Addressing a Few Misnomers about Technique
by Steve McGill
In addressing questions that I receive from comments on my YouTube channel, or via email, or from athletes that I work with regularly, there are a few that come up rather often, and that indicate what I consider to be a misperception of what we want to do when hurdling. Three questions I will address in this article are the following:
- What do I do to correct a trail leg that’s too fast?
- What cue do I give an athlete who is leaning too much?
- How do I practice the cut step?
Let’s go in order. With the “downhill” style that I teach, there’s no such thing as the trail leg coming to the front too fast, or too soon. That line of thinking fits the old-school style of hurdling (that was common when I competed in the 1980’s, and that is still evident in some athletes, like Hansle Parchment) in which the hurdler kicks out the lead leg, locks it at the knee, and then “snaps down” on the other side of the hurdle. With this style, the trail leg can’t come to the front immediately after pushing off the ground. Instead, it must wait until the lead leg completes the kicking motion; it can’t begin coming to the front until the the foot of the lead leg begins to snap down. So, a trail leg that begins coming to the front prior to the snapdown action will end up getting to the front too soon, and there will be a pause in the action until the lead leg does snap down. So, with that style of hurdling, there should be a delay in the trail leg. It pushes off, pauses, and then whips to the front. And the whip coincides with the snapdown of the lead leg. So, if you’re teaching the old-school style, you’d want to teach the athlete to delay the trail leg action.
With the downhill style, which is very prevalent in the women’s race today, and is becoming more and more prevalent in the men’s race, the lead leg knee does not lock. I was first introduced to the fundamentals of this style when watching Allen Johnson races in the late 1990’s, and then learned more about it when attending a coaching clinic run by Johnson’s coach, Curtis Frye, in 2004. Frye argued that a “bent-leg” lead leg was preferable to the “straight-leg” lead leg that was so common prior to Johnson’s success. If you go back to the 1970’s and 80’s, and even the early 90’s, almost everybody straightened the lead leg. Renaldo Nehemiah, Greg Foster, Roger Kingdom, Tonie Campbell, Tony Dees, Rodney Milburn, etc. The only one who didn’t was Jack Pierce, and his style was notably different from everybody else’s — notably smoother and more fluid than everybody else’s.
So, if the lead leg is not kicking out, that means it’s also not snapping down. Instead of snapping down, it’s cycling back down, just like it would in a “normal” sprinting stride. Never, in a normal sprinting stride, do we want to lock the leg at the knee. It should always stay slightly bent, even upon descent. Because the lead leg is cycling (that’s my term for it; Coach Frye referred to it as “rotary hurdling”), the trail leg doesn’t have to wait. It can come to the front as soon as it pushes off the ground. In fact, it must come to the front as soon as it pushes off the ground, or else the lead leg won’t be able to cycle properly and both legs will be temporarily suspended in the air.
So, when people ask me how to fix a trail leg that’s coming to the front too fast, my answer is to tell them to leave the trail leg alone; instead, fix the lead leg that’s locking at the knee.
When it comes to the second question, about the lean, the same logic applies. There’s no such thing as leaning too much — not while clearing the hurdles, nor in the strides between the hurdles. I always say, if you’re dorsiflexed and running on the balls of the feet, your upper body is going to be tilted forward, ever so slightly. The point is, you’re not going to be fully upright. I say, allow that forward tilt to happen and just keep your core muscles tight so that your chest is pushing forward. I think the fear of leaning too much is also an old-school concern, because the old-school style of kick and snap included dropping the eyes and chin so that they were facing the track during hurdle clearance. But I always tell my hurdlers to keep their chin up and their eyes looking forward. As long as your eyes are looking forward, you can lean as deeply as you want to and you won’t lose balance. As long as your eyes are looking forward, you are ensuring that your lean is coming from the waist, not from the upper back. So, not only will you not lose balance, but you’ll also increase your acceleration off the hurdle.
Between the hurdles, why stand back up? I’ve never understood the point of that. Keep pushing the chest forward all the way down the track. If you stand up and run more erectly between the hurdles, then you have to consciously remind yourself to lean when clearing the hurdles. Then the whole race is herky-jerky, and even if you do lean when clearing the hurdles, the lean won’t be as deep and you won’t gain as much (if any) acceleration from it. The idea is to push yourself forward as you sprint down the track and to push yourself down once the heel of the lead leg passes the crossbar. Coach Frye used the term “chest over thigh,” which meant that you want to push the chest down over the thigh. Of course, if you’re old-school, and you’re trying to straighten the lead leg and then snap it down, then pushing the chest down over the thigh inhibits that action. But if you’re trying to cycle the lead leg, and trying to cycle the trail leg right behind it, then, yes, lean, and lean deeply, and stay leaning. I tell my athletes, don’t come out of your lean. Ever. Coming off the hurdle, the body from the waist up will naturally come up taller. But you’re not telling it to. Let the natural action happen, but your cue is to keep pushing forward, keep creating momentum, keep creating the feeling that you are constantly accelerating.
As for the third question on the list, I don’t ever practice the cut step, and I don’t see how it’s possible to do so. The reason for that is that the cut step is an instinctive, reactionary movement, not a planned movement. For those who don’t know what a cut step is, it’s the last step you take before clearing the hurdle. It’s called a cut step because it’s the shortest step of the three strides between the hurdles, or of the 7 or 8 strides to the first hurdle. It’s so short that the stride length feels like it’s being cut in half in comparison to the previous stride. The shorter stride is necessary if the athlete is to propel him/herself through the hurdle and accelerate toward the next one. Without a cut step, the athlete has to work a lot harder to accelerate in the beginning part of the race and to maintain speed in the middle and latter stages of a race.
In regards to the first hurdle, what I teach is “big strides early, quicker strides late.” In other words, we want to cover ground in our early strides out of the blocks (by pushing, not by reaching), and then as we get closer to the hurdle, we shorten and quicken our strides, with the last stride being the shortest and the quickest. But here’s the thing: we don’t want to think shorter and quicker. We want to feel like we’re being forced to shorten and quicken our strides, that it happens instinctively, not because we were trying to do it. Because, if we try to shorten and quicken our strides, we’ll do so too much and throw off the timing dramatically. I always tell my hurdlers, you want to feel at every hurdle like you’re about to crash, and then you don’t. The “and then you don’t” part is the cut step.
