Why We Want to Keep the Lead Leg Knee Slightly Bent
by Steve McGill
When I first started working with Raelle Brown in the summer of 2024—prior to the start of her junior year of high school, I was taking on a hurdler who had developed some bad habits in her technique before she started training with me. The worst of these habits was her tendency to kick out her lead leg, swinging the foot upward, and locking the leg at the knee before finally driving the foot down to the track in a “snapdown” style. Fast forward about 18 months later, and the rudiments of that issue still linger, but the locking of the knee is a problem that we have pretty much solved. Only when she is extremely fatigued, or when her back is hurting, do we see that habit return. Addressing that issue is a big part of the reason why she has dropped from 15.5 when I first started with her down to 14.5 by the end of last year, with the goal being to get down to 14.0 by the end of this year, her senior year.
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The habit of locking the lead leg knee is one that goes back to ancient hurdle times, as, for many decades, coaches taught their hurdlers to do that before snapping the leg back down to the track. From my memory, it wasn’t until the 1990s that coaches started to move away from the kick-snap style and started to teach “rotary hurdling,” as it was called when I attended a coaching clinic run by Curtis Frye, who was head coach at the University of South Carolina at the time, and had grown a reputation as an expert hurdles coach based on his work with 1996 Olympic gold medallist Alan Johnson. The rotary style, also known as the “bent-knee” style, emphasized a cyclical action that was more rhythmic and fluid than previous styles. In adopting Frye’s approach and watching Johnson’s races, I developed the term “cycling,” as it looked to me that the legs were cycling the same as they would be if they were on bicycle pedals. That rotary style, which Frye and Johnson introduced to the world (at least from what I can tell), has now become the norm in hurdling, especially in the women’s race, but also among the majority of male hurdlers as well.
The kick-snap style did, and does, often create balance issues, the issue of running too erect, the issue of the trail leg being wide and late, among others. From my perspective, the biggest issue is that it creates a pause in the action, and that pause leads to the domino effect of the other issues.
In working with Raelle, the kick upward of the foot was what I first noticed when I started working with her. Her arms were swinging across her body as it tried to right itself after the kicking action. So, when that upward kick is evident, there are steps to take and drills to use to address the problem. Some coaches like to use the one-step drill with the hurdles spaced close together, which forces the athlete to drive the knee up and drive the foot down. These can be done as side drills, or over the top. I don’t do one-step drills anymore—not because they’re not effective, but because I like to do everything to a three-step rhythm in order to ingrain the race rhythm into the athlete’s muscle memory. I use the marching popover drill to function, in this case, in the same manner as the one-step drill. It too forces the athlete to drive the knee up and drive the foot down. Any kicking out or up will take away space and cause all the issues we’re trying to address.
With Raelle, I followed the drill progression I follow with all of my athletes—marching popovers, followed by the cycle drill, followed by the quickstep drill, followed by full-speed from the start line using a crouched start or 3-point start, followed by full-speed from the start line using starting blocks. We increase speed gradually, raise the height of the hurdles gradually, making sure that we’ve mastered each drill at one level before adding a challenge, and making sure to master each drill at the most challenging level before moving on to the next drill.
The difficulty with Raelle has been that even after we addressed her sprint mechanics and got rid of her back-kick—which is almost always the root cause of the lead leg kicking up and locking at the knee—she still wasn’t cycling the way I wanted her to. It was a habit ingrained by two years of hurdling that way, so even with the progress we had made, the old Raelle was still visible.
This year, we’ve made more progress, and she has become very adept at feeling for and identifying her own flaws. She now can feel when she is not driving her knee high enough before extending the foot toward the crossbar. At this point, she’ll have to work on it at full speed because we know she won’t have that issue in the drills. “Keep the heel under the hamstring,” I tell her, and sometimes her body remembers but other times it forgets. Usually, the control, the discipline, gets looser as her speed increases. So she might look excellent at hurdle one and hurdle two, but then the leg starts kicking out at hurdle three.
But what I’ve also noticed is that even when there is a kick of the leg out, there is not a kick of the foot up. The knee is staying slightly bent throughout hurdle clearance, which means that, yes, she is indeed cycling. How do I know? Because her torso stays pushing forward; she’s not standing up off of hurdles. Also, she is accelerating; she is not just maintaining speed, but gaining speed. Also, the trail leg is driving to the front with no lag, no delay. “Stay fast, stay forward” is my mantra. If these two things are happening—if we’re staying fast and we’re staying forward, and if we’re not seeing any balance issues, nor any pauses in the action—then there’s no need to micromanage at that point. Let’s keep doing what we do and speed it up. The general rule is, if the big things are going well, then the little things must be going well.
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