Leaning from the Waist
by Steve McGill
Though my private coaching has slowed down since I started coaching for my team, I still do enough of it to keep abreast of common mistakes and tendencies. One of the most common mistakes I see amongst hurdlers I coach (and hurdlers I see at meets) lies in their forward lean. The majority of hurdlers I see at the high school level kind of hunch their shoulders forward, which is fool’s gold at best, or the cause of a ripple effect of mistakes at worst. In this article, I want to talk about the proper way to lean, and the benefits of leaning properly.
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First, the first thing to understand is that this thing we call a “lean” isn’t really a lean in the truest sense of the word. What I mean is, when you get ready to clear the hurdle, you will not be doing something different from what you’ve already been doing in your sprinting strides. Instead, you will just execute a more exaggerated version of what you’re already doing. Check it out: If you were to stand erect, with both feet firmly on the ground, and then roll onto the balls of the feet, you will find yourself slightly tilting forward. That slight tilt represents the posture we want to always have when we are sprinting. If we’re sprinting on the balls of the feet. That tilt will be there naturally, with no effort. I always tell my athletes to push the chest forward, with the eyes looking forward and the chin evenly angled — not pointing down and not pointing up.
Meanwhile, with each stride you take, your hips are pushing forward as the knees and feet go up and down. When you’re running on the balls of the feet with the chest pushing forward and the hips pushing forward, you will accelerate in the first part of the race, reach top speed in the middle part of the race, and your deceleration in the last part of the race will be minimal. On the other hand, if you’re running flat footed with the upper body too erect, you will be too erect when clearing hurdles, which will cause you to hit hurdles, lose balance, and spend too much time in the air when clearing hurdles. You will have issues with the lead leg and trail leg that will frustrate you to no end. So, what I’m saying is, if you’re not sprinting with a slight forward lean, your lean over the hurdle will be minimal and ineffective.
A proper lean comes from the waist, from the lower back. One little thing I do to demonstrate what I mean is I’ll have the hurdler stand directly in front of me, facing me. We’ll stand about five feet apart from each other. I’ll instruct the athlete to put their hands behind their back, and I’ll say, “Lean forward from the waist, keeping your eyes on me the whole time.” And I’ll do it too. If we’re both doing it properly, our foreheads will almost make contact. This little drill shows the athlete what a proper lean looks like — it’s a lean forward, in the direction that you’re moving.
When leaning in this manner, there is no such thing as “leaning too much,” or leaning too deeply. When attacking the hurdle, the knee drives up and the chest pushes down as the hips push forward. All of these actions happening simultaneously create a significant forward thrust that creates a huge acceleration coming off the hurdle. The idea that it is possible to lean too much comes from, I think, the type of lean that involves a hunching over of the shoulders, as I mentioned above. If the lean comes more from the upper body than from the waist, then yes, that type of lean will cause the lead leg to kick out before the knee rises, and the athlete will not only kick out but kick up in order to get the foot higher than the bar. Then the trail leg flattens and swings wide, and the arms swing from side to side in an attempt to keep the torso balanced.
I’m well aware that plenty of coaches actually teach their hurdlers to run more erect between the hurdles. And to be honest, I don’t get it. I tell my hurdlers to get forward and stay forward. Every stride of the entire race. Never come out of your lean. Stay forward, stay forward, stay forward. I worked with a collegiate athlete a few summers ago and taught her the forward lean from the waist, and instructed her to maintain that forward tilt between the hurdles, and she was looking crazy fast by the end of the summer. When she got back to college her coach told her she needed to be more erect between the hurdles. The athlete was frustrated because she no longer felt as fast between the hurdles and she was hitting hurdles with her trail leg all the time. But when it comes to the hurdles you can’t have two coaches telling you two different things, so I had to take the L on that one.
My thinking is this: Because you’re moving so fast in a hurdle race, you can only lean forward but so much when clearing the hurdles. Let’s say, you can lean 30% from what your posture is like between the hurdles. So, a 30% lean from a body that is already slightly tilting forward with the chest pushing forward is going to put that chest to where it’s almost touching the lead leg knee. Meanwhile, a 30% lean from a body that is erect will mean that you’re still too erect to clear the hurdle without hitting the hurdle or twisting the hips or something like that.
To me, hurdling is all about minimizing wasted effort in order to maximize the quality of the effort put forth. Too many hurdlers I see are fighting themselves. The goal is to get down the track and through the finish line as fast as possible, but many hurdlers are jumping up instead of pushing forward. They kick out the foot instead of driving the knee. These are simple, basic things that grow very hard to fix if bad habits have become ingrained. Leaning forward from the waist is an essential element if all the other elements are to be executed effectively. Leading with the knee, keeping the lead arm tight in a crisp, concise up-and-down motion, minimizing lateral movement in the lane, and bringing the trail leg through high and tight cannot happen if the athlete isn’t leaning forward from the waist.
When I begin working with hurdlers who have developed such bad habits as running flat-footed and/or too erectly, we’ll spend a lot of time on A marches and A skips before we get to hurdling drills. A tear-down and rebuild is necessary.
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