Beginners, Open it up; Elites, Quicken it up
by Steve McGill
While many beginner level hurdlers at the youth and high school levels look up to the elite hurdlers who compete at the DI and professional levels, the approach that a beginner takes can often need to differ tremendously from the approach of an elite hurdler — even elite high school hurdlers. And the difference in approach has to do with one all-important factor: speed.
There are two major issues that I see often with beginner level hurdlers. The first is that they forget to be fast. They’re so fixated on each hurdle that they forget to sprint, as they focus instead on reaching the hurdle, not realizing that if they were to just sprint, they would not only reach the hurdle, but they would three-step more easily and put themselves in a position where they’re able to accelerate through the hurdle. The other issue is that they don’t run powerfully and aggressively. Instead, they take a more tentative approach, and their short strides out of the blocks force them to have to open up their strides in the last few strides before the first hurdle, which means they don’t have any momentum going into the hurdle.
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Another related issue is that their running posture changes when hurdles are in their lane. When doing hurdle-free sprints, they may exhibit solid sprint mechanics, but as soon as they see a hurdle, they shift their posture and run too erectly, scooting along with low knees. That’s another indication that they’re fixated on the hurdle.
What I’ve figured out is that with most beginners, the word “fast” means “quick.” So when you tell them they need to run faster, they run quicker, which is the opposite of what you actually want them to do. So now I say “open up” instead of “speed up,” because the whole point is to cover ground. Then, in some cases, I need to explain that “opening up” is a function of knee lift, not of reaching out with the foot.
As hurdlers become more advanced, they need to open up less, and quicken up more. But as a baseline, I tell younger hurdlers to sprint like sprinters sprint — hands high, knees high, applying force to the track every stride. Push … push … push … push. The rhythm isn’t supposed to sound fast; it’s supposed to sound slow. When it sounds slower, it’s actually faster, because you’re covering more ground per stride. As a sprinter teammate of mine from college once said to me, sprinting is bounding. A 100 meter race is a series of bounds down the track.
Not until crowding becomes an issue does the focus begin to shift from opening up to quickening up. In some cases, with beginner hurdlers who have exceptional speed, this shift must happen almost immediately. Once crowding is an issue, that’s when the fun begins. Now the goal is to refine technique so that airtime over the hurdles is minimized. In addition, we’ll be looking to lower the knee lift and quicken the action of the hands and feet.
Elite hurdlers don’t have any room to sprint at all. To call what they’re doing “sprinting” is really misleading, in a sense. Many coaches refer to it as “shuffling,” especially in the men’s race, where the hurdles are so high. In the strictest sense, what they are doing is sprinting, because the sprint mechanics aren’t altered, but just modified to fit the space. The ankles are still dorsiflexed. The knees are still coming up, just not as high. Same with the hands. And everything is moving more quickly. The women’s race at the elite level is more of a sprint race than the men’s race, but the women too have to quicken things up dramatically, just not as dramatically as the men.
So, most elite male hurdlers can run the 100m dash in 10.5 or so, or faster. Most elite female hurdlers can run the 100m dash in the low 11’s. Most high school hurdlers aren’t running nearly that fast in the 100. That’s why watching elite hurdlers and trying to mimic what they do can prove to be misguided at best, and downright destructive at worst. A hurdle race for someone with 10.5 100 speed is a totally different race than for someone with 11.5 100 speed. In my coaching, I introduce quickness-specific drills only to those hurdlers who need them. There’s this one drill that I saw Aries Merritt do on Instagram years back, where he sets up really low hurdles and spaces them really close together and basically tap dances his three steps between them. I’ve borrowed this drill with my advanced hurdlers, but I don’t put the hurdles as close together as Aries did because my hurdlers don’t run as fast as Aries does.
I also have other quickness drills that help advanced hurdlers to adapt to the rapidly decreasing space between the hurdles, and to adapt to the feeling that the hurdles are coming at them like ocean waves. But I don’t use any quickness drills for hurdlers who don’t have the type of speed that forces them to be quick between the hurdles. Instead, we’ll do bounding drills. We’ll do short sprints from a standing start to work on improving top-end speed. We’ll do sprints over cones serving as hurdles to get in the habit of sprinting when there are hurdles in the way.
When I started with Ayden Thompson, who is now a college freshman, he had just finished his sophomore year of high school with a personal best of 17.2. We spent that whole first summer together working mainly on his sprint mechanics and covering ground. By the time he graduated high school his personal best had dropped down to 14.5, so our workouts were a lot different than they had been when we first started out. We did a lot of quick-step drilling in the offseason of his senior year, because that became the thing he needed the most.
So, establishing a foundation of solid sprint mechanics is essential when working with beginners. That way, as they advance, you have a frame of reference that you can constantly refer to when modifying their sprint mechanics to fit the shrinking space between the hurdles.
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