Coaching the Ambidextrous Hurdler
by Steve McGill
A couple weeks ago, I decided to make a change in the hurdling technique of Raelle Brown – a high school junior that I’ve been training over the summer. The change is major: from here on in, we’re going to use the right leg as her lead leg instead of her left leg. I’ve never made such a significant change in any hurdler that I’ve coached in thirty years, but it wasn’t a decision made randomly or on just a gut feeling. Let me give the full background.
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An athlete I’ve worked with off and on over the past four years or so, Evonne Britton, is a professional hurdler who trains in Georgia, and used to train in California when I first met her. We connected when she binge-watched some of my instructional videos on YouTube, and then reached out to me with some questions. She came to train with me one weekend here in North Carolina, and has since come here about three or four more times to work on things. On her second visit here, I was working with her at the same time that I was working with a high school kid named Ethan who had come down from Maryland. I was saying something to Ethan about being able to alternate lead legs for the intermediate hurdles. Evonne heard us talking and happened to mention that she had the ability to switch lead legs, and had done so as a collegian running the 400 meter hurdles. Then she said something about having learned to hurdle using her right leg as her lead leg, even though she’d been leading with her left leg throughout her professional career. Hmmm, I thought. In the drills I’d been having her do, we’d been working on getting better knee drive with the lead leg, and tightening up her arm action so that her hands would stop swinging away from her body. We’d been having limited success; I was seeing progress, but at a slow pace. When she mentioned the ability to lead with either leg, the mad scientist in me couldn’t help but want to see how she looked doing the drill leading with her right leg. So I asked her to do it, just out of curiosity, with no intention of suggesting she make a permanent change. But lo and behold, she instantly looked much better leading with her right leg than with her left leg. The arm action was tighter, the knee action was tighter, she was quicker overall getting over the hurdles, and faster coming off the hurdles. “Whoa!” I shouted, “Do that again!” She did a couple more reps and I said to her, “Your right leg is doing everything we were trying to get your left leg to do.”
Long story short, Evonne did end up switching lead legs the following year. She was in her competitive season at the time we met, so she couldn’t switch. And we agreed that even though her left leg wasn’t executing the movements as efficiently as the right leg, she had been using the left leg for so long that she was going to run faster times with it. Also, if we were to switch, there was the issue of aches, soreness, and potential injuries with each leg’s muscles being used in ways they hadn’t been used before.
But the biggest take-away in relating it to Raelle was that there was such a thing as being an ambidextrous hurdler. I had coached one girl like that when I had first started coaching, but never again since. But Evonne was another with that same rare skill.
So, before I first started working with Raelle, her dad sent me videos of five of her races – two 100 hurdle races, two 300 hurdle races, and one 4×400 relay leg. Because my job was to help her improve her technique, I reviewed the 100 hurdle races, identified her weaknesses, and decided what we would need to do to correct her flaws. I looked at the 300 hurdle races too, but not closely. So, for all of her time together this summer, we’d been drilling her out of her old habits. We’d made significant progress, but a lot of the old her was still in there, as she’d been hurdling a certain way for two whole years – kicking out the lead leg and locking it at the knee was the biggest flaw, as it caused a twist in the hips and shoulders, so she was never landing on-balance off the hurdles.
Raelle and I met two times in the last week of July. Prior to the first session of that week, I was thinking of using one of the days to work on her 300 hurdle race and start establishing a stride pattern for the first three hurdles. So I went back and examined the 300 races her dad had sent. One of the things that caught my eye was that she was leading with her right leg over some of the hurdles, which informed me that yes, she did have the ability to alternate. In playing back the races several times, it became clear to me that she looked really good clearing the hurdles with her right leg. That’s when the thought hit me, maybe she’s been leading with the wrong lead leg all this time. Of course, my initial reaction to the thought was to try to suppress it. I’d been working with her for six weeks. Now I’m gonna see about switching lead legs? Well, it was still July, still the pre-offseason. So if we were going to make a major change, now would be the time to do it, because we’d have plenty of time to ingrain it.
At the beginning of practice the next day, I told her we would not work on the 300 hurdles as we had planned; instead, we would work on switching lead legs. She gave me a raised-eyebrow look, so I kept talking, explaining what I’d seen in the videos, and making the argument that we had to at least try the other leg and find out. “If it looks like garbage,” I said, “we’ll scrap the whole idea and stick with the left leg.”
It didn’t look like garbage. It looked good. Really good. After only a few reps of easy drilling at a slow pace, she was able to sprint over 30-inch hurdles full speed from the line. That looked good enough that we were able to raise the hurdle to the race height of 33 inches and sprint over three hurdles, with the second and third hurdles moved in two feet from race distance. The previous session, leading with the left leg, we hadn’t been able to try the 33s because I was still seeing issues over the 30s. So in one session, the right leg already looked better than the left leg had looked in six weeks, and for two years before that.
As I explained to her, the right leg hadn’t learned any bad habits. The left leg had been ingraining bad habits for two years. So teaching the right leg from scratch was bound to be easier than getting the left leg to unlearn all the wrong movements that felt right. That’s the same logic that explains why it’s easier to teach a beginner hurdler who has never hurdled before than it is to teach an experienced hurdler who has been doing things wrong over a period of time.
I’m so glad I took that risk, and that I took it when I took it. And I’m so grateful that she’s trusting me so completely, even as I take her down roads that are scary and full of unknowns.
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