Finding the Delicate Balance
by Steve McGill
Coaching hurdlers is all about finding the balance between teaching technique, establishing rhythm, and preparing the athletes to race. When there is enough time to do all three, there really are no issues. But with meets beginning prior to the winter holiday season nowadays, there is not enough time to do all three in the manner that all three need to be done, unless the coach and athlete agree to train through the indoor meets. Even then, race performance cannot be ignored, as solid performances are vital to developing an athlete’s confidence. When it comes to this time of year — mid-February, when the indoor season is winding down for most athletes who didn’t qualify for indoor nationals, we are now looking forward to the spring outdoor season and an influx of athletes who didn’t compete indoors. Even those who did compete indoors now need to prepare for the longer outdoor race that doubles the amount of hurdles that need to be cleared in the 55 or 60m race. So, with limited time, with meets popping up once or twice per week, how do we continue to develop hurdlers in all phases without putting too much emphasis on one aspect and not enough emphasis on another?
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When starting with a hurdler in the late summer or early fall, it’s easy to integrate everything that needs to be integrated prior to having the hurdler sprint over hurdles full speed from a block start. There is plenty of time to teach sprint mechanics and address all flaws in sprint mechanics. There is plenty of time to build the athlete’s hurdle endurance. There is plenty of time to teach all the aspects of technique and to explain how all parts of the body work together in creating a harmonious flow. There is plenty of time to start with low hurdles and slow speeds with the spacing discounted before gradually increasing the level of challenge. Even with the indoor season beginning earlier and earlier every year, and even with an ever-increasing number of indoor meets available every year, starting in the fall does allow enough time to enter the indoor season ready to race, and to use races as part of the training regimen. But when an athlete is starting during the indoor season, or, during the outdoor season, the speed element has to be introduced much sooner. So, to rephrase the question asked at the end of the previous paragraph, how do we introduce speed into the equation without sacrificing technical and rhythmic development?
The answer I’ve come up with is to coach them all together — technique, rhythm, and speed. The method I use is to start a hurdle session with foundational hurdle drills, transition into more challenging drills, transition into block starts, then transition into block starts over hurdles. Doing it this way, I can explain to the athlete how it all goes together — the emphasis on technique and rhythm in the drills and the emphasis on speed and aggression. in the block starts.
One of the girls I’m working with this year, Stefi Williams, is a high school sophomore with whom I just started about three or four months ago. Stefi came to me with a severe kicking habit with the lead leg, causing her to clear hurdles way too high and causing the hip on her trail leg side to open up too much. Most significantly, the big kick with the lead leg slowed her down so much that she had no speed going into the next hurdle, and had to play the “reach with the foot” game to maintain her three-step. So, recently, I decided to put Stefi on the same types of workouts I was doing with another kid I just started with this year, Ayden Thompson. The progression of the workout goes as follows:
- Marching popovers
- Quickstep drilling
- Block starts with no hurdles
- Block starts over the first hurdle
- Block starts over up to as many as three hurdles
With the marching popovers, the hurdles are at 30” (girls) or 33” (boys), spaced 12 feet apart. The purpose of the popover drill is to instill the habit of driving with the knee of the lead leg, not with the foot. We also work on pushing the hips forward so we can “step” over the hurdle. As I always tell them, if your hips go up, you go up. How many reps we do depends on how far along the athlete’s technique is. With Ayden, we’ll just do five reps over five hurdles now and consider it part of our warmup. With Stefi we’ll get up to ten reps because she has things to work on that Ayden has already mastered. I don’t want to do more than ten because I don’t want to put too much on the legs before we get to the faster parts of the workout.
With the quicksteps, the hurdles are either at race height or a click below race height, depending on the athlete’s development level. Or we might start a click below race height and then work up to race height. Again, we’ll do five reps over five hurdles (spaced 24-25” apart for boys, or 21-22 feet apart for girls) as a continuation of the warmup.
Then, the block starts represent a shift in mindset. Here, we’re transitioning from thinking a whole lot about technical details to focusing on being powerful and aggressive. The shift in mindset can be difficult for some, as they want to continue thinking about technique when all that does is slow them down. The purpose here is to see what elements of the drilling are ingrained enough that the athlete executes them without needing to think about them. Here, I’ll allow for technical mistakes and encourage the athlete to sprint through the mistakes. Trust your speed. With Stefi, she wasn’t kicking her lead leg very much at all in the popovers, then it was a little more pronounced in the quicksteps, and then it came back full bore in the starts. I’m fine with that. It tells us what we need to know: that the technical elements haven’t been fully ingrained yet. But we also know that her speed can compensate for her flaws in the meantime. So, we’re still building confidence even as we’re still fully engaged in the learning process.
The goal would be to ultimately get to a point where the drills can be minimized so that the legs are fresher for the speed part, and more hurdles can be added to the speed part. By the end of the spring season, we want to be going over seven or eight hurdles out of the blocks, so we can’t be doing a lot of drilling beforehand.
The video below features Stefi doing the workout described above.
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