Workout for Speeding up the Non-Dominant Lead Leg
by Steve McGill

This month’s workout is actually two workouts, both designed to make the weaker lead leg of long hurdlers more efficient, effective, and trustworthy. In my experience working with long hurdlers, drilling at slower speeds is only good for acclimating the weaker leg to clearing hurdles, but doesn’t prepare the athlete to use the leg when they actually need to in a race. Also, most hurdlers take an odd number of steps for at least half of the race, before they might change down to an even number. Obviously, hurdlers like Sydney McLaughlin and Femke Bol, who now both 14-step through seven hurdles, are exceptions to this rule. But for the most part, hurdlers usually settle in with 13 strides, 15 strides, or 17 strides between the hurdles at least through the first five (400m hurdlers) or first four (300m hurdlers) before switching. As a result, the transition to an even number of strides usually takes place somewhere on the curve. The hurdler I’m working with now, Tevin Colson, takes 15 strides through hurdle six, then has to switch to 16 strides at hurdle seven, which is right in the middle of the curve in the 400H race.

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Meanwhile, another one of my athletes, Marie Madsen, who runs the 300H for my school team, is in her second year of hurdling, and because we were working a lot last year on trying to get her 3-stepping in the 100H, we didn’t do much work at all when it came to alternating. We’ve been working on that this off-season, and it’s been coming along well. She’s able to take 17 strides through the first three barriers, and after that it gets tricky because the 17 is a reach, she doesn’t trust the weaker leg enough yet to go 18, and 19 is too choppy. So we’re working on getting the weaker leg up to speed so she can go 18 on the curve. 

So the first workout, that I designed with Tevin in mind, is to place three hurdles, at race height, on the curve, spaced 12.5 meters apart. The distance to the first hurdle is 13.72 meters – the same distance as the first hurdle of the 110m men’s race. So, the athlete takes eight strides to the first hurdle, and five strides between the next two, leading with the non-dominant leg the whole time. With Tevin, I placed the second hurdle exactly where the seventh hurdle in a race would be so that we could work specifically on using the weaker leg at that hurdle. The spacing and the 5-step rhythm allows for a high level of speed, so getting that leg up over the hurdle while maintaining balance and momentum is a challenge. When adapting this workout for your own purposes, I would suggest setting up the hurdles at the part of the curve where your athlete is most likely to need to use the non-dominant leg; don’t just copy what we’re doing, because what we’re doing is specific to Tevin’s needs. 

Below is a video of one rep of Tevin doing the workout a couple weeks ago. In the first four reps or so, he wasn’t going fast enough. I told him to speed up so that we could legitimately re-create the speed and intensity that he’ll feel at hurdle seven in a race. The faster the athlete sprints, the more challenging the workout is, and you’re gonna find out if the athlete can really use that weaker leg or not, and, if not, what the issues are that need to be addressed. Like I always say, we want to expose the flaw so we can address the flaw. 

The other workout is an 8-step alternating workout that I’ve been doing with Marie lately. When at the elementary level, I start with 2-stepping and 4-stepping with the hurdles close together. Each time we increase the number of strides between the hurdles, we are thereby increasing the speed between the hurdles, and thereby increasing the level of challenge. By the time we get to 8-stepping, we’re moving at a speed that will be close to the speed of a race.

So with the 8-step workout, which is done on the straight-away, the first hurdle is at the regular mark for the women’s 100m hurdle race. The rest of the hurdles are spaced 15 meters apart (or somewhere in that range, depending on the speed of the athlete). In the video below, I also had Marie progress to a 10-step version, but I had the hurdles too close together and she was forced to chop her stride some. I had them 19.5 meters apart. Were I to do that workout with her again, I’d have them 20.5-21 meters apart for the 10-step version.

Both workouts described in this article can be done on the straight or on the curve. Because the first one involves using just the non-dominant leg the whole time, and the second workout involves alternating, doing both will be most helpful in building the athlete’s confidence in the non-dominant leg.

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