Run on the Balls of the Feet
A lot of athletes ask me questions about what they should focus on in their hurdling. And when I see video footage of their races or have them come by for a training session, I almost always find the same root cause for all of their hurdling problems: they don’t run on the balls of their feet. And until they do learn to run on the balls of their feet, they won’t be able to successfully address their hurdling issues. So I find myself spending more time correcting their sprint mechanics than I do correcting their hurdling technique.
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Let’s start by talking about what it means to run on the balls of the feet. The ball of the foot is the part of the foot just below the toes. Most athletes that I’ve encountered who don’t run on the balls of their feet tend to either run flat-footed, or they run on their heels. If they run flat-footed, they are basically stomping the track with every stride. If they run on their heels, then their upper body weight is always behind them. In both cases, the angle of their foot-strikes makes for longer ground contact time, which makes for slower speed between the hurdles, and more effort to clear each hurdle.
A lot of coaches will tell their athletes to run on their toes. But that’s a misnomer as well. When an athlete is told to run on his or her toes, he or she will then point the toes down, which is a no-no. The toes cannot support your weight. So if you try to run on your toes, your hips will drop with every stride you take. Also, you’ll be reaching with your foreleg instead of lifting your knees, which means you will always land with your upper body weight behind your lower body. Instead of your foot landing under your hip, it will land in front of your hip.
The ball of the foot is the only part of the foot that can absorb the impact of landing and instantly give you the push you need to get that foot back off the ground. When you see sprinters who look like they are just floating down the track, just bouncing down the track, you know they are running on the balls of their feet.
So how does one run on the balls of one’s feet? The first key is to keep the ankle dorsi-flexed, so that the toes are pointing upward, as opposed to keeping the ankle plantar-flexed, with the toes pointing down. If the ankles aren’t dorsi-flexed, you will not be able to land on the balls of your feet, no matter how hard you try. The second key is to raise the heel along with the knee when the back foot leaves the ground. The heel should come upward so that is under the hamstring when the knee reaches full height. If the heel gets out in front of the knee, even if the ankle is dorsi-flexed, the athlete will land on the heel instead of on the ball of the foot. The third key is to cycle the foot back under the hip in the final part of the sprint stride. If the foot goes straight up and down, without any cycle motion, the athlete will land flat-footed. Cycling the heel back under the hip will ensure that you land on the ball of the foot, allowing you to bounce/float down the track with minimal ground contact time for each stride.
So how do sprint mechanics effect hurdle technique? In every way imaginable. Most, if not all, of the flaws that are common to hurdle technique can be found in errors in sprint mechanics. The lead leg that swings from the hip, the arms that swing across the body, the trail leg that hangs too low and swings too wide, for example, are all caused by running on the heels or flat-footed. Trying to address the hurdle technique problem without addressing the sprint mechanic problem is a fundamentally faulty approach since the hurdle problems are caused by the sprint problems. My contention is that if you address and fix the sprint problems, the hurdle problems will fix themselves.
So how does one address the sprint mechanics flaws? By going back to basics. A-marches, A-skips, wall drills. I think that skip drills are too often used just as part of the warm-up instead of functioning in their most important role, which is to teach proper sprint mechanics. I have a couple kids I just started working with who did their skip drills perfectly, but when it came time to sprint, they were all back on their heels. They hadn’t made the connection that the drills were actually teaching them how they wanted to run. The drills were just part of their warm-up, as far as they knew. Early in the season, or, preferably, during the off-season, coaches should spend a lot of time teaching proper sprint mechanics, ingraining dorsi-flexion, the cycling action of the legs, tall posture, proper arm swing, etc. I tell my beginning hurdlers that when I’m teaching them A-skips and B-skips, I’m actually teaching them how to hurdle, even though there are no hurdles up.
As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, many hurdlers will run on the balls of their feet until the last stride into the hurdle. Then, they’ll stomp, landing flat-footed, as they prepare to “jump” over the hurdle. So, this habit has to be addressed by lowering the hurdles and by emphasizing to the athlete that if he or she is already on the balls of his or her feet, then he or she just needs to stay there, so that the momentum will be going forward, into the hurdle, creating speed off the hurdle. The last-step stomp kills acceleration and thereby forces the hurdler to work much harder to maintain speed throughout the race.
What it all comes down to is this: hurdlers, and hurdle coaches, including myself, often over-emphasized the hurdling aspect of hurdle races, and under-emphasize the running part. I always tell my hurdlers now to “run over the hurdles” as opposed to hurdling. “Run over the hurdle” means keep doing what you’re already doing. Don’t do something “different” when you get to the hurdle. But I can only give this instruction if the athlete is sprinting properly to begin with. An athlete who runs with back-kick and wants to fix his lead leg swing has to understand that the lead leg swing will remain until he or she gets rid of the back-kick.
Once proper sprint mechanics are in place, then modifications to stride length and force application can be made as determined by the athlete’s height and speed. Then, the hurdling part becomes a lot easier, even before specific hurdling issues have even been addressed. And addressing those issues will be a lot easier as well, because the athlete’s body will “feel” that the extra efforts made to get over the hurdle are a waste of energy, and will seek to adapt accordingly.
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