Popovers & Quicksteps Workout for Fall Training
by Steve McGill
Fall training for hurdlers is the best time of year to work on addressing technical flaws, instilling or ingraining the three-step rhythm, and developing speed in a non-pressure situation. While I do very little full-speed hurdling in the fall, all the drilling I have my hurdlers do is designed to prepare them to sprint full speed over the hurdles once the indoor season starts. And since the indoor season is starting earlier than ever now (before Thanksgiving here in North Carolina), I also use the early indoor meets (the ones prior to the new calendar year) as speed workouts over hurdles so that my athletes can continue refining their technique and rhythm through December. The logic is, once the competitive season starts, all training has to be geared towards race prep. But if we begin race prep too soon (and to me, November is too soon, as is December), we won’t give ourselves enough time to put the technical things in place before we ramp things up. So if my athletes have to race in November and December, then I’d rather use those races as evaluative tests instead of getting caught up on what their time was and what place they came in.
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About ten years ago, I whittled my drill repertoire down to three main drills that I used in the off-season to address all technical issues. These drills were the marching popover drill, the cycle drill, and the quickstep drill. The marching popover involves high-knee marching over the first hurdle and then allowing oneself to speed up the match naturally as the lush forward into each hurdle creates more speed. The cycle drill involves a 4-step approach to the first hurdle, focusing on cycling the legs for each of those four strides, and then maintaining the cycle action over the hurdle. The quickstep drill involves a 6-step approach to the first hurdle, and it mimics the cycle drill, except the hurdles are spaced farther apart and can be raised all the way to race height.
In recent years, without consciously planning to, I’ve taken out the cycle drill and have relied on the popovers and quicksteps to implement all the foundational hurdle work that I want to get in before we race. I have found that this approach saves time, and that the increase in speed when progressing from the popovers to the quicksteps is not too much of a leap for the majority of athletes to handle. So in cases where the cycle drill is an unnecessary step, I won’t use it.
So, many of my fall training workouts on hurdle days consist of a series of marching popovers followed by a series of quickstep reps. For the popovers, my standard spacing is 12 feet apart, but the hurdles can be anywhere from 24 inches to a click below race height. With the girls up coaching now, I’ve been using this drill to work on cycling the lead arm, which is something new I’m seeking to instill.
For the quicksteps, my standard spacing is 31 feet (girls) or 33 feet (boys) to the first hurdle, then 23-25 feet (girls) or 25-27 feet (boys) between the hurdles. The wider spacing is for the faster athletes, while the closer spacing is for not/S-fast athletes, so that the athletes are forced to be quick regardless of their talent level.
In each session, and for each drill, we’ll start with some “practice” reps over one hurdle, then over the first two hurdles, before we begin clearing all five hurdles (five is my standard amount of hurdles, although I’ve had advanced athletes clear as many as ten in their reps).
I don’t set out to complete a required number of reps; instead, I monitor fatigue levels by reading body language and evaluating the quality of each rep (as athletes will rarely admit to being tired). Usually, about 45 minutes worth of intense drilling, after a dynamic warmup, is the most we can expect to get in without risking poor quality and allowing bad habits to creep back in.
Below are videos from my Instagram page featuring athletes doing popovers and quicksteps.
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