The Aries Merritt Lead Arm
by Steve McGill
If you’ve followed this website and read back issues of this magazine over the years, you know that I’m not a big fan of the Aries Merritt lead arm style. But I’m an open-minded person, and I’ve never been averse to Aries’ style when it is done efficiently. My issue has always been that so many hurdlers who have copied Aries’ style have not very closely resembled the efficiency of the 2012 Merritt who had the best season ever for a hurdler, bringing the world record all the way down to 12.80 and winning an Olympic gold medal. Unfortunately, we live in a copycat world in all facets of society, but often is the case that those who do the copying don’t really know what they’re doing. The athlete I’m working with currently, Ayden Thompson, who just finished his junior year of high school, has adopted a version of the Aries lead arm. It wasn’t my intent for him to do so, but he did it on his own, and when I asked him about it during a recent practice, he said that “it helps me to keep my arm from pausing.” That explanation was good enough for me to give it my approval and to work with him on refining it.
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A little background first. What is the Aries Merritt lead arm? What does it look like? The video below that I did about ten years ago describes it, the part beginning at the 2:25 mark to the 3:45 mark.
As I explain in the video, everything in hurdling follows a 1-2-3 pattern. Lead leg: lead with the knee, extend the foot, cycle the foot back to the ground. Trail leg: Push off the ground, raise the knee up while slightly opening the ground, drive the knee to the front. The lead arm can vary in its 1-2-3. As I explain in the video (if you watch the whole thing), Sally Pearson lead arm action will be: drive the hand up to the level of the forehead, slightly open the elbow so that the hand extends forward, then punch the hand back down. Allen Johnson. Drive the hand up slightly above the dome, turn the hand so that the palm is facing outward, pull the hand down forcefully. My former athlete, Keni Harrison, does a version of the Sally lead arm because that’s what we were modeling ourselves after when I was coaching her. Dawn Harper-Nelson’s lead arm was very similar to Pearson’s, as is Jasmine Camacho-Quinn’s, which is part of the reason that she is so super-efficient over the hurdles. Grant Holloway is also similar with his lead arm, but his arm tends to pull back instead of punching down, which is why he sometimes has balance issues late in races. Liu Xiang punched his hand straight up and straight down, so the “three” of his 1-2-3 involved his arm swinging far behind his back. In looking at some other athletes mentioned in this month’s magazine, Devon Allen and Trey Cunningham are both similar to Sally with their lead arms.
Based on my observations, all the hurdlers who have adopted some version of the Aries lead arm are male, and there’s an obvious reason for that — the hurdles are high enough that it takes a little extra effort to get over them. I think I remember seeing an interview with Aries a long time ago where he stated that he himself didn’t consciously do it when he first started doing it; it just helped him to get over the hurdles so he stuck with it. As I mention in the video, Aries’ lead arm was much less efficient in the early part of his pro career than it was by the time he broke the world record. The 2007 version of Aries’ lead arm noticeably kept him in the air too long by causing his lead leg to extend to the point where the knee locked, and the trail leg flattened out too much. By 2012 that lead arm was humming.
So, my issue with so many hurdlers copying the Aries style is that most of them look like the 2007 Aries, and hardly any of them even remotely resemble the 2012 Aries. To me, the biggest mistake to avoid when it comes to the lead arm is allowing the arm to cross the body. That’s what I always tell my hurdlers, and that’s what I told Ayden regarding him implementing the Aries style. If the hand turns so that the palm is facing down instead of the thumb pointing up, that’s fine as long as the hand punching straight down. Women can get away with the arm crossing the body more than men can, but even among women now you’re not seeing any of the best women hurdlers today swinging the arms side to side. But getting back to Ayden, I saw on one rep that as he turned his hand over (in step 2 of the 1-2-3), it was crossing the plane of his nose. Actually, what I most instantly noticed was that his trail leg looked flatter and his hip on the trail leg side opened up. Then, in looking at the film on my phone, I noticed that his lead arm infiltrating the other side of his body was the cause.
So, to keep it simple, all we’re trying to do here is eliminate wasted motions. Everything in the hurdles is x 10, so your movements have to be efficient enough that you can execute them ten times at full speed under pressure-filled conditions. With the Aries style, in the 1-2-3 action, the arm should not go out too wide in part one, it should not go over the head or across the body in part two, and be in position to punch straight down in part three. When it’s done that way, I could become convinced that it’s equally or even more efficient than the Sally Pearson style for the male athlete going over 42-inch barriers, just because the male athletes do need more of a punch to initiate descent than women do.
Below is video footage of my guy Ayden Thompson doing block starts. I filmed from the head-on angle so it’s easier to see the lead arm action. You’ll see that it’s very efficient over most hurdles but that there are instances where the arm does cross his body and cause some issues with the trail leg and with the hips staying straight.
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