Seven-Stepping to Hurdle One: The Debate Continues
by Steve McGill
When Dayron Robles began the 7-step revolution back in 2008, it was hard to predict where his success would take the event in the future. Although he wasn’t the first to ever 7-step, he was the first to have enormous success with it – setting a world record and winning major international championships. For a couple years there, Robles was unequivocally the man in the 110 meter high hurdles. His success led his competitors to experiment with 7-stepping. Hurdlers who were already running very well taking eight steps to the first hurdle – such as David Oliver, Jason Richardson, and even Liu Xiang – switched to seven steps, and their race as a whole either stayed the same or improved.
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Then there was Aries Merritt in 2012 – his breakout year, when he set the world on fire. That was the year he won the Olympic gold medal and smashed the world record, dropping it from 12.87 all the way down to 12.80. That was the first year he ran in his professional career that he ran injury-free. It was the first year he put together all technical aspects of his race. And it was also the first year he switched to 7-stepping. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Nowadays, when you look at the final of an elite-level 110m hurdle race, almost all of the athletes on the start line are taking seven steps to the first hurdle. (Omar McLeod does not; we’ll get to that a little later). In addition, 7-stepping has made its way down to the collegiate level. Even though it’s not as prevalent at that level, it is still common enough that it no longer raises any eyebrows. On the women’s side, in the 100m hurdles, 7-stepping hasn’t caught on like it has with the men’s race, most probably because, even though there have been women who have experimented with it, there hasn’t been a woman who has become dominant 7-stepping. There hasn’t been a Robles among the women to set the trend. But if one were to come along, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 7-stepping become common among the women too.
My observation has been that, generally speaking, there are two schools of thought when it comes to 7-stepping: 1) Hell no, it’s too risky, it leaves no margin for error, and it’s too difficult to get to a cut step when 7-stepping. 2) Hell yes, the rewards outweigh the risks, so let’s go out there and make it happen!
I fall in the middle. I feel like the anti-seven-steppers are a bit overzealous, and I feel that the pro-seven-steppers are a bit overzealous. My attitude is, I don’t coach the hurdles; I coach hurdlers. I am big on tailoring everything to the individual athlete. So the 8-step approach is my base, my go-to, my usual. But if there is an individual athlete for whom 7-stepping would make sense, then I’m not going to avoid trying it just because the textbook says I shouldn’t. I’m not going to force 7-stepping on an athlete, but I’m not going to turn away from it if the need to make that switch arises.
This past school year I worked with an athlete, Joy, who was in her sophomore year of high school. She had hurdled before, but without a coach, so her mom asked me to be her private hurdles coach. Because she was dealing with illnesses during the off-season and indoor season, she couldn’t get in any consistent training until the outdoor season had begun. As a result, I didn’t have time to put in all the technical and rhythm-based drilling that I usually inundate my hurdlers with. We basically had to put the blocks down and go, since there was always another meet coming up.
Technically, she didn’t drive her lead leg knee high enough, she extended the foot too far and too soon, the trail leg lagged behind, she didn’t bend from the waist, and her lead arm crossed her body. We were able to make minimal fixes, but basically the strategy was, compensate for your flaws by being fast on the ground. That approach got her down from 17.5 to 15.8, which was great, but I knew we were leaving a lot of meat on the bone.
She didn’t run summer track, but instead continued to train with me, starting the off-season early so that we could really address all of her issues and get her right for next year.
One day we were doing my go-to drill – the quick-step drill. I set up five hurdles and spaced them 21 feet apart for a quick three-step in between. For girls, with this drill, I usually space the hurdles anywhere from 18-21 feet apart. For boys, I space them 21-24 feet apart. At 21 feet apart, Joy was getting super-crowded. I was getting frustrated with her, but because I knew her natural running stride was very much a bounding type of stride that covered a lot of ground, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt by moving the hurdles further apart – 24 feet apart – the spacing I use for the boys. Still, she was having trouble fitting in her three steps. Fine, I said to myself, I’ll move them out even more. 26 feet. Finally, at this spacing, I was seeing the rhythm I wanted to see, and we could finally begin to address the technical issues.
Though I didn’t express my feelings to her, I was shocked. This girl was doing the quick-step drill at a spacing two feet further apart than I normally used for my male hurdlers. Wow!
That’s when I began to think back to some of our sessions during the season, when she would almost slam on the brakes heading into the first hurdle coming out of the blocks. We had played with moving her blocks back further, with taking a shorter first step. But she always seemed to back off, to take off some speed, in her approach to hurdle one, forcing herself to fight to re-accelerate coming off of hurdle one.
So, though I had no intention of working on the start with her this summer, not with her next indoor race still five months away, I was curious, based on what the quick-step drill had shown me, to find out if the reason she had been so stuttery heading into hurdle one hadn’t been because of fear or lack of aggression, but because she simply couldn’t fit in her eight steps. If not for what I had seen in the quick-step drill, the thought never would have occurred to me.
The next workout, I had her put on her spikes and take an eight-step approach to hurdle one from a three-point start. The same problem I had seen during the season appeared again: getting out strong, then putting on the brakes as she got closer to the hurdle. So I asked her, “Are you feeling crowded at hurdle one?” She responded that she was. “Is that why you’re backing off?” I asked. She responded that yes, she keeps feeling like she is going to run into it.
That’s when I took a deep breath and decided to make the big leap. “Switch your feet at the start,” I said. I knew that she didn’t know that 7-stepping was a big deal, so I didn’t want to make it sound like it was a big deal. “Put your left foot in front at the start, and instead of taking eight steps to the hurdle, you’ll take seven. This should give you the room you need to open up your stride. Get a big arm sweep as you push out, and keep pushing all the way through the hurdle.”
Actually, I moved the hurdle out of the way, and put a piece of tape where I wanted her seventh step to land for a good take-off distance. On the first try, her seventh step landed on the tape. And it was natural; she didn’t reach for it. We did two more reps like that, with similar success, then I put the hurdle up.
She reached the first hurdle with no problem. We did three more reps over just the first hurdle. On the second rep, her first step was too short, so she had to extend her last stride to reach the hurdle. But she corrected that mistake on the next two reps. By the fourth rep, she looked downright fast going into the hurdle, and coming off of it. So I set up a second hurdle.
This was the true litmus test: the transition off of hurdle one into hurdle two. If this looked good, then we’d go ahead and make the switch to seven-stepping our thing. And we’d have plenty of time to master it before she’d have to race again.
It went very well. She had good speed coming off hurdle one, and looked a lot faster between the hurdles than she had in any of our sessions during the school year. In our latest training session, we worked on the start some more from the three-point stance, and got over three hurdles this time. Her speed and rhythm look great, so we can already begin to refine the technique. The video below shows a few reps from this session, which was only our second session of seven-stepping.
I like the three-point start because it facilitates the type of arm swing that is so essential to an explosive first step and a powerful drive. Probably sometime within the next few weeks, I’ll have her come out of the blocks and see how it looks.
Whenever I have one of my hurdlers switch from 8-stepping to 7-stepping, I want the reason to be the same as it was with Joy: 8-stepping feels too crowded.
Back to McLeod: the fact that he has won major international championships in consecutive years with an 8-step approach, and the fact that he is blasting 7-steppers out of the blocks, indicates that 7-stepping is in no way inherently preferable to 8-stepping. The question is: which approach allows you to best transition to hurdle two? If you’re not feeling crowded 8-stepping, there’s really no point in switching to 7. To me, it has to be organic, it has to be natural. That’s why I am neither pro nor anti 7-stepping. I take each case on an individual basis. I will do what the moment indicates I should do.
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