Dealing with Crowding Issues in the Sprint Hurdles
by Steve McGill
As we head into the hot summer months, many hurdlers face a problem that wasn’t all that much of a problem during the cold of winter and the cool days of spring: they’re getting faster. In all other running events in track, getting faster is a positive thing. Only in the hurdles does getting faster cause problems. Because the hurdles are a rhythm event (in addition to being a speed event and technique event), improvements in speed can often create problems with rhythm.
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As I often tell my hurdlers, the faster you are between the hurdles, the faster (or quicker) you have to be over them. For the hurdler, it becomes necessary to constantly make adaptations to your rhythm, or your cadence between the hurdles, as your overall flat speed improves. Usually, once hurdlers become comfortable with a certain rhythm, they’ll grow comfortable with it, and will be resistant to adjusting it.
The four-stepper who is now fast enough to three-step will still drop that trail leg upon landing off each hurdle in order to make room for all four steps, even though she now knows that getting a full stride with that first step will ensure a successful three-step. In such cases, it’s the fear of change that holds her back, not the fact that she can’t do it. For the three-stepper, increased speed provides a sure path towards new personal bests and qualifying for championship meets, but it also means increased chance of crashing into hurdles. Therefore, a lot of three-steppers will intentionally hold back their speed in order to maintain the rhythm they’re used to, and to avoid what is commonly referred to as “the danger zone.”
But, again, as I often tell my hurdlers, the danger zone is where the breakthroughs lie. You’re not going to reach new plateaus doing the same old thing. As a coach, thing get really challenging when it comes to helping athletes to push past the mental barriers that come with getting locked into a rhythm. To me, the most important thing to do in practice is to create the same feeling of being crowded, of running up on hurdles, of not having any room to sprint, that the athlete is experiencing in races. As with everything else in hurdles, it’s best to start with drills that simulate the feeling, and then move onto putting the blocks down and inserting speed into the equation.
One of the hurdlers that I coach privately, Matt Garrett, is at the top of the 13-14 age group in youth track. Matt’s personal best last year was in the 14-low range in the 100m hurdles. This year, he has already run 13.66, and it’s looking like he can get down to the 13.2 range by the end of the summer. But doing so will require going deep into the danger zone. When I asked him how the 13.6 race felt, he mentioned that he had felt crowded. That’s when I knew it was time to intentionally crowd him in practice so that the crowded feeling in races would feel more natural. Prior to the 13.6 race, we had been emphasizing speed a lot more in practice, as his technique had reached a level where it no longer needed to be a point of emphasis. He runs the open 100 as well, and his time in that race was dropping too – from the 12.0 range to the 11.4 range. So yes, it was only going to be a matter of time before crowding became an issue.
To address the issue, I’ve had him do a variety of things, including the workout that I filmed some footage of in the video below:
In this workout, we didn’t do anything different or special; instead, we did something simple that I do often: we sped up and quickened up drills that were already part of our usual routine. The quick-step drill. is one that I often use in the fall as a conditioning drill. It involves setting up 5-10 hurdles, spaced 21-24 feet apart. With a high-knee approach to the first hurdle, the athlete clears all of the hurdles, taking quick steps in between, then jogging back to the start line and going again. The full-blown workout version consists of two or three sets of 10 reps over 5-10 hurdles. A typical workout consists of clearing at least 100 hurdles, and as many as 300.
But the same drill can be used to address the issue of crowding. In Matt’s case, we only did 10 reps over five hurdles for a total of 50 hurdles. And we did the first set of 5 reps over 30-inch hurdles before raising them to race height – 33 inches – for the second set. And he walked back between reps instead of jogging back. In addition, I kept the spacing on the tighter end of the spectrum – 21 feet apart, although he can easily do the 24 feet distance. Finally, I instructed him to force the issue. Don’t be comfortable, I said, attack the hurdles, force yourself to be quick getting up and down off the hurdle. Re-create the feeling you had in the race. As you can see in the video, he hits one or two hurdles in the quick-step drill, which is what I wanted to see happen. The fact that he hit a hurdle meant that he was really attacking. What I know, and what I wanted him to understand, is that with enough drilling, the body will adapt. It will adapt to the tighter rhythm, the quicker cadence, and he’ll be skimming hurdles instead of hitting them. But the key is, don’t back off in order to avoid hitting them. Or else you’ll be stuck at 13.6 for the rest of the season.
After the quick-step drill, we moved to incorporating the newer, quicker rhythm into full-speed reps out of the blocks. As the video shows, we first did a start over just the first hurdle. The reason for doing that was to establish the speed element first. When transitioning from the quick-step drill to block work, it’s easy to forget to be fast, as the quick-step drill doesn’t require the explosive power that the block start does. So, we did a start with no hurdles, then a start with one hurdle, which brought us back to where we wanted to be: incorporating the quick-step rhythm into the transition from hurdle one to hurdle two. I usually move in the second hurdle one foot when doing block work. This time, because we were working on addressing the crowding issue, I moved it in three feet. That way, we could mimic the jammed feeling that he was experiencing in recent races.
As you can see in the last rep of the video, he had to really put his feet down quickly to successfully negotiate the space between the hurdles. The ultimate goal is that the quick-step drill and the jammed spacing out of the blocks will translate into faster times in races. In future workouts, I’ll add more hurdles in the block part of the workout so that he has to face the real danger zone – hurdles 4-7 – where his speed will be at its peak. But you can’t just jump into a workout like that; you have to build up to it.
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