It’s not All about Technique
by Steve McGill
On my YouTube channel I’ve uploaded a series of videos about teaching beginners to 3-step (and I still have one more video in that series to make; just gotta find the time). This fall, I’ve started working with two girls on my high school team who are both beginners. One, Grace Galloway, I’ve written about before, as she began hurdling during the outdoor season last year, and is just now learning the fundamentals that I didn’t have time to teach her back then. The other, Marie Madsen, just started earlier this month. Both are high school juniors. What I’ve learned in the past month or so of teaching them the basics is that even I often have to stray from the advice I give on my own videos, and that teaching beginners is far from being an exact science that can lead to predictable results. In this article I want to explain the process I’ve been going through with these two athletes, especially Marie, since she had never hurdled in her life before until the beginning of September.
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When teaching beginner hurdlers, I used to always focus on technique, almost exclusively at first, before introducing the other two main elements — rhythm and speed. But several years ago I had a harrowing experience in which I was coaching a new hurdler who had been a good sprinter, and we did nothing but drills for about a month, and she was looking quite good at them. Then one day I decided she was ready to go ahead and attack the hurdles full speed from the start line. I showed her how to set up her feet behind the line, placed the first hurdle at the mark, and instructed her to sprint over the hurdle. On her first attempt, she ran up to the hurdle and stopped. On her second attempt, she ran up to the hurdle and stopped. On her 15th attempt, she ran up to the hurdle and stopped. On her one-billionth attempt, she ran up to the hurdle and stopped. Finally, I said to her, “This isn’t gonna work. You’re afraid of the hurdle.” She responded, “I’m not afraid of the hurdle, I’m just afraid of hitting it.”
Since then, I’ve always made it a point to incorporate rhythm work and speed work into the hurdling sessions with beginners, because I came to realize that fear of the obstacles is the greatest obstacle that beginners must clear. While the purist in me wants technique to be close to flawless before cranking up the speed, the realist in me recognizes that such an approach can actually impede progress instead of facilitating it.
With Marie, I started off her first session, which ended up lasting a full two hours, by teaching her the basics of sprint mechanics — dorsi-flexion, pushing off the balls of the feet, driving up the knee and heel, pushing the chest slightly forward, driving the arms up and down from cheek to cheek. Though she grasped the concepts, she struggled to implement them. But once she looked good enough, I set up the first hurdle at the mark and instructed her to clear it full-speed from the start line. Instructions included: 1) make sure your lead leg is behind your trail leg at the start line, 2) take big strides in the beginning so you can take quicker strides closer to the hurdle, 3) take eight strides to the first hurdle (but don’t count; just let it happen, and 4) clear the hurdle no matter what, even if your technique is garbage.
After clearing the first hurdle a couple times, I added a second hurdle, moved in three feet from race distance. (The hurdles were low, by the way. We started at 24 inches). She struggled with maintaining her speed off the first hurdle, as she reverted to short, quick steps upon landing, which led to 4-stepping the second hurdle. Marie is 5-8 and has decent speed, so we weren’t going to settle for 4-stepping. After a few more attempts and further instruction, she was able to 3-step the second hurdle three consecutive times. It was ugly, but she did it. Good. Now that I knew that she wasn’t afraid, and now that she knew how it felt to sprint off the hurdle and to attack the second hurdle, I could introduce her to the fundamentals of hurdling technique.
The drill we spent the most time on was hurdle walk-overs. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not a fan of walk-overs, but I do find them effective for teaching beginners the movements and body positioning. We did side walk-overs lead leg, side walk-overs trail leg, and over-the-top walk-overs. She was having the most trouble with the trail leg action. Earlier, in the full-speed reps, the trail leg was coming directly under her. So we did some fence drill reps to teach her to wrap the leg around by opening and then closing the groin. She performed the motion well in the fence drill, but in the walk-overs she was dropping the foot as she brought it to the front instead of keeping the knee high and tight. So we spent a big chunk of time just doing over-the-top walk-overs over one hurdle, with me instructing her to not drive the foot to the ground until the knee is facing the front and is parallel to the track.
Once she got the hang of it, I set up more hurdles, up to five, for a series of walk-over reps, focusing on the same things we’d been focusing on in the sprint drills and the earlier hurdle drills. Things didn’t go blissfully well; there were plenty of times when I saw back-kick in her trail leg, when I saw it drop as she brought it to the front, where her arms weren’t doing much of anything at all, etc. But she was getting the rhythm down and she was beginning to understand how each leg functions.
We ended the session with a couple more full-speed reps over two hurdles from the start line, and though they were far from smooth, I could see progress from the reps she had done before the drills.
So, what I’m learning is, it’s not all about technique. Beginners can quickly become fearful over-thinkers if all they ever work on is technique. They have to be taught early that, when all else fails, they need to be fast and stay aggressive. As a coach, I can’t try to address every flaw that I see. I have to constantly pick and choose which flaws need to be addressed now and which ones will have to wait till later. That’s why I hardly ever post videos of my beginners on my YouTube channel or Instagram page. A musician doesn’t release a song that the band still needs to rehearse. An artist doesn’t hang a painting on the wall that’s only partially completed. I share such videos here because y’all are my people, so I think it’s cool for you to see that I’m figuring things out as I go the same as you are.
The video below includes both of the recent sessions with Marie Madsen.
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