Fixing the Lead Leg Kick
by Steve McGill
One of the most common, and most difficult to correct, technical flaws among hurdlers is that of kicking out the lead leg and locking it at the knee. For most hurdlers, this flaw is a result of faulty sprint mechanics. Lack of dorsi-flexion, leading to too much back-kick, leads to the lead leg swinging from the hip. Whether the leg is bent at the knee or not doesn’t really matter. The fact that it is swinging from the hip means that the foot will kick out, and up, causing the knee to lock, which creates a pause in the lead leg and a pause in the entire hurdling action. Even for many hurdlers who do lead with the knee (as opposed to swinging from the hip), they don’t raise the knee high enough while attacking the hurdle, which means they will need to use the foot kicking out to get the body up and over the hurdle. This habit of kicking out the lead leg — of leading with the foot more so than with the knee — is a difficult habit to correct once it has been ingrained, even for hurdlers who do exhibit efficient sprint mechanics. I usually say that flaws in hurdling technique are rooted in flaws in sprinting technique. But this flaw is one flaw that often lingers even after sprinting flaws have been addressed. Hurdlers who are used to kicking out the lead leg will continue to kick out the lead leg because that’s what they are used to doing, and because that’s what their muscle memory informs them they should do. So, how do we fix this problem? Read on:
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The first thing you have to understand, as a coach, is that ingrained habits are very hard to fix, simply because they’ve become ingrained. As I’ve always contended, working with an athlete who is new to hurdling is easier than working with an athlete who has hurdled in the past and developed bad habits. So, rule number one is, be patient. And remind the athlete to be patient. It’s going to take some time. Rule number two is, start now, in the off-season, so that the habit has been eliminated by the time the competitive season starts. It is nearly impossible to successfully correct flaws when there’s a competition coming up every weekend. The training always has to be focused on preparing for the next race, so technical flaws can only be addressed to a less-than-ideal degree. We can’t have a heavy drilling session on Thursday if we have a meet on Saturday. We have to put the blocks down and get some starts in and let our technique be what it is. Even if I want to train through a meet, the very fact that the athlete does race means that confidence can be affected if the technical flaws aren’t addressed and the race goes poorly. So yes, if you want to fix the lead leg kick, or any other flaws, the time to do so is now.
For me, when addressing the lead leg kick, I’ll go all the way back to the beginning of sprint mechanics. I’ll start with A marches. Even if the athlete does A marches perfectly, we’ll start there as a way of informing the athlete that “this is what we want to do when we’re sprinting full speed, and these are the angles we want to take over the hurdle: knee up, heel up.” Meaning, knee driving up to the chest and the heel driving up under the hamstring. From there we go to A skips, giving the same reminders. A lot of sprinters, when doing A skips, will let the heel get away a little bit, so that the foot gets ahead of the knee a little bit. As hurdlers, we don’t want to do our A skips that way. We want the heel coming up under the hamstring. Until we’re doing that consistently and without needing to think about it, we’re not ready to put a hurdle up yet.
Then we move on to the high-knee drill, focusing on the same things. In this drill, the legs are actually cycling, so we want to make sure that the heel is coming up under the hamstring every stride. As you may have figured out by now, the key to leading with the knee and avoiding the lead-leg kick is what the heel does. If the heel goes forward when the knee comes up, you’re toast. If the heel comes up (under the hamstring) as the knee comes up, then you’re good to move on to the next drill. The first hurdle drill we’ll use to address the lead-leg kick is the marching popovers — one of my bread and butter drills. When I originally created this drill, its purpose was specifically to teach hurdlers to rely less on extending the lead leg and to rely more on pushing off the back leg. Hurdlers who are in the habit of extending the lead leg as soon as they take off have a very hard time grasping the marching popover drill at first, to the point where I always keep extra water bottles in my bag when going to practice so that I can start athletes off with clearing the water bottles, with the water bottles serving as hurdles. Usually, even over the water bottles, which they could literally step over, the athletes who are used to kicking out the foot will kick out the foot. So, what the marching popover drill forces these athletes to do is drive the knee and heel up. If they’re having trouble understanding the concept, I’ll exaggerate the cue. I’ll tell them to bring the knee all the way up to the chin. “Hit yourself in the chin with your knee.” Of course, they won’t be able to do so, but in trying to do so, the heel will come up and the foot won’t kick out. To cover the ground, I tell them, thrust the hips forward and push off the back leg with force. Don’t rely on extending the lead leg to cover the ground. With the lead leg bent at the knee and the heel under the hamstring, now you’re in a position to cycle the legs over the hurdle, with the trail leg following immediately behind the lead leg, with no delay.
Once they’ve mastered the marching popover drill at 30” (females) or 33” (males), then we can move on to drills that require more speed. First we go to the cycle drill, where the hurdles remain lower than race height and are spaced 15-17 apart (females) or 19-21 feet apart (males). Every time we progress to a new drill, adding more speed, there’s the potential that the old habit will come back. So we have to be ready for that. But like I always tell my athletes, if you’ve mastered the marching popover drill, you’ll be able to master the rest of the drills, because now you have muscle memory in your body for how the motion is supposed to feel. If progress is coming slower than we would like, we’ll go back to the marching popover as needed to reinforce the mechanics we’re looking for.
From the cycle drill, we move on the quickstep, where the approach to the first hurdle is faster and the spacing between the hurdles is wider (21-22 feet for females, 24-25 feet for males). Again, there’s a chance for regression because we’re going faster. But if regression does occur, we don’t get upset and we don’t get frustrated and we don’t panic. As the coach, I keep reminding the athlete of our cues, and let the athlete decide which cue is the one to focus on each rep, as only the athlete can know which cue is really effective. And there are a bunch of cues: knee up, heel up, push forward, lean deeply, hold the lean, stay forward, attack the track. My cues are never phrased negatively. I’ll never say “don’t stand up” or “don’t kick the foot out” or anything like that. I don’t want to remind them of what they want to do. That can create the mindset of not wanting to mess up, and fearing to do so. Instead, I want to use phrasing that reminds them of what they do want to do.
Once the athletes can feel the difference between what they are now trying to do vs. what they’ve been doing in the past — once wrong feels wrong, then we can feel confident that progress will come and the issue of kicking out the lead leg will go away entirely. But it takes more than just understanding the difference; this is not merely an intellectual exercise. It takes being able to feel the difference. Along the way, you’ll want to see incrementally progress every session. When the athlete is first adjusting, there will be reps where he or she reverts back to the old way just because that muscle memory is still in there. But gradually, once wrong feels wrong, that will happen less and less often. As coach, you have to keep providing more challenges. Once they’ve mastered all of the drills discussed above — the marching popovers, the cycle drill, and the quickstep drill, then you can move on to sprinting over hurdles from the start line, using a three-point start at first, and then graduating to a block start. The key is to keep adding speed incrementally. If you add too much speed too soon, you’re setting up the athlete for failure, and you always want to set up the athlete for success. Keep providing new challenges, but never present the athletes with challenges they’re not yet ready for.
Below is a video of an athlete I just recently started working with. He’s a high school junior who, when I started with him this past July, kicked out the lead leg to an extreme degree. In the video, he is doing the quickstep drill over 36’s and then 39’s. When I started him on the drill, he was clearing 30’s. The kick action is still evident, but less pronounced. We will continue with the quick step drill until the kick action is gone completely. Then, and only then, we will move on to the three-point starts.
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