Is Every 3-Stepper a 3-Stepper?
by Steve McGill

I was working with a new athlete last weekend who just started with me about a month ago. This girl, a high school junior, is very flexible and explosive, has a gymnastics background, and told me she ran a 17-low last year, 3-stepping the whole way. Without having seen her race, and only having seen her sprint, I could tell she was a puddle-hopper — a term I use to identify hurdlers who run with the goal of reaching every hurdle. Such athletes run with their toes pointing down, and, instead of applying force to the track and lifting their knees to create stride length, they create stride length by reaching with the foot. To me, such hurdlers can’t really be called three-steppers, even though they are three-stepping. A true three-stepper is either sprinting between the hurdles, or is running so fast that he or she doesn’t have room to three-step between the hurdles. But a true three-stepper does not puddle-hop between the hurdles. 

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I call it fool’s gold. When you’re three-stepping but you’re puddle-hopping, that’s fool’s gold. Yes, you’re taking three steps between the hurdles, but you’re fighting the whole to maintain that three-step action, whereas if you were really a three-stepper, you’d be accelerating in the early part of the race, and you’d be dealing with crowding issues in the middle part of the race. So, learning to three-step by reaching with the foot ultimately does more harm than good. It ingrains poor sprint mechanics, it ingrains poor hurdling mechanics, and it makes all of these poor mechanics very difficult to correct. 

With Steffi — the girl I referred to in the beginning of this article — I told her we would have to tear down and rebuild her sprinting technique so that we could tear down and rebuild her hurdling technique, so that she can gain the full benefit of her athleticism. And that’s what we’ve started doing. Our sessions consists of lots of A-marches, A-skips, high-knee cycles, marching popovers over water bottles (functioning as hurdles), popovers over 24-inch mini hurdles, and slow, five-stepping cycle drilling over the mini hurdles. I generally don’t use five-stepping drills anymore, but I needed to with her because the three-step rhythm had her moving too quickly, without enough time to think, leading to little progress. Both gymnastics and the way in which she initially learned how to three-step make it very difficult for her to run with her ankles dorsi-flexed. With the popovers, she would point her toes down and kick her foot out even when stepping over a water bottle.

So, each session, we go slowly, methodically. Because she’s so used to kicking her feet out over the hurdles and running in what I call a scooting motion (extremely low knee lift, with the feet always in front of the knees), I had her do a marching drill that involved exaggerating the knee lift and exaggerating the heel recovery. These angles felt very strange and uncomfortable to her at first, but, as I told her, these are the angles she will need to grow accustomed to if she is going to become a true three-stepper who sprints between the hurdles.

I’m not of the school that says that three-stepping should be easy for beginners, that you have to just “go for it.” You need to have a certain amount of speed, a certain amount of explosive power, and an aggressive mindset. In many cases, height does help. But most importantly, you have to know how to sprint properly. Hurdlers who are rushed into three-stepping before they have adopted proper sprint mechanics are being set up for failure. If we’re talking about beginners who have never hurdled before, proper sprint mechanics must come first, before we even put a hurdle up. 

What I want to make sure of is that the athlete is applying force to the track every stride, that the athlete is maintaining dorsi-flexion every stride, that the athlete is pushing off the ball of the foot every stride, that the athlete is keeping the hands high and the knees high every stride, that the athlete is keeping the chest pushed forward every stride. I don’t want to see any rocking back on the heels, any sinking in at the stomach, any dropping of the hands, any lowering of the knees, any reaching downward with the toes. If you’re a beginner and I’m teaching you how to hurdle, I need all that stuff to be on point before we put a hurdle up, Then we can focus on getting over a hurdle, because now, when I’m explaining to you what I want you to do hurdle-wise, you will have all the sprint mechanics stuff in you as a frame of reference. Now, leading with the knee isn’t just a hurdling thing; it’s a sprinting thing. Push forward isn’t just a hurdling thing; it’s a sprinting thing. Now, assuming you do have decent speed, three-stepping should come easily. 

For hurdlers like Steffi, who do have the speed and athleticism but haven’t been taught proper sprint mechanics and have been allowed to hurdle with poor sprint mechanics, there is a whole lot of work required to push out the bad habits and ingrain the new ones. It’s time-consuming, tedious, meticulous work. Like I and many coaches have said in the past, it’s a lot easier to coach someone who is brand new and hasn’t developed any habits than it is to coach someone who has ingrained a lot of bad habits. 

Is 4-stepping an option for hurdlers who don’t have the speed to 3-step properly? A lot of coaches would emphatically say no. I would also say no, but not as emphatically. For those hurdlers who have no aspirations to run track beyond high school, I say sure, why not? For those kids who play other sports in other seasons and for whom you only have a few months each spring to work with them, there’s only so much you can do. But for hurdlers who are all-in in regards to track, there’s no reason that with enough time spent working on developing speed and developing solid sprint mechanics that they can’t learn to three-step with ease. 

The biggest point I want to re-emphasize in this article is: don’t rush the hurdling part. Get the sprint mechanics right first, then add in the hurdling element, teach the hurdling drills properly, and watch the athletes get better and better. If the focus is on the hurdling element too soon, they might never learn to be truly aggressive in approaching the first hurdle, and in staying aggressive between all the rest of the hurdles. We don’t want hurdlers who fixate on the hurdles. We want hurdlers who are focused on getting to the finish line first.

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