Drill Variety Pack & Block Starts Workout
by Steve McGill

When I’m working with hurdlers who have been training with me for a while and are a bit more advanced, I’m always looking for new ways to challenge them so that they can continue to sharpen their skills. One of the ways to do this is to put together drill packages that are new and unfamiliar. So in working with Ayden Thompson, who just finished his junior year of high school and has been training with me for a year, I was looking for a way to challenge him in the portion of the workout prior to putting the blocks down and working specifically on race modeling. So I came up with the following drill that I refer to as a drill “variety pack:”

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Set up six hurdles.

• The first two hurdles are at 33 inches, spaced 12 feet apart for a marching popover action.
• Hurdles three and four are at 36 inches, spaced 19 feet apart for a cycle drill action.
• Hurdles five and six are at 39 inches, spaced 25 feet apart for a quickstep action. 

So, in each rep the athlete is doing three drills — marching popover over the first two, cycle drill over the next two, and quickstep drill over the last two.

What is the point of the drill? Glad you asked. The idea is to try to maintain the same cadence between each pair of hurdles. So, there will be the need for a “push” into the first hurdle, and then another push into the third hurdle, and then another push into the fifth hurdle. The goal is for the cadence between hurdles five and six to match the cadence between hurdles three and four, and for the cadence between hurdles three and four to match the cadence between one and two. So, the athlete is creating the illusion that the raised heights and increased spacings do not make the rhythm feel any different, which of course requires speeding up as the spacing increases. So, it’s about establishing a rhythm and then working to maintain that rhythm while doing so proves more and more challenging.

After some reps of this variety pack drill, we’ll move on to block starts. The amount we do of each can vary. If I want to focus on the drill, we’ll do more reps of that and maybe just get over the first three hurdles out of the blocks a few times. If I want to focus on both equally, then the number of reps of the drill will decrease and we’ll get in more block-start reps, and probably get over four or five hurdles. If we want the emphasis to be on the block starts, then we might just do a small handful of reps of the drill, and then get in starts up to as many as seven hurdles. With Ayden, we’ve done this workout twice, with the following rep numbers:

The first time, we emphasized the drill more, and we did some warmup reps of the drill so he could get a feel for it. Once we got started, we did:

• 5 reps of the variety pack drill
• 1 block-start rep over one hurdle
• 1 block-start rep over two hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over three hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over four hurdles
• 2 block-start reps over five hurdles

The second time we emphasized the block starts more, so it went like this:

• 2 reps of the variety pack drill
• 1 block-start rep over one hurdle
• 1 block-start rep over two hurdles
• 2 block-start reps over three hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over four hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over five hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over six hurdles
• 1 block-start rep over seven hurdles

In that second session, we actually weren’t planning to get up to seven hurdles, but he was having a good day, so we rolled with it. But I did know, going into the workout, that I wanted to get into the second half of the race (six hurdles), which is why we only did two reps of the variety pack drill, as it served as a good warmup before cranking up the speed. 

Below is a video of Ayden doing the workout the first time we did it. Not all reps are shown, but most of them are.

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