Speed Hurdling Workout
by Steve McGill
Because I have two girls who will be competing in national championship meets next weekend, I’m still in the mode of conducting training sessions that focus on big-meet race prep. (I actually had three girls qualify for nationals, but the school coach of one of them forgot to register her in time. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say). I’ve been able to get in some good work with all three of the girls — Raelle Brown (the one whose coach forgot to sign her up), Sadie Buchanan (who will be competing in the Oregon nationals), and Milleah Johnson (who will be competing in the Philly nationals). So when working with these girls, the core part of the training session consists of block starts with a heavy emphasis on the drive to the first hurdle, and only minimal technical instruction. The technical instruction is athlete-specific and I add it only if I feel confident the athlete can implement it in the next rep and subsequently in the upcoming race.
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In past years I liked to work up to seven or eight hurdles by the end of pre-big-meet workout, which is something I still see the value of. But with these girls I felt it made more sense to stick to just three or four hurdles because there were things we wanted to fix with their start. If the goal is to end the season with a new personal best, we have to figure out the best way to do that. Back in the days when I was coaching the likes of Johnny Dutch and Keni Harrison, and even Ayden Thompson a few years ago, I liked getting over seven because their starts were excellent and I’m a fan of getting through the first two zones (start line to hurdle three, then hurdles four to seven) to give us a good sense to how close we are to being on a personal best pace.
But if the drive to the first hurdle needs work, we have to place our energies there. With Sadie, we needed to work on her tendency to get too erect too soon. With Milleah we needed to work on her first step, which was short and soft because she wasn’t pushing off the pedals with any force.
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The clip above features reps from Sadie’s most recent session with me. In addition to her start, we also worked on her lead arm. When she had shown me the video from her state meet a few weeks ago, I noticed that her lead arm, although in good position, was hanging too long, keeping her in the air. So if our goal is to set a personal best at nationals, I honed in on the lead arm as a way to do it. I instructed her to cycle the lead arm in sync with the cycling action of the lead leg. This is not an easy thing to learn how to do, but Sadie is a high-IQ athlete so I figured we should try it because the risk, I felt, was worth the reward. She indeed picked it up very quickly, as the above video shows, and I feel confident that she’ll be able to incorporate it into her flow at nationals. A quicker lead arm, along with a better drive to the first hurdle, should lead to good things in Oregon. She’s a great competitor so her competitive instincts will also prove highly valuable.
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The video above is from Milleah’s most recent session with me. Her arms are more of a problem than Sadie’s. They tend to raise up over her head when she hurdles despite the fact that they move in a nice, tight up-and-down motion when she’s sprinting. It’s one of those habits that I’m sure was ingrained without her realizing it and without a coach there to correct it. I was going to ride with it for nationals, but the arm/elbow raising was causing her trail leg to flatten out and hit hurdles, and it was also causing her to stand up too tall off the hurdles. So we worked on trying to maintain an up-and-down motion over the hurdles. We had some success, but that’s going to be more of an off-season fix in her case. Because she’s tall, her height can somewhat compensate for this flaw as long as she focuses on sprinting between the hurdles, which is what we did.
So, in regards to the details of a workout like this, it’ll go as follows:
- A full dynamic warmup that ends with three full-speed 40-meter sprints, in spikes, from a crouched start.
- Two hurdle-free block starts past where the first hurdle would be. These reps function as the last stage of the warmup.
- From there, we add a hurdle, and keep adding more hurdles, building up to four. The pace at which we add hurdles will vary based on the progress we are making. All in all, about twelve block starts is the maximum we want to do.
- Recovery between reps will consist of one or two minutes of walking and standing. If I’m noticing fatigue or if the weather is particularly hot and/or humid, the rest time will increase.
- As coach, I give commands for all reps.
- All reps are filmed and discussed by the coach with the athlete between reps.
Ideally, some of these block starts can be done competitively, but I haven’t been able to do that yet with these three girls. I’m hoping to do so in the early part of the week, before Milleah and Sadie leave for their meets. If I’m able to pull it off, I’ll share video of that workout in next month’s issue.
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