Lead Arm Height as an Indicator
by Steve McGill
As those of you who subscribe to this magazine know, I’m very big on having hurdlers develop effective, efficient lead arm mechanics. Of the four limbs, the lead arm is the one that, when used purposefully, can initiate low hurdle clearance with minimal air time. An inefficient lead arm can cause other issues in regard to the lead leg, the trail leg, the trail arm, overall balance, and overall speed. Not only that, but it can sabotage efforts to correct issues with those other limbs. You can fight to lead with the knee all day long, for example, but if the lead arm is swinging across the body, then the knee of the lead leg will always lock.
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As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I like for the lead arm to cycle in a continuous, flowing action with no pauses. I used to be okay with a lead arm that punches up and punches down, but as I’ve incorporated the cycling action with more and more athletes, I’ve become convinced that this is not only the best way to go, but the only way to go. The cycling of the lead arm speeds up the cycling of the lead leg, and forces the trail leg to cycle to the front sooner in order to keep up with the lead leg and to thereby maintain the balance and rhythm that has already been established. So, a lead arm that cycles speeds up everything else.
In my last two training sessions over the holidays with Janie Coble, whom I’ve coached over the past two years and is now a freshman in college, we kind of picked up where we had left off last year by continuing with our mantra of “stay fast, stay forward,” and by focusing on the lead arm action to facilitate that cue while clearing the first hurdle. The logic is that even the slightest pause can cause a break in the rhythm and therefore inhibit the ability to accelerate in the early part of a race, even if the block start and the drive to the first hurdle is good. The micro-pauses of the punch-up-punch-down lead arm can lead to longer pauses later in the race, over the last three hurdles, when fatigue becomes a factor.
In the first of the two sessions, while recording her reps, I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. She was sprinting over three hurdles, and what I noticed was that her lead arm looked slightly lower and slightly quicker at each hurdle. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before, but once I did, it was a pure moment of epiphany. What I realized is that the lead arm shouldn’t be at a consistent height the whole race. In the acceleration phase of the race (the first three hurdles), the hand of the lead arm should be lower at each hurdle. At hurdle one, with Janie, the hand was even with her forehead; at hurdle two, it was even with her cheek; at hurdle three, it was even with her neck. Also, the lower hand led to a deeper bend in the waist, so the cycle action created even more forward momentum down the track. And the kicker is, because of the exaggerated forward body angles caused by the cycling action, the acceleration phase was more pronounced, and easier to execute. Janie didn’t have to cue herself to stay forward; the arm, in essence, was pulling her forward.
So now, I know to look for the gradual lowering/quickening of the hand of the lead arm through the first three hurdles as an indicator as to whether or not the athlete is accelerating the way we want to. If the hand starts at forehead height at hurdle one and is still at forehead height at hurdle three, that’s indicating that we’re not accelerating like we need to, so we need to figure out what it may be that she is doing wrong coming out of the blocks. Also, I now know that I shouldn’t expect or even hope that the lead arm will be as low and quick as it will be at hurdle two and hurdle three. I don’t need to beat myself up trying to figure out what’s going “wrong” at the first hurdle and why we can’t get the hand to be as low there as it is later on. Because we’re still building up to full speed at that point in the race, we need the hand to be a little higher than it will be later because it needs to help us generate the speed to begin with.
Because it’s indoor season, I didn’t have Janie clear more than the first four hurdles, with the emphasis being on the first three. My thinking, in regard to how a 10-hurdle race would develop, would be as follows:
The hand gets progressively lower and quicker through the first three hurdles. Then as we reach top speed heading into hurdle four, the hand height stays the same in the “sweet spot” part of the race — hurdles 4-7. Then, in the deceleration phase of the race — hurdles 8-10 — the aim will be to maintain the hand height and quickness established in the middle part of the race. Doing so will be a matter of staying relaxed while staying aggressive.
Thing about it is, there is no other lead arm style I’ve ever seen or taught in which this lowering/quickening thing happens. With the Allen Johnson style, where the palm faces outward and then punches down with some torque, the hand always goes just above the forehead before the downward action initiates. With the Liu Xiang punch-up-punch-down style (which was my style of preference for many years), the thumb always taps the forehead, right between the eyes. And with any other style, it’s obvious that consistency of the hand height is a fundamental element of technique.
So I’m pretty excited about developing this style further, and eager to see what else I may uncover about it. Hopefully I’ll be able to meet with Janie again at some point this year and continue our development with it. And I’m equally eager to introduce the style to new athletes I work with. Of course, they have to get the sprint mechanics down first, and then get the punch-up-punch-down style mastered first. But once we have all that locked in, then we can begin experimenting with cycling the arm like I’ve been doing with Janie.
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