Experimenting with Wider Strides out of the Blocks
by Steve McGill
This article probably applies more to coaching hurdlers who 7-step out of the blocks, but I think it can also apply to 8-steppers as well, and to non-hurdling sprinters too, as the impetus for this article came from watching old footage of Maurice Greene’s start. I’ve always taught my hurdlers that they should drive out in as much of a straight line as possible. Lateral movement in the first few strides, I reasoned, results in those strides being shorter, which in turn results in less momentum going into the first hurdle. But in a recent workout with Ayden Thompson — one of my athletes I coach in my private coaching — we experimented with wider strides for the first three strides, and the results were enormously beneficial.
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Let me backtrack a little bit. I started with Ayden last summer — after his sophomore year of high school. At 6-4, he was already 7-stepping, even with a lot of flaws in his running form and despite not being all that strong. Throughout his junior year, his sprinting mechanics and hurdling technique improved gradually, to the point where I remember saying sometime in February, “You’re starting to look like a Steve-coached hurdler.” Once the outdoor season started, we met a lot less frequently, due to the fact that I was coaching for my school team, which limited my availability. In addition, he was dealing with an ankle injury late in the season that required him to rest as much as possible. In an early summer meet he got his non-windy personal best down to 15.50.
In the weeks prior to that meet, we had been working on getting him to get more push in his first three strides out of the blocks. I had him do some long-jumper-style bounding drills to ingrain the concept of being powerful out of the blocks so that he could be quicker in the final strides into the first hurdle. My observation was that although he was easily getting to the first hurdle in seven strides, the last three strides were longer than desirable, as he wasn’t really pushing through the first hurdle. In races, he was having trouble sustaining his moment over the last three or four hurdles, and I became convinced that the lack of push into hurdle one was the reason why, as conditioning wasn’t an issue.
So, focusing on being more powerful and covering more ground in the first three strides did help, which led to the 15.50. Then, in our most recent session, we were doing more block starts over the first three hurdles, and I liked what I was seeing, but something was bothering me. It still wasn’t looking powerful enough. I wanted him so close to that first hurdle that he was forced to either take a major cut-step or crash. I wasn’t seeing the need for that level of urgency. That’s when I suddenly remembered something Kevin Howell — a sprint coach with whom I’ve been friends for over a decade — had said to me at our most recent Team Steve Hurdling Academy this past June. He had said that running in a straight line out of the blocks isn’t always the best way to go. He said that being more lateral can actually give the athlete more power. Remembering his words, I decided to experiment with that idea with Ayden.
First we tried it with no hurdle a couple times, and both times his seventh step landed a good 6-8 inches beyond our desired take-off distance, which meant, yes, if he did the same thing with a hurdle in the way, he’d definitely have to severely shorten that last stride, which would give him the speed going through the hurdle that we wanted. And just in looking at the first three strides, he definitely appeared to be generating more power than ever before. When I asked him how it felt after the first rep, he said it felt more powerful, but that he felt a little wobbly and that it took some effort to straighten himself out in the last four strides. Hearing those words didn’t deter me; it just meant he needed more reps to get used to the feeling. Sure enough, the wobbly feeling went away, but the powerful feeling remained. When we put up the first hurdle, the speed he had going into and coming off the first hurdle was electric. When we added a second hurdle, I was finally seeing the kind of turnover I’d been envisioning in my head for several months. When we added a third hurdle, same thing. Even more so. I’m sold now on this block-start approach, at least for this particular athlete. Again, I think this wider-stride approach in the first three strides makes a lot more sense for a seven-stepper than for an eight-stepper, as a seven-stepper needs more power to get into proper take-off position. An eight-stepper with this much power may end up so close to the first hurdle that he/she can’t react to it.
Below is video footage of the practice session where we worked on the wider-stride approach. In the first three reps of the video, we were keeping things in a straight line. After that, we began our experimentation. You can see the wobbliness on the first rep with the new approach. But in the ensuing reps, as he grows more comfortable with it, he’s looking more and more aggressive and is generating more and more speed.
Recently I was looking at the Diamond League race in Monaco that featured Grant Holloway, Hansle Parchment, and Trey Cunningham. In the video, which can be seen below, there is a slo-mo replay beginning at the 3:13 mark in which you can see the start of all three hurdlers from a head-on angle. In this replay, it is clear that both Holloway and Parchment do begin with wider strides before transitioning into more of a straight line with the fourth step, while Cunningham is very much in a straight line the whole way. And all of them ran within .04 of each other, which indicates that both block-start styles — the wider approach and the more narrow approach — have benefits. That’s why I’ll continue to take it on an athlete-by-athlete basis instead of wanting all of my athletes to adopt the same style.
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