Lead Arm Angles
by Steve McGill

The lead arm is arguably the most important limb when it comes to developing efficient hurdling technique, as its movements largely determine the movements of the lead leg and the trail leg. Even if the lead leg and trail leg know what they are supposed to do, they won’t be able to execute the movements properly if the lead arm is leading them astray. A lead arm that swings across the body will cause the foot of the lead leg to kick out and lock at the knee. It will also cause the trail leg to flatten out, usually resulting in contact with the obstacle, or, at the very least, resulting in the hips twisting. An efficient lead arm, meanwhile, will not only help to solve such problems, but will also enable the athlete to create speed coming off hurdles. 

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Recently I’ve been working with a high school junior, Ayden Thompson, who has been a regular in my YouTube videos in recent months. Ayden is tall, 6-4, and when he first came to me during the summer, he used his height to compensate for a lot of technical flaws. The biggest one was that of kicking out the lead leg and locking it at the knee. For me, that’s the ultimate deal breaker. We can’t go on to anything else more advanced if you’re swinging the lead leg from the hip as one piece. So we spent a lot of time in our sessions working on that. As I always do with athletes who don’t lead with the knee, I started him off with basic sprint drills in order to rebuild his sprinting form. I taught him dorsi-flexion and had him do A marches, A skips, and high-knee cycles out the wazoo, ingraining new muscle memory while pushing out old muscle memory.

From there, we moved into the marching popover drill in order to get the trail leg right. With the style of hurdling I teach, we want the trail leg cycling right behind the lead leg, just as if the feet were on bicycle pedals. We don’t want that delay, where the trail leg pauses before it whips to the front. We want a continuous, fluid motion. The popover drill exposes hurdlers who rely too much on their lead leg to do all the work in clearing the hurdle. When clearing the first hurdle in the drill, they’ll want to kick the foot out. That’s how they’ve grown accustomed to clearing hurdles — by kicking the foot out. But we don’t want to kick the foot out; we want to drive the knee (and heel) up. Which means, we must push forcefully off the back leg, while simultaneously thrusting our hips forward. That’s how we get our hip height (push off the back leg) and that’s how we cover the ground (thrusting the hips forward). 

With Ayden, we made good progress rapidly, as he is a hard worker who listens well to instruction. But another thing I noticed about his technique was that his lead arm would often pause mid-flight while clearing the barriers. That pause was consistently causing him to float and causing the trail leg to hang back instead of driving to the front. Whenever I saw his hips opening up on the trail leg side, I knew it was because that lead arm was pausing mid-flight.

In our most recent session, we honed in on that issue from the outset. But, to my surprise, even without the pause in the lead arm, I noticed that his hips were still opening up. Hmmm. This was a mystery. I was baffled. What was I not seeing? In looking closely at one of the reps that I had recorded on my phone, I noticed something that had escaped me in all these past sessions: His lead arm, as he was descending off the hurdle, was pulling back instead of punching down. OMGeezy, how had I not seen that before? It was now obvious to me that the pull-back action was causing the twist in the hips, and that that was what we needed to address going forward. The pull-back action is more pronounced and easier to detect in hurdlers who kick out the lead leg. I guess that’s why I hadn’t caught it sooner with Ayden — because I had been so fixated on getting the legs to cycle. I had been breaking my own rule of being sure to look at the whole picture, and to not isolate parts when analyzing technique. But anyway, what I tell hurdlers who do that pull-back move is to focus on the hand, not the whole arm. The hand must punch down. The angle at the elbow will open, but as long as the elbow doesn’t lock, we’re good. 

Another athlete I coach, Teri Pridgen, a high school sophomore, ran flat-footed when we first got back together a couple months ago. (I had coached her some during her 8th-grade year, pre-Covid). With Teri, the lead arm was doing a major swing move across the body upon attacking the hurdle, and then another major swing move in the opposite direction while descending off the hurdle. As with Ayden, we had much to work on with her sprint mechanics first. In our first sessions back a couple months ago, she hit a hurdle and fell, leading to a nice bruise on her knee and a renewed fear of the obstacles — something I had dealt with when I had first started with her a couple years ago.

So we worked our way back up, rebuilt her confidence, and we’re now at the point where she is quickstep-drilling over 33’s with speed and confidence, and she is doing a great job of negotiating the shrinking space between the hurdles. One of the things I observed as she continued to complete reps was that the swing of the lead arm across the body was becoming less pronounced. Instead of swinging all the way across, it was swinging to her nose, and then swinging back. As a result, she was able to maintain forward momentum more easily. She wasn’t standing upright off hurdles like she had been before. So I seized the opportunity to make a suitable compromise with her. Though I prefer for the lead arm to be as close to up-and-down as possible, with hardly any raising of the elbow, I told her:
“Hey, if you’re able to keep the elbow low enough that you’re able to punch down, then I’m okay with the hand moving across the body as you take off. As long as the hand doesn’t go past the nose, and you’re able to punch down and not swing across, we’re good.” 

So that’s where we are now. Whether or not her lead arm ever gets to how I want it to look remains to be seen. But sometimes you have to make compromises with athletes in order to avoid stagnation and frustration. It’s like if you’re flying to another country — you might need to take a connecting flight to get there. That middle destination isn’t the ultimate destination, but without going there first you might not ever get to where you’re going. But the compromise has to be on the coach’s terms, and it has to make logical sense, and the athlete has to buy in. 
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