gave him the confidence that he could 15-step a whole race. In previous races, he had switched to 17 at hurdle nine or hurdle ten and either clobbered the hurdle or lost so much momentum that he got walked down, neither of which are good.
The clip below shows a rep of Nyle doing this speed version of the back-and-forths. I’m thinking that in the future, I might want to do this workout in the indoor season and early outdoor season, adding a third hurdle, so that it has a balance of being both a speed workout and a hurdle-endurance workout.
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