Cycle Drilling & Quick-Stepping Workout
by Steve McGill

The off-season is the best time to put in all the foundational work that will help hurdlers to run faster once it comes time to race again. With me, I like to have my hurdlers do hurdle work at least once a week in August and September, and up to two times a week after that. Just like basketball players have to shoot a lot of jump shots if they want to become better jump shooters, and quarterbacks in football have to throw a lot of passes to improve their accuracy, and a baseball player will have to swing at a lot of curveballs to get better at hitting curveballs, hurdlers have to clear a lot of hurdles to get more efficient with their hurdling. While quantity doesn’t equal quality, it absolutely can lead to quality if the reps are done with specific intent and with the watchful eye of a knowledgeable coach present at all times.

As I always tell my athletes, hurdle races consist of three main components: rhythm, technique, and speed. And hurdle training consists of rhythm development, technique development, and speed development. In the off-season, I place a heavy emphasis on rhythm and technique, so that when it’s time to add the speed element, the rhythm and technique have been ingrained to the point where they can be executed effectively without the athlete needing to think about specific details. The off-season is the time for thinking, thinking, thinking, fixing fixing fixing, adjusting adjusting adjusting. 

Between rhythm and technique, which is more important? They’re equally important, and must be developed together. Ingraining the race rhythm helps the body to learn how to respond instinctively. That’s why I do all my drills to a three-step rhythm now. Back in the day I included one-step drills, five-step drills, and varying cadence drills like most hurdle coaches still do. But if the race rhythm is a three-step rhythm, then, to me, it makes sense to do all drilling to the race rhythm. That way, when it’s time to race, the three-step rhythm is all the body has in its muscle memory, and, again, the instincts will be very sharp.

But technique must be developed along with rhythm. Which means, essentially, that when doing drill reps, there should always be something specific regarding technique that is being worked on. We don’t want to do reps just to say that we’re doing reps. We want to be able to say that we improved an aspect of technique to some degree, that we have addressed a flaw and the flaw is no longer as prominent. 

I have three basic drills that I use all the time. And they’re the only ones I use. The marching popover drill, the cycle drill, and the quickstep drill. The cycle drill is just a sped-up version of the marching popover, and the quickstep drill is just a sped-up version of the cycle drill. With more experienced athletes, I’ll put a number on how many reps I want to get in. With a less experienced athlete, I won’t put a number on it,  because I know I’ll need to do some teaching during the session even as I do want to get in enough reps that fatigue becomes a factor. 

The video above shows an example of the workout and how it usually progresses. On this day with this athlete — Kara Stewart, a collegian who came to train with me for a weekend in June — I noticed that her lead arm crossing her body was her most obvious flaw. And because it’s a flaw that’s been ingrained over years of reps and races, I knew we’d need to start low and slow (low hurdles, slower pace) and build our way up. So even though we skipped the cycle drill and went straight to the quicksteps, we started with 24-inch mini-hurdles spaced 20 feet apart, then transitioned to 30-inch hurdles spaced 21 and then 22 feet apart. The idea is, as the athlete seems to have mastered the drill or made dramatic improvements technically, I increase the challenge by increasing the height of the hurdles and increasing the spacing between them. The logic is, the faster you’re running, the more chance there is that the old habit will come back. So we want to challenge the athlete to maintain the progress they made at the previous height and/or spacing, and, ideally, build on it.

So if you’re looking for a baseline volume-wise for this workout, I’d start with something like this (over five hurdles for everything):

• Five reps of cycle drilling over hurdles that are three or six inches below race height. 4-step approach to the first hurdle, with the first hurdle being 20-23 feet from the start line. Space between the hurdles should be 17-19 feet for females, 20-22 feet for males.
• Five reps of cycle drilling with the hurdles raised up one click from the previous height. Spacing between the hurdles stays the same or increases by one foot.
• Five reps of quickstepping over hurdles that are either at race height or one click below race height. 6-step approach to the first, with the first hurdle being 30-33 feet from the start line. Space between the hurdles should be 21-23 feet for females, 24-26 feet for males.
• Five reps of quickstepping with the hurdles raised up a click if they’re not already at race height. Spacing between the hurdles should increase by a foot.

Depending on the level of the athlete and the progress they’re making, you might not get beyond the cycle drilling. They can’t graduate to quickstepping if the technical issues continue to linger at the cycle drilling pace. With some athletes, like with the collegian in the video, you may be able to bypass cycle drilling and go straight to quickstepping. In some cases, if improvement is coming quickly and dramatically, you can decrease the number of reps.