One-Step Drills? Okay!
by Steve McGill
Recently, my daughter, who is 25 years old and in her first year as a middle school social studies teacher, texted me asking for advice when one of her students turned in an assignment filled with misspellings, misplaced punctuation, and errors in writing mechanics. When I suggested that she try to find some one-on-one time with that student, she replied by saying that almost half the students in the class are similarly limited in their writing skills. That’s when I told her that “you have to meet them where they are. If you have to go back and teach them third-grade grammar, then go back and teach them third-grade grammar.” What they “should” be able to do is irrelevant if they can’t do it. That’s true when it comes to students, and that’s true when it comes to hurdlers.
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That’s something I’ve been finding out this off-season in coaching a hurdler on my school team, Grace Galloway. Grace is a joy to work with — a great kid, a great human being, a hard worker, a willing listener, a dedicated athlete. But when it comes to picking up on the elements of technique and ingraining them consistently, progress has come slowly.
Several years back, I made the conscious decision to do all hurdling — whether drilling or at full speed — to a three-step rhythm. My go-to drills — marching popovers, the cycle drill, and the quickstep drill — are all drills done to a three-step rhythm, which ingrains the race rhythm and ingrains the cadence that we’ll want to have when racing. My logic has been, and remains, that there’s no point to doing one-step drills or five-step drills or any other variations if the race is all about three-stepping.
But in Grace’s case, none of the drilling we’d been doing this off-season was helping to eliminate her greatest flaw, which is that of pointing down the toe of the trail leg when clearing hurdles. It’s arguably one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my 28 years of coaching. When she first converted from the 800 to the hurdles in early April last year, she was able to pick up on sprint mechanics rapidly. By the end of our second session together, she was running on the balls of her feet, her ankles dorsiflexed, with a tight, efficient arm action. She improved so rapidly that my assistant coach was stunned by her progress. We didn’t get a lot of hurdle work in last year due to not having a track to train on during the week, but when we did meet on the weekends, we worked mainly on rhythm because we didn’t have time to ingrain technique with so many races in the way and so few weeks left before the end of the season.
This fall, we met once a week on the weekends. And when the fall sports season ended (she played volleyball), we met five days a week regularly. Two of those days were hurdle days — a drill-heavy day and a speed-based hurdle day. On our drill-based days, she quickly picked up on almost all of the technical elements I hadn’t had time to teach her last year. On speed days, she learned to really drive and not pop up too soon, which enabled her to three-step more consistently over lower hurdles. For a while, she was still stomping her last step into the first hurdles, causing her to elevate instead of pushing forward. But with my help, she figured that out, and she wasn’t elevating as much, but was still elevating a little. And the foot of her trail leg would flair out to the side, sometimes severely. In looking at video of her reps, her lead leg was executing just like we wanted to, but the trail leg seemed to be the culprit regarding the issues we were having.
Weirdly, while the lead leg ankle was staying dorsiflexed throughout hurdle clearance, the toe of the trail leg was dropping, forcing her to elevate to avoid catching her toe on the crossbar. And all the elevation was slowing her down considerably. Probably, a decade of being a dancer and another five years playing volleyball had something to do with this tendency to drop the toe, especially the dancing, as dancers are taught to point the toes down. So, we had to address this problem in a new way, because the ways I was using weren’t working.
That’s when I thought of the idea of bringing back the one-step drill — of pulling it out of the closet, dusting it off, and making it shiny and bright again. With the one-step drilling, I philosophized, Grace wouldn’t have as much time to react because she’d basically be hurdling every stride. If the toe dropped, with the hurdles bunched together so closely, she’d catch her toe on a hurdle and crash and burn.
With the way I teach the trail leg action, which emphasizes a high, tight movement with high knee action and minimal opening of the groin, keeping the ankle dorsiflexed is of paramount importance. So, when the lead leg foot has reached the crossbar and the trail leg has left the ground, the sole of the trail leg foot should be facing directly behind if the foot is properly dorsiflexed. If the foot is not properly dorsiflexed, but is instead plantarflexed (toe pointing down), then the toe of foot will be facing directly behind. That’s what was happening with Grace.
The video above shows reps of one of the sessions where I had Grace doing the one-step drill. I started with the hurdles at 24 inches, 7 feet apart, before moving up to 27 inches, 8 feet apart. Over the 24-inch hurdles, I saw instant success. Both legs were cycling fluidly, one right behind the other, both feet dorsiflexed the whole time. Over the 27-inch hurdles, the trail leg toe started dropping again on occasion, but as we addressed the problem it happened less and less. With Grace, I will continue to include one-step drilling in our hurdle training with the hope that it’ll carry over to her three-stepping work.
As it stands right now, if Grace had to run a 10-hurdle race today, she might be able to 3-step for three hurdles before switching to 4-stepping the rest of the way. I was hoping we’d be able to 3-step a whole race by now, but this issue with the toe of the trail leg dropping, in addition to nasty weather and not having a track to train on, has prevented us from getting there. But we’ll keep at it.
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