Transitioning from Four to Three
A high school junior I started working with this year has a personal best of 16.5 in the 100m hurdles, and that’s with 9-stepping to the first hurdle and 4-stepping the rest of the way. She’s about 5’5” and has decent speed. When I started working with her about six weeks ago, I didn’t know yet that she was 9-stepping to the first hurdle, but I could see that she had the potential to 3-step at least part of the race, as her sprint drills looked excellent and her sprint mechanics were quite solid as well. In this article I’ll talk about some of the work I’ve been putting in with her, and hopefully it’ll give you coaches out there who struggle with coaching 4-steppers some ideas on how to make the transition to 3-stepping a smooth one.
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The first thing I had Scout (that’s her name) do was a lot of drills that involved a three-step rhythm. The idea behind doing this was two-fold. First, I wanted to get the three-step rhythm at least somewhat ingrained into her body, so that the “natural” tendency to add a fourth step wouldn’t feel so natural. Also, I wanted to work on technical flaws when leading with her stronger leg. That way, when we came back to working on the weaker lead leg, the weaker lead leg would have a frame of reference for how things were supposed to feel.
The first drill I had her do was the marching three-step drill. With that drill, I set the hurdles about 12 feet apart, at the lowest setting. FYI, it couldn’t hurt to use practice hurdles with this drill, lowering the hurdles to 27 or even 24 inches. I was using standard high school hurdles, so I slid the bar as far down as I could below the lowest click, so the hurdles were probably at about 28 inches. I set up five of them and told her to march with high knees and high heel recovery, take off close enough to push herself up and over the hurdle, then keep marching between and pushing off the rest of the way.
The key to this drill is to get a good push off the back leg in order to cover the ground that needs to be covered. Scout was definitely a straight-leg hurdler when I first started with her, so I was trying to drill that habit out of her. It’s funny how some hurdlers have excellent sprint mechanics when there are no hurdles in their way, but then revert to kicking and reaching when the hurdles are there. So I instructed her to push off the back foot, drive the knee of the lead leg, and cycle the lead leg over the hurdle.
It took a while, but she started to get it, and she started to get a feel for the rhythm of it. I explained to her that part of the reason she had been unable to three-step in the past was because of the way she kicked out her lead leg, which caused it to pause, which caused everything else to pause, which caused reduced speed by the time she landed. Once it was clear that she understood the concept, I could sense that her confidence was growing. At first she was like, “Do you really think I can three-step?”
After a good twenty or so quality reps of the marching three-step drill, we moved on the quick-three-step drill, which involves spacing the hurdles about 20 feet apart. From a standing start, I had her take a six-step approach to the first hurdle and sprint a quick three through the rest. I had five hurdles set up. Because this drill doesn’t require full speed sprinting, it is easier to focus on mechanics. Again, my aim was to get her in the habit of three-stepping, of ingraining that rhythm into her body. Hurdlers in the habit of four-stepping will sometimes add that fourth step even when they don’t need to, just because they’re so used to doing it. So I wanted to get enough quick-three reps in to put in some new muscle memory.
Meanwhile, from a technical standpoint, we continued to work on pushing off the back foot, driving the knee of the lead leg, cycling the lead leg. As with the previous drill, progress came slowly at first, but it came quickly once she picked up on how it was supposed to feel. I also urged her to open up her strides between the hurdles, since, as a four-stepper, she tended to take short, choppy strides. “Sprint like you sprint when there are no hurdles there,” I told her.
Basically, we followed this formula for the next couple weeks. The three-step marching drill, the quick-three-step drill, and some sprinting without hurdles interspersed throughout the session in order to remind her to be a sprinter between the hurdles. Because the track where we were training was being resurfaced, we did the marching drill on the long jump runway, and we did the quick-step drill on the football field. The next step was to have Scout sprint over the first two hurdles from a three-point start on the grass. I moved the second hurdle in three feet. Usually, for a four-stepper transitioning to three-stepping, I would move the second hurdle in two feet. But because we were on the grass, I moved it in an extra foot.
First, I had her take eight steps to the first hurdle, which, for her, I found out, meant switching her feet at the start. When she told me she usually took nine steps to the first hurdle, my reaction was, “Ohhhh, that explains a lot.” Nine-stepping to hurdle one sets up a four-step the rest of the way, as it establishes an emphasis on quickness as opposed to speed.
In attacking the first hurdle in eight strides, Scout had no problem reaching the hurdle, but she wasn’t getting there with any speed. So she had no chance of three-stepping hurdle two. So I temporarily moved aside the second hurdle and just had her concentrate on the first one. Even though we weren’t using blocks, I explained to her, I still wanted her to drive. None of this fixating on the hurdle and running to the hurdle. Give me big strides early, keep the back parallel to the track, give me big arm swings. Then when you come up, come up gradually. Rise to meet the hurdle. Drive through the hurdle.
This approach scared Scout at first, as the hurdle felt like it was rushing up at her. But it gave her the take-off distance she needed to accelerate through the hurdle. Once I saw that, and saw that she was able to do it for three reps in a row, I put the second hurdle back in place and instructed her to go at it. She was able to three-step with relative ease, with only minor hints of her old habits coming back.
In the next couple workouts, we continued with what we had been doing, but also began doing the same type of work (marching drill and quick-three drill) with the weaker lead leg. As bad as her strong leg had been at first, the weaker leg was worse. It kicked so badly that her whole body twisted and her trail leg just dropped on the other side of the hurdle. But we stayed patient and repped our way through the mistakes until they became less pronounced, and then eventually became minimal.
Once I felt the weaker leg was strong enough, we did some experimenting with race strategy. Since she was planning to run in an indoor meet the following week, I knew she wasn’t ready to three-step in a race yet. We had to figure out a strategy for the short-term while still keeping long-term goals in place. For the race, I told her, just do what you’re used to doing – nine-step to hurdle one and four-step the rest. The body isn’t ready to do anything new when the gun goes off. But in practice we continued to work on progressing. We set up four hurdles and experimented with 8-stepping to hurdle one, three-stepping hurdle two, then four-stepping hurdles three and four. That seemed to work the best. The drills had gotten her to a point where she trusted her weaker leg a lot more now. And like I told her, “By getting rid of the kick and getting in the habit of cycling over each hurdle, you’ll be able to run a lot faster with your four-step, before you even have the three-step race-ready.”
I also told her that she’ll have to be okay with being physically and mentally confused for a while. The old four-stepper and the new three-stepper are going to clash some before she learns to harmonize them. The aim outdoors will be to gradually be able to three-step more hurdles. With the onset of warmer weather and higher quality speed workouts, there’s a real possibility she’ll be able to three-step at least half a race by the end of the outdoor season. The long-term goal, of course, is to three-step the entire race throughout her senior year.
The thing is, the process has to be gradual. Steps can’t be skipped, and the process cannot be rushed. If she wanted to puddle-hop her three-step, she could probably three-step to the third or fourth hurdle right now. But we don’t want to puddle-hop; we want speed behind our three-step. And that’s the underlying point that every coach in a similar position needs to consider.
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