In Defense of 8 Steps to the First Hurdle
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all for making changes and experimenting in the name of discovering new ways to run faster. Around 2008, when Cuba’s Dayron Robles won an Olympic gold medal and broke the 110m high hurdle record taking seven steps to the first hurdle, I was at the forefront of those suggesting that other world class hurdlers would most likely need to switch to seven steps in order to compete with Robles.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
Surely enough, seven-stepping to hurdle one quickly became the norm at the world class level. One by one, you watched a race and noticed that another hurdler had switched to seven. David Oliver. Jason Richardson. Aries Merritt. Dwight Thomas. Hansle Parchment. Liu Xiang.
Fast forward to 2016, and just about everybody at the elite level takes seven steps to the first hurdle. I had thought, back in ’08, that there would be a mix of about 50/50 between seven-steppers and 8-steppers as the years progressed, but it seems that the 8-stepper at the elite level is becoming more or less obsolete.
This trend is also continuing to occur at the college level, and even at the high school level, and, in rare cases, at the youth level.
The obvious question to ask is, is this a good thing? Is the advantage gained by taking one less step to the first hurdle so significant so great that everyone should learn how to do it? Should youth coaches and high school coaches be looking to teach their fastest and strongest hurdlers to seven-step? Would they be putting them at a disadvantage by not doing so?
Let’s address these questions. If you look at Liu as an example, he ran his personal best of 12.88 taking eight steps to the first hurdle, although he did have much success with the seven-step approach after coming back from injury.
David Oliver ran his personal best 12.89 in 2010 after switching to the seven-step start, but he has also had troubles with it, leading to some disappointing performances, including at last year’s World Championships.
Merritt’s 12.80 world record in 2012 provides the best argument for the value of seven-stepping, as that was the first year he switched to the new stride pattern, so it’s easy to assume that his success in that golden year can largely be attributed to the overhaul of his start. However, it is also true that 2012 was the first year in his professional career that he’d been completely healthy, so it’s hard to say how much that one step mattered.
Richardson, like Oliver, has struggled with consistency with his start, and that seems to be the constant theme. For eight-steppers switching to seven steps, staying consistent with a good start has been a problem.
The hurdlers who have not had problems with consistency – Robles, as well as American Antwon Hicks – were seven-steppers all their lives. Hicks was seven-stepping as a youth, well before he even knew that doing so was a big deal.
I’ve only coached one high school athlete who seven-stepped. He is a senior in high school now, and I no longer coach him because I moved to a new school, but Kobi, who has appeared in some of the instructional videos I’ve uploaded to my YouTube channel, was seven-stepping since he first started in eighth grade. Back then, when he was first learning his hurdling ABC’s, I had him do a standing start to the first hurdle, and he kept stopping and putting his hands on the crossbar, claiming he was getting too close and felt like he was going to crash. After about five attempts, I finally grew exasperated and told him to switch his feet at the start. After doing so, he easily seven-stepped, and has been doing so ever since. So, like Hicks and Robles, Kobi didn’t “switch” to seven steps. It came naturally to him.
So, you can see what I’m getting at: switching to seven steps is where the difficulty lies, not in seven-stepping in and of itself. When one leg gets used to being the power leg out of the starting blocks, and many years of ingraining that habit accumulate, getting the other leg to be the power leg out of the blocks is hard. Not only that, but you have to get to the hurdle in one less step, with the less powerful leg on the front pedal. It would be hard enough to seven-step if the stronger leg remained in the front. I think that the reason many seven-steppers have trouble with consistency is because of that first step – pushing off the pedals, covering a lot of ground, but without popping up too soon.
Also, the rhythm shift is difficult to adapt to. From the quicker eight steps to the more wide open seven steps. Sometimes in big races, the body will revert back to quicker, and even if it only happens for one step, that one step can screw up the entire approach to hurdle one, and thereby screw up the whole race.
A lot of old schoolers are skeptical of the merits of seven-stepping, and their arguments contain much validity. I remember that the first thing Colin Jackson said to Merritt while interviewing him right after the 12.80 race was that he wasn’t “a big fan of the seven-step,” but congratulations anyway. Jackson ran 12.92 in 1991 eight-stepping hurdle one, Renaldo Nehemiah ran 12.93 in 1981, Allen Johnson ran sub-13 more often than anyone else in history, and he never switched to seven steps.
In the last few years since Merritt’s 12.80, there hasn’t been anyone who has threatened the world record, and there haven’t even been a whole of sub-13’s. In the 2013 World Championships, no one broke 13 in the final, and in the 2015 World Championships, only winner Sergey Shubenkov broke 13 (12.98), and his start wasn’t all that great in that race. Which all goes to show that the seven-step approach hasn’t led to an overall higher standard of excellence in the event. The assumption back in 2008, after Robles, the king of the seven-steppers, impressed us with his dominance, was that 12.90 would become the new 13.00. But that hasn’t happened.
I think the biggest reason that seven-stepping has not led to a breakthrough in faster times has to do with the lack of consistency mentioned earlier. To many hurdlers, getting that seven-step start just right requires thinking. And we all know that, in a race, you can’t be thinking. Instead of focusing on being aggressive and attacking, the athlete has to focus on foot placement for each stride. From my observations, it doesn’t seem to be something that comes automatically, or that becomes automatic. The margin for error is very thin. As I’ve stated in past articles on this topic, the seven-step approach is a high-risk, high-reward approach.
To be clear, reaching the hurdle in seven steps isn’t the problem. You’re not going to see elite hurdlers switch to eight steps en route to the first hurdle and wind up clearing the hurdle with the wrong leg. No. The problem lies in getting to the first hurdle at the optimal take-off distance, with the necessary cut step that is so essential in creating momentum through hurdle one. Getting to the first hurdle in first place can be fool’s gold for the seven stepper. Without a proper cut step, or with a take-off distance that is a smidge too far away, people are going to be leaving you in the second half of the race, if not sooner.
My advice to coaches would be to keep an open mind, and take each case on an individual basis. Don’t reject the seven-step, but don’t force it on athletes who aren’t built for it. If you had an athlete like I had – Kobi, who was 6-2 in eighth grade – then yeah, go ahead and let him seven-step. But there’s no reason to feel that you are putting your athletes at a disadvantage of they’re not seven-stepping, and that goes even for the elite level.
[/am4show]
