Teaching Sprint Mechanics Here There and Everywhere
by Steve McGill
The longer I’ve been coaching, the more I’ve emphasized the importance of proper sprint mechanics for hurdlers. When I first started coaching in the 90’s, I didn’t pay much attention to sprint mechanics; I focused exclusively on hurdle technique with hardly any regard for sprint mechanics. After about six years of frustration with athletes who couldn’t fix their technical issues even as I was telling them what they needed to do and how to fix it. Then in 2004, when I attended Curtis Frye’s coaching clinic in South Carolina, I was introduced for the first time to front-side mechanics. That changed everything for me. Even though he wasn’t relating it to hurdling in his presentation, I related it to hurdling in my own mind. Frye was explaining about keeping the ankles dorsiflexed so that the back-kick is minimized. During his presentation, I had a light-bulb moment when I realized that my hurdlers who were having trouble fixing their hurdling technique were never going to be able to fix those issues as long as their sprint mechanics remained flawed.
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When I go to meets these days and watch the hurdlers warming up, and then watch them race, it’s normal for about 95% of them — including some of the best hurdlers at the meet — to have jacked up hurdling form and sprint mechanics. Lead legs are flinging and swinging. Trail legs are wild. Arms are helicoptering. The better athletes can rely on speed and strength to carry them through their flaws, while the ones who aren’t as athletic just ride the struggle bus all the way through the finish line. When I receive emails or messages from other coaches or from athletes who are eager to get better, their focus is almost always on hurdling technique — how can I fix my trail leg, what drills should I do to make sure I lead with the knee, etc. The answer always lies in their sprint mechanics. I’m talking 100% of the time. Even among elite athletes, whose issues are much more minor because of their extreme athleticism, you can often find something in the sprint mechanics that can use some adjusting.
When you see elite hurdlers who have flawless hurdling technique, you can be sure that they also have flawless sprint mechanics. My go-to hurdlers to serve as teaching models — Allen Johnson and Liu Xiang on the men’s side, and Sally Pearson and Dawn Harper-Nelson on the women’s side — all had exquisite sprint mechanics. If you look at someone like Grant Holloway, who is an incredibly talented hurdler and an incredibly talented athlete, you’ll notice that in some races he gets a little floaty over hurdles late in races. That’s because when he clears hurdles, the foot of his trail leg tends to rise higher than the knee of his trail leg. One of the tenets of front-side mechanics, especially for hurdlers, is to bring the heel up under the hamstring. If the heel is going outward (forward) instead of upward, then, as a hurdler, your groin will open wide and it’ll be harder to drive the knee to the front. That’s what’s happening with Holloway late in races. And if he were to try to fix it as a trail leg issue, he wouldn’t be able to; he needs to address it as a sprint-mechanic issue. Yes, it’s a minor issue, but it’s still an issue. It cost him a gold medal in 2021. That’s what I mean when I say that even elite hurdlers have things they can fix in their sprint mechanics. It doesn’t get more elite than Holloway.
Teaching proper sprint mechanics is an ongoing, never-ending process, especially with hurdlers, as the presence of the barriers can cause flaws in sprint mechanics even for hurdlers whose sprint mechanics are excellent when sprinting without hurdles. When I do my hurdle camps, we spend the entire first session, which lasts over two hours, on sprint mechanics alone. We don’t even put a hurdle up. With athletes I coach privately, the first thing I do with new athletes is evaluate their sprint mechanics. And if their sprint mechanics need a lot of work, we’ll spend a lot of time on them. The reason is, I know that I won’t see what I want to see when it’s time to hurdle if the sprint mechanics aren’t on point. When we do sprint drills, I’m constantly reminding the hurdlers that these sprint drills are hurdle drills. What you do as you approach the first hurdle determines what you will do over the hurdle. What you do between the hurdles determines what you will do over the rest of the hurdles. Your sprint mechanics will determine your sprint mechanics. Experienced hurdlers are actually harder to work with in this regard because they’ve developed habits when clearing hurdles that will linger even after we improve the sprint mechanics simply because those habits have become ingrained. But in such cases, improving the sprint mechanics will make it easier to improve the hurdling mechanics; it’ll just take longer because of all the built-up muscle memory that has to be torn down and replaced.
With my school team, we’ll do some sprint mechanic work every day, either as part of the workout or as part of the cool-down. In warmups, I make it a point to watch with a hawk’s eye as they’re doing their A-marches, A-skips, and high-knee cycles. We don’t do our drills just to warm up; we do them to further ingrain proper sprint mechanics so that it becomes second nature and can be executed without thought.
After workouts, one drill I’ve started doing is the one where you have the athletes stand on one foot, with the other foot in the air in sprint position, ankle dorsiflexed, thigh parallel to the ground. Then, after a second or two, I’ll have them switch to the other foot, and then keep having them switch back and forth, switching up the cadence so that they can’t predict when it’s time to switch. We’ll do this in place. Hopefully before the end of the season they’ll be proficient enough at it that we can do it moving forward.
By including sprint drills as part of the cool-down or workout every day, my aim is to instill good habits that can lead to running faster races with less effort. Poor sprint mechanics forces you to work harder, making you tired earlier in races, causing you to slow down sooner in races. The more efficient you can be with your movements, the easier it is to run complete races without your running form falling apart. For hurdlers this is exponentially more important than it is for sprinters for the obvious reason that the obstacles present another layer of challenge that flat sprinters don’t have to deal with.
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