Quickfeet Drilling & Quickstep Workout
by Steve McGill
A few years ago I saw a video on Instagram of Aries Merritt doing a quickness drill over 24-1nch mini hurdles, and it was one of the very few times I’ve seen someone doing a drill and was immediately struck by how effective it was. Usually, when I see drills on YouTube or Instagram (which I’m no longer on), I can see I’ve either used them before, don’t want to use them, or will create my own variation of it. But with this drill, I knew that all I needed to do was copy and paste it. Now, I had seen other people use the mini hurdles before, and had used them myself, but mainly as a way to help beginners gain an understanding of rhythm with minimal fear, since the hurdles are so low and so flimsy that they can’t do an athlete any harm. But using the mini hurdles to help elite athletes ingrain a quicker cadence, and to teach them how to tap dance between the hurdles wasn’t something I had never seen or done before, but ever since then I have incorporated it into my routine of drills I use for hurdlers who are at the elite level. Since most of the athletes I coach are high schoolers, “elite” means sub-14 in the 100/110m hurdles.
This month’s workout is one that includes some reps over the mini hurdles, and it is indeed designed for elite hurdlers, although non-elite hurdlers can benefit from it if variants are implemented, which I’ll explain later. Here’s the workout:
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–Set up five mini hurdles at 24 inches (fold-up practice hurdles will work too if you don’t have access to mini hurdles)
–Hurdles are spaced super-close: 17 feet apart for females, 19 feet apart for males, for a super-quick three-step rhythm.
–Distance to the first hurdle should be somewhere in the range of 19-22 feet, with a 4-step approach to hurdle one. (3-step approach for those who 7-step to hurdle one in a race)
–Athlete will do a total of ten reps over the five mini hurdles, with a walk-back recovery between each rep. Emphasis is on maintaining a slightly forward angle with the upper body, staying on the balls of the feet the whole time, quickening the hand action (and therefore the foot action) off of hurdle one and between the rest of the hurdles as speed increases. The idea is, the faster you are, the quicker you have to be. When you feel yourself getting faster, force yourself to be quicker, as opposed to backing off or slowing down.
–Five minute rest after the mini hurdle portion of the workout. Now it’s time to move into the Quickstep portion of the workout.
–Set up five hurdles, either at race height or a click below race height. Race height if the hurdler has no major flaws to address; a click below race height if he or she does.
–Space the hurdles 21-22 feet apart for females, or 24-25 feet apart for males.
–Distance to the first hurdle should be between 30-33 feet, with a 6-step approach to hurdle one. (5-step approach for those who 7-step to hurdle one in a race).
–Athlete will complete five reps over five hurdles for a total of 25 hurdles. Two sets of this constitutes the quickstep portion of this workout.
–After each rep, the athlete should turn around, walk back to the last hurdle, and then jog/bounce on the balls of the feet back to the start line, then turn around and go again.
–Five minutes rest between sets.
The quicksteps can be done in flats or in spikes. If it’s an athlete with a lot of flaws to fix, I prefer using flats. For an advanced athlete who is emphasizing the need to create the level of crowdedness that he or she will feel in a race, then I prefer spikes.
When having a non-elite athlete do this workout, the quickfeet drill over the mini hurdles should be modified. Add a foot or two of space between the hurdles, as getting crowded is not an issue they’ll be dealing with in races. For such athletes, the mini hurdles can serve to help them address technical flaws (like the lead leg kicking and the arms swinging side to side) before trying to address such flaws over actual regulation hurdles.
The video below features one of my athletes, Falon Spearman, doing this drill, although I didn’t record all of the reps. Falon is entering her senior year of high school, and has run a personal best of 13.50, so we’re using the quickfeet drill and the quickstep workout to address technical flaws and to ingrain a race-pace cadence. We actually made a real cool discovery when doing this workout for the first time:
When doing the quickfeet drill prior to doing the quicksteps (before, we would go straight to the quicksteps, and do more reps of those), we found that the quickfeet drill really helped her body to remember to stay forward from the waist up, and for the arms to transition quickly, and for the trail leg to move to the front instantly after pushing off. When talking with her after the workout, we agreed that we will always do some quickfeet drilling first before beginning the quickstep portion of the workout for the remainder of the off-season hurdling sessions.
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