Cues, Not Drills
by Steve McGill
A couple weeks ago, as I was continuing my “comeback” by doing 20-30 minutes worth of hurdle drilling of my own, I decided to try to incorporate the “cycle arms” style that I had created over a decade ago. The idea behind the style is that both arms cycle, just like the legs cycle, instead of doing their traditional thing of pumping up and down. When the cycle motion is executed properly – over the hurdles and between the hurdles – there are no pauses in the action. Thus, hurdling can be totally rhythmic and continuous, like water flowing over a rock, as the Taoist philosophy metaphorically describes fluid motion.
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But my first time trying to do the cycle arms style, I struggled. Though I had come up with the style myself, and had successfully taught it to a handful of athletes over the years, doing it myself was proving difficult – not just because I’m older and the body can’t put itself in hurdling positions like it used to, but also because it’s simply a difficult style to execute. I was hurdling over my little 27-inch practice hurdles, just like I’d been doing in previous weeks when hurdling with the normal arm action where the trail arm punches down during attack and then punches back up during descent. The trouble I was having involved maintaining the cycle action off of hurdle one. Coming off that hurdle, my arms seemed to revert to the traditional up-and-down action instead of continuing to cycle.
That night, I texted my former athlete, Keare Smith, who had mastered the style at one point about ten years ago. I asked Keare if he remembered having similar difficulties when he was first learning the style. He responded with an emphatic yes. “The body has done thousands of reps one way,” he wrote, “and now we’re telling it to do it a completely different way all of a sudden. It’s confused as hell.”
Comforted to know that this was a problem I should have anticipated, I decided to go out to the track the next week and try it again. This time, so I could focus more on the cyclical arm action and less on getting over the hurdles, I brought my baby 24-inch hurdles with me and decided to try it over those. The results can be seen in the short video below:
As you can see in the video, the arms are already cycling as I am approaching the first hurdle. That’s the only way this style works. If you’re not already cycling the arms before you get to the hurdle, you won’t be able to cycle the arms over the hurdle. When I was teaching the style to Keare, we figured out that the arms have to function traditionally for the first few strides out of the starting blocks, and then we can switch to cycling the arms in the last three strides into the first hurdle, thus establishing the rhythm we’ll want for the rest of the race. Another former athlete, Brandon Johnson, whom I coached about three years ago, had mastered the approach to the first hurdle before heading off to college.
Anyway, as the video shows, the arm that we traditionally call the trail arm does not trail with this style. Instead, it cycles in a continuous motion the same as the lead arm does. What’s most notable in just looking at it is that the trail arm cycles down during descent off the hurdle instead of punching up. Thus, as I like to put it, you’re getting two booms instead of just one. As the lead arm cycles downward with the lead leg touching down off the hurdle, that’s the first boom. Then, the trail arm cycling downward as the trail leg attacks the track in the first stride off the hurdle, creating a second boom. Obviously, watching me do it over 24-inch hurdles spaced five meters apart, you’re not really seeing any booms. But just imagine how it would look if a young athlete were doing it moving much faster over higher hurdles. The BOOM BOOM would be evident even to the untrained eye, and the acceleration coming off the hurdle would be amazing.
When I texted the above video to Keare to ask for feedback, he responded with the following: “Looks like you got this down, Coach! When you described it to me in 2014, that’s what I imagined it would look like.” That’s was all the validation I needed to continue to pursue this journey one step further. The next step will be to drill it over 27-inch hurdles, keeping the spacing the same at first. The next step after that would be to increase the spacing by as much as my body can handle. Keare said that speeding it up is “where it gets tricky. When you speed it up, your arms will be weirded out by how fast they should or shouldn’t move.” Point well-taken. He added in a subsequent text something that I always used to say to him: “You’ll get it, just gotta get the reps in.”
And that’s the larger lesson that I’m presenting in this article, whether or not the cycle arms style makes sense to you and whether or not you plan to ever use it. The larger lesson is that intentional repping – where you know what you’re trying to accomplish and you know what the movements are supposed to look like – is going to lead to progress. So often, people ask me what drills they should be doing to improve technique whenever they contact me asking for technical advice. It’s not about which drills you choose. Any drills will do. The key is what are you cueing? What are you reminding yourself to do? What instructions are you giving your body? Whether you’re trying to learn to lead with the knee, trying to keep the lead arm from crossing the body, learning to lean forward more, it doesn’t matter what drill you choose. Pick a drill, do the drill with intent, and keep repping it until you start getting it right and the movement starts to feel natural. Running on the balls of your feet probably didn’t feel natural the first time you did it. But with enough A-marches done correctly, with enough A-skips done correctly, with enough wickets done correctly, etc., it not only felt natural, but easy.
So, learning how to execute the cycle arms action in my own mini hurdling adventures is helping me as a coach, because it has been serving as a reminder to always give myself the most effective cue that will most likely lead to improvement. With the cycle arms coming off hurdle one, I kept reminding myself to punch down, punch down, punch down. Coming off the hurdle, punch the trail arm down. It wants to punch up because that’s what it has always done. So I had to tell it, punch down. And once it knew to do that, it kept doing it.
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