Teaching a New Hurdler how to Hurdle (on Borrowed Time)
by Steve McGill
In hurdle coaching, there is nothing more difficult, and, in some cases, more aggravating, frustrating, and agonizing, than teaching a beginner hurdler how to hurdle during the outdoor season. With beginners, I almost always begin in the off-season — at least in January or February, if not sooner. But when you’re coaching a school team with athletes who play other sports and have a million other things going on in their lives, finding time during the off-season can prove to be impossible. Also, there’s always going to be that new kid who hasn’t run track before but wants to try the hurdles and has the physical tools to be good at it. When I was an assistant for a school team for two decades in the late 90’s and 2000’s, I had success developing beginner hurdlers during the season. My first national-caliber hurdler, Cameron Akers, back in 2000, went from never hurdling before in March to running 14.40 by May and 14.21 by July. He was an exception to the rule, obviously, but I’ve had similar successes with other hurdlers over the years who weren’t as naturally gifted but who did develop rapidly.
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So here I am now, in 2022, head coach at a school that doesn’t have a track, and that only has about 12 kids on the team. I wasn’t originally planning on trying to make a hurdler out of any of the squad members. But then after a few meets, and looking at the hurdlers in these meets, especially the girl hurdlers, I started to think to myself, well damn…. In our first meet, only one girl was three-stepping. All the rest were four-stepping and one was five-stepping. Our second meet was similar, and in our third meet two weeks ago, only one girl even signed up for the hurdles, and she ran all by herself. That’s when I said to myself, okay, I gotta get somebody on this team running the hurdles.
My first choice was a girl who runs the sprints and stands about 5-10, but she shot me down instantly, citing that she didn’t want to mess up her knees for basketball, as she plays AAU. My next option was a girl named Grace who was running the mile and the 800 in meets, but was only doing decently well. When I broached the subject of giving the hurdles a try to her, she liked the idea and even seemed a bit eager. In talking to her, I found out that she has a background in dance, which meant I could expect her to have good explosive power. But of course, dancers are taught to plantar-flex their ankles, which is the opposite of the dorsi-flexion we want in sprinting and hurdling.
For our first session, we met on a Sunday morning so that we could use an actual track — a public school track about ten minutes from my house — because there was no way I was going to conduct session number one on the sidewalk. I quickly discovered that what I hoped wouldn’t be true was true: that I’d have to spend a whole lot of time teaching her how to run before I could begin teaching her how to hurdle.
Dorsi-flexion did not come easily to her, even when standing still with her hand against a wall. So I literally had to grab her foot and take her through the motion of cycling the leg and landing on the ball of the foot. Then I took her through A-marches and then A-skips, which took close to an hour before I felt confident that she was ready to go over a hurdle. I tried to start with a marching popover over one hurdle that was lowered to 21 inches, but that proved to be an exercise in futility. So I switched to walk-overs over five hurdles with the hurdles at 21 inches. Then we did side walk-overs for trail leg so I could teach her the trail leg motion. From there, we went back to the popovers, and she was able to at least get the concept of pushing off the back leg, even though the idea of pushing the hips forward wasn’t clicking.
Finally, realizing that I had to get her to where she was functional and that I didn’t have time to nitpick every detail with meets coming up, I introduced the speed element of the race to her; I had her sprint over the first hurdle from the start line (standing start). From there, we added more hurdles — up to four — and worked on rhythm. With her sprint mechanics not being sound enough and her speed not being fast enough to 3-step, we settled on a four-step pattern in hopes that she’d be able to maintain such a pattern in a race.
In our next session, on a weekday during a school-team practice, I had her do a whole bunch of walk-over drilling and then a little bit of popover drilling, trying to ingrain the dorsi-flexion. In her next sprint workout after that, her sprint mechanics looked very sound, to the point where my assistant coach was stunned. His reaction informed me that Grace was indeed coming along in regards to her sprint mechanics, which means it’s only a matter of time before we see progress in her hurdling mechanics. Once she really grasps the sprinting concepts, I feel confident that she’ll be able to three-step, but I don’t know if that’ll happen this season simply because I don’t know if we’ll have enough opportunities to practice on a good surface. In our most recent session, I had her go over the first three hurdles a few times, using a parking lot as our track. We only did about five reps because I didn’t want to kill her legs.
The video below is of the session we did on the sidewalk, drilling the walk-overs and popovers. She’s making a lot of mistakes, obviously, but she’s an eager learner who is coming along nicely.
Overall, if I’m giving advice on coaching a beginner during the season, I would suggest the following steps in the following order:
1) Teach sprint mechanics, emphasizing dorsi-flexion, knee lift, high heel recovery, staying on the balls of the feet, pushing the chest forward, and moving the hands in a cheek-to-cheek motion.
2) Teach A-marches and A-skips, emphasizing the items mentioned above in step one.
3) Have the athlete do slow sprints focusing on the items mentioned in step one.
4) Introduce hurdle drills, starting with walk-overs and side walk-overs to learn the movements.
5) Introduce marching popovers so that the athlete learns to push off the back leg and leave the ground.
6) Introduce speed gradually, having the athlete clear the first hurdle from a standing start, and then adding more hurdles moved in a foot or two. Hurdles should be lower than race height to start with.
7) Keep repeating steps one through six, adding in block starts once everything else looks solid enough.
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