Don’t be Powerful, Be Fast
by Steve McGill
In previous articles for this magazine I have pointed out that there are three main components to hurdling: technique, rhythm, and speed. I’ve also mentioned that of the three, speed is the most important. My favorite thing to say to my athletes on race day is, “When in doubt, be fast.” My second favorite thing to say is, “What are the first five rules of hurdling? Be fast, be fast, be fast, be fast, be fast.” Technique’s role is to enable the athletes to maximize their speed. Technique is never an end unto itself, but a means to an end. The more efficient we are technically, the more we can maximize our speed. Technical flaws can cause balance issues and rhythm issues that lead to a loss of velocity.
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Rhythm, meanwhile, is the sum of the relationship between speed and technique. The faster you are, and the more efficient your technique is, the quicker the cadence becomes. So, improvement in the hurdles means constantly adapting to changes in your rhythm. You aren’t changing the rhythm; you’re getting faster, so the rhythm changes itself, and you have to adapt to it. A hurdler who settles into a rhythm doesn’t get faster, even if their overall flat speed improves.
So, based on the points discussed above, there is no need for a hurdler to overtly attempt to be “powerful.” Power, I’m arguing, is the sum of technique + rhythm + speed. A fast hurdler is a powerful hurdler. A fast hurdler with solid technique is an even more powerful hurdler. A fast hurdler with solid technique who has no fear when it comes to quickening the rhythm to match improvements in speed is an even more powerful hurdler. In that sense, power doesn’t come from effort; it comes from minimizing effort and maximizing efficiency. Power doesn’t come from being powerful; it comes from being fast.
In one of my recent Instagram posts (which is linked at the bottom of this article), I talk about this concept from another angle. There, I talk about how we shouldn’t think of the word “hurdle” as a verb, but only as a noun. The reason being, when hurdlers prepare to “hurdle,” they tend to do something that throws them off their rhythm. They’ll stomp on the last step before take-off, for example. Or they’ll swing their arms across their body. Or they kick their lead leg foot aggressively toward the crossbar. All of these movements disrupt the rhythm. All of these movements represent an attempt to be powerful. All of these movements slow you down. For hurdlers who aren’t gifted with exceptional sprint speed, these movements can be the reason you lose your three-step pattern halfway through a race, or why you fall apart in the last part of a race.
Running powerfully is exhausting. Anything you can’t maintain for ten hurdles, you shouldn’t be doing at all. That’s why I’m not a fan of indoor meets. Over five hurdles, it’s possible (and in some cases easy) to run a race without your flaws being exposed, without paying a price for your flaws. In a five-hurdle race, a good start, coupled with aggression and intensity, can get you to the finish line in relatively good shape. In a ten-hurdle race, aggression and intensity can lead to late-race breakdowns—not because of any technical flaws themselves, but because of how the technical flaws limit speed and disrupt the rhythm, forcing you to work so hard that you can’t keep it up for that long.
When I say “speed is power,” what I mean is that, if you were to watch a hurdler who is really fast, and who is really quick between the hurdles, and who is really efficient in clearing the hurdles, that hurdler will look powerful. Think Grant Holloway. Think Jasmine Camacho-Quinn on the women’s side. In a lot of videos I’ve seen online with athletes doing hurdle drills, I’m seeing a lot of what I refer to as “power moves,” and I don’t like those movements. Drills that allow for a pause in the action, followed by a forceful hurdling action, either with the lead leg or trail leg, teach the athlete to do something different when it’s time to clear the hurdle. My thing is, don’t do something different when you get to the hurdle. Do what you’ve already been doing, but exaggerate it. Lead with the knee every stride, for example, and then lead with a higher knee when clearing the hurdle. Don’t lead with the knee between the hurdles and then suddenly switch to kicking the foot out over the hurdle.
When I first started coaching, I used a lot of isolation drills (drills where the athlete clears the hurdle to the side of the hurdle, with only one leg clearing the hurdle). After about 15 years into it, I stopped using them, as I recognized that real hurdling means both feet working as a single unit, and that flow, or fluidity, mattered more than power. At that point, I wasn’t against using isolation drills, and I wouldn’t have advised others against using them, but I just decided I was no longer going to use them myself. Now, another ten years or so later, I would say that isolation drills are not the move. They teach athletes to think in terms of being powerful. I always say that, in any drill, the rhythm over the hurdles should match the rhythm to the first hurdle and between the rest of the hurdles. Like I said earlier, attempts to be powerful disrupt the rhythm. Disrupting the rhythm creates fatigue further down the line, because it forces you to work harder. When you focus on maintaining the rhythm between and over the hurdles, hurdling doesn’t feel like hurdling. It feels like running over hurdles, sprinting over hurdles. It feels fluid. Then, once you get in the habit of staying consistent over the top and in between, it’s just a matter of speeding it up, which is the easy part.
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