Cycling the Lead Arm with the Lead Leg
by Steve McGill
A big part of being a coach is evolving. Another big part of coaching is coming up with your own ideas and philosophies, beyond what you’ve learned from fellow coaches, attending clinics, doing internet research, etc. Another big part of coaching is having confidence in your ideas and using them with your athletes. Another big part of coaching is staying open to new ideas, being willing to change or modify one’s methods. In my career as a coach, I’ve had so many incarnations of myself that I can hardly keep up with myself. It’s also interesting to note how aspects of my life outside of coaching directly or indirectly affect my willingness and ability to explore new ideas in my coaching.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
When it comes to the lead arm action, I’ve been pretty much open to various styles, and I’ve discussed these styles in various articles I’ve written and in videos I’ve made over the years. Even in my most recent book, The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling, which I wrote over the past two years and finished/published this past June/July, I state that I have two styles that I like best — the punch-up/punch-down style, and the style where the lead arm cycles instead of punching, thereby mimicking the cycle action of the lead leg.
But if you were to ask me today, I would say that the only style I want any hurdlers I coach to use is the cycle action. I came to this place simply by observing athletes I’ve been working with over the summer who did have a nice punch-up/punch-down action. When I experimented with them trying the cycle action, I was impressed with the results, and decided that any hurdler who comes to train with me, whether it’s one of my regulars or if it’s someone from out of town coming to train with me for a few days, I’m going to teach them this style. It’s the best style, the most efficient style, and it’s not especially difficult to implement.
This past July and in the early part of this month, I have worked with four hurdlers whose efforts convinced me that cycling the lead arm is the way to go. The first was Milleah Johnson, a high school junior from West Virginia who has come down to train since this past indoor season. The second and third were two collegiate athletes — Malik Mixon, who attends Ohio State University and whom I’ve worked with since his sophomore year of high school; and Shane Gardner, who attends the University of Pennsylvania and is good friends with Malik. The fourth was Janie Coble, the girl from my school team who will be heading to UNC-Asheville this year.
All of these athletes were punch-up/punch-down hurdlers. The first one I worked with this summer was Milleah. After finishing her outdoor season in June, she came to North Carolina for four days to train with me. Now that her season was over, we had time to build a foundation for next year and to experiment with her technique in ways we couldn’t do during her competition season. Both of her arms tend to be all over the place — not swinging side to side, but rising up too high. Her trail arm tends to swing up when it should be punching down. So we worked on that first, and then when the punch-up/punch-down action looked crisp, we transitioned into working on cycling the lead arm.
Next came Shane, who is only 5-9 clearing 42-inch hurdles. He’s a beast though. Ran 13.68 last year and was indoor Ivy League champion. Shane learned and mastered the cycle action very quickly over lower hurdles, up to 39 inches. But when we transitioned to 42s (in quickstep drilling and out of the blocks), the elbow was raising higher; a key feature of the cycling action is that the hand leads the way and the elbow stays noticeably below the hand. Still, the key feature of the cycle action as opposed to the up-down action is that with the cycle action the lead arm doesn’t pause; instead, it flows continuously, which speeds up the whole hurdling action and creates a big speed boost off the hurdle. His arm was maintaining that continuous motion, leading me to believe that his modified version of the cycle action might work best for him, considering his height.
With Malik, who is 6-2, we had always been using the punch-up/punch-down, but due to the success I had had in teaching the cycle action to Milleah and Shane in previous weeks, I decided to teach it to him too. Because, why not? If it can make him faster, I said to myself, let’s do it. At first the motion confused him. We were doing a high-knee drill over one hurdle and he kept doing it too fast, causing him to continue with the punching action. I told him to slow it down so that he could actually teach the arm the new action, and when he finally did so, things clicked into place and he shouted with joy because it felt so much faster. In our ensuing sessions that weekend, we were able to speed things up and raise the hurdles; with his height, he had no problem, unlike Shane, with keeping the elbow low.
For visual models, I directed Shane and Malik to watch the 2012 women’s 100 meter hurdle final on YouTube, featuring Sally Pearson and Dawn Harper-Nelson. Those two women finished 1-2 in that race, and both of them were hurdlers who cycled their lead arms. I don’t know either of them personally, so I’ve never been able to ask them if they did so intentionally, but I assume it must’ve been intentional. Anyway, I think male hurdlers do themselves a disservice when they don’t study the technique of female hurdlers. Studying Sally’s style did more for me in confirming the value of cycling the lead arm than studying the style of any male hurdler. You really don’t see any males cycling the lead arm like Sally and Dawn did, and very few females do actually. When Malik saw the video of that race, he came back the next day raving that he understood what I was trying to get him to do. He was all-in by that point, and by the time he got in the car and headed back home, he was a lead-arm-cycle disciple.
With Janie, a similar type of progress occurred. Only thing with her was, even though she was doing the right motion, she was still adding a pause. The cycle motion involves cycling the hand up, then cycling it out (minimally), and then cycling it down. She was pausing between the out part and the down part, which made sense because her pause when doing the punch-up/punch-down style had been too pronounced. In her better reps, she eliminated the pause, replacing it with a continuous, fluid action that sped up both legs.
In all four cases, a significant adjustment didn’t take long to implement. Two sessions was all it took to see a major difference in the old way vs. the new way. Shane left determined to keep working on it so that the elbow stays low.
What I have learned from these training sessions is that it’s not only okay to be assertive in making my vision a reality on the practice track, but that it’s essential that I do so. A lot of times I settle when I should push, especially when I’m working with athletes whom I don’t coach on a regular basis and who might receive conflicting instructions from their school coach or club coach. But I’m realizing that if what I’m teaching them can make them faster, I shouldn’t hold back, because I’m doing the athlete a disservice if I do. My ultimate goal remains to teach an athlete how to cycle both arms and have them make it their style in races. If you’re a long-time reader of The Hurdle Magazine, you know I already know how it’s supposed to look and what the difficulties are in executing it, and that I did have a kid who had learned it before our progress got derailed by the Covid pandemic five years ago.
Below are clips of Shane Gardner quickstepping, Shane out of the blocks, and Janie quickstepping. I don’t have any video of Malik because it was raining and I didn’t want to risk damaging my phone. The video of Shane doing the marching popovers and quickstep drilling is the best of the three for demonstrating how the lead-arm cycle is supposed to look.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
[/am4show]
