7-Step Block Start Experimentation
by Steve McGill
When a hurdler is considering transitioning from an 8-step approach to the first hurdle to a 7-step approach, the best time to experiment with making this transition is this time of year, when there is enough time to work on it and ultimately implement it in races. As I’ve stated before in previous articles, I have rarely coached any hurdlers who took seven steps to the first hurdle. My first one, from about eight years ago, was a kid who was 6-2 by the time he was in the eighth grade, so eight-stepping was never even a consideration. Running the 100 meter hurdles back then in the 13-14 age group, he kept running into the hurdle when we tried to eight-step, so we switched to seven-stepping on day one, and never looked back. The second one, Brandon Johnson, just graduated and now is at the University of Cincinnati. Brandon wasn’t as tall, maybe 6-0. But he had a background as a long jumper, so he was exceptionally springy and explosive in his lower legs. With him, eight-stepping worked fine in his sophomore year, was crowded his junior year, and was untenable his senior year. In the fall of his senior year, we made the transition, and he seven-stepped his whole senior year. In both cases, we didn’t seven-step until eight-stepping was no longer a viable option.
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This fall, I’ve been working with a high school junior, Ayden Thompson, who is 6-4 and quite probably still growing. When he and his dad first contacted me this past July, Ayden had only run about six meets in his senior season, without a hurdle coach at his school, and had managed to get his personal best down to 17.0 after starting out in the 20.0 range while five-stepping between the hurdles. With those kinds of times, in spite of his height, seven-stepping didn’t even enter my mind initially. But after working on his sprint mechanics for a few sessions, it was evident to me that he had much more speed than his personal best indicated. So one day in August we did put the blocks down and gauge where he stood, and while the eight-step approach was a little tight, the seven-step approach looked like too much of a reach. So we decided that we’d stick with eight-stepping this year and then see about seven-stepping in his senior year.
So we returned to our usual drilling, working on smoothing out his technique. I locked in on the quickstep drill, in which we use a six-step approach to the first hurdle from 33 feet away. In workouts in late September, he was getting really crowded in his run-up to the first hurdle, to the point where he had to jump up to avoid running into the hurdle. That had me thinking. With seven-steppers, I have them take five strides to the first hurdle in the quickstep drill. But in my mind, Ayden was still an eight-stepper. Did I need to reconsider? Would we need to seven-step this year? I decided that we had to find out, and that we had to find out now, before it would get too cold to find out. I didn’t want to go into the indoor season unsure about whether he’d be eight-stepping or seven-stepping.
In our next session, in the first weekend of October, we worked on his seven-step approach. I took Ayden through the same process I had used with Brandon when he transitioned to seven-stepping. First we did block starts with no hurdle up, but I placed a cone at the six-foot takeoff mark and another at the seven-foot takeoff mark. For someone of Ayden’s height, a six-foot takeoff is too close, but he needs to get to the six-foot cone when no hurdle is there to ensure that he’ll need to take a cut step as his seventh step when the hurdle is there. I put a heavy emphasis on making sure that he stayed pushing forward out of the blocks and exaggerated his arm swing so that those early strides would be big strides, but with his feet landing under him. No reaching, because reaching will help you cover the distance but it will also cause you to stand up too soon and lose momentum. In these hurdle-free reps, Ayden hit the six-foot takeoff distance consistently, which meant he was ready to graduate to clearing an actual hurdle. So I set one up at 33 inches.
Gradually, I raised the hurdle. Up to 36, and then 39, race height. I instructed him to attack the hurdle the same as he had driven out when there had been no hurdle there. That way, he would force himself to be in a position where he needed to take a cut step. You don’t want to consciously decide to take a cut step, I told him. You want it to happen instinctively. On the first rep, he took off from seven feet away and it looked nice and fluid. On the second rep, he got to the six-foot cone and almost crashed. After that, he consistently took off from seven feet away, with no reaching, with his torso pushing forward.
Once we looked good consistently over one hurdle at race height, I added a second hurdle, moved two feet in from race spacing. The purpose here was to observe the transition from hurdle one to hurdle two. The real way to tell if the seven-step approach is working is based on how the athlete looks coming off the first hurdle. If the athlete is able to keep pushing forward, to keep accelerating, and if the rhythm to hurdle two is quick and precise, then we know we’re in good shape. In this particular workout, his rhythm looked very good. And that’s what convinced me that the seven-step approach for Ayden is here to stay — that we don’t have to wait until senior year to seven-step; we can seven-step in his first indoor meet this year.
A couple things: Firstly, when I’m working on the block start specifically, I don’t focus on technique over the hurdle very much at all. Whatever technique is already in there is what we’ll go with. Once the seven-step approach is ingrained and it’s fast and it’s sharp and it’s crisp, then we can add technical emphasis to the mix, although we won’t necessarily try to fix technical flaws in this portion of the workout. Instead, we’ll observe the flaws here and then work on them later by transitioning to some hurdle drilling, or we’ll wait until the next hurdle session to address the flaw through drilling. But I never address technical flaws when working on the block start unless it’s something that is directly affecting the athlete’s ability to transition from hurdle one to hurdle two.
Secondly, now that we’ve established that seven-stepping is the way to go, we’ll need to keep working on it so that it feels more natural and feels more powerful. That’s no different than any hurdler who takes eight steps to the first hurdle. There are always going to be things in your start that you can fix.
Below is the video from the training session where Ayden and I worked on his start. In it, you’ll see the progression that I described in this article.
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