Learning to Relax
by Steve McGill
More so than at any other point in my coaching career, I want my hurdlers to be rhythmic, fluid, and effortless in their movements. No compromising. If you’re working too hard, compensating for technical flaws with power and speed, that’s unacceptable. Mastery of technique is of the highest importance; without it, you’re cheating yourself, and you’re cheating the sport, and you’re cheating the hurdles. You’re settling. And no one I coach is going to settle. Anyone I coach is going to learn how to hurdle, because that’s the only way to maximize one’s speed, one’s power, and one’s overall athletic gifts. Recently I’ve been working with a high school junior from Georgia, Malik Mixon, who comes up to North Carolina every fairly regularly to get in some hurdle training. I started working with Malik in his sophomore year, pre-Covid, and he has started coming back in the past few weeks. One of the main things I’ve been working on with him has been just getting him to relax.
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A few weeks ago, I was coaching Malik at the same time I was coaching my regular athlete, Brandon Johnson. What stood out to me more than ever was the difference in their running styles between the hurdles, as well as the differences in technique. Brandon, who has been with me for three years, was very light on his feet between the hurdles, very efficient over the top, and didn’t put any strain into getting over the hurdles. Malik, although taller and stronger and more powerful, looked so much more inefficient in comparison to Brandon. He ran with his fists clenched and his jaws tight, putting strain on his neck and arms. Between the hurdles, he was sprinting with hands high and knees high, getting himself so crowded that he was curving his lead leg to avoid contact with the barriers. After two or three reps of the quickstep drill, I said to myself, Malik needs to start from scratch. If he’s going to go sub-14 like he’s capable of doing, he needs to learn how to be a tap dancer between the hurdles. He needs to learn how to be light on his feet. He needs to learn how to relax. Otherwise, although he’ll be good for five hurdles, but he’ll never be good for ten. All that tension will lead to late-race mistakes. Guaranteed.
The first thing I had Malik to in his hurdling re-education was the lane-line drill, which appears at the beginning of the above video, and which Brandon has become a master of. In the drill, the lane lines serve as “hurdles,” and the idea is to take three super-quick strides between each line in order to instill the type of rhythm that will be needed when moving at hyper-speeds during a race. Malik’s first attempts to do the drill, which do not appear in the video, were utter failures. He was stomping the ground so hard that there was no way he could fit three steps into such a small amount of space. I had Brandon demonstrate how the drill is supposed to be done, but that didn’t help at all. Though he intellectually understood what he was being asked to do, he was hopeless when it came to doing it. So, I grabbed some mini-cones that could serve as “hurdles” and provide a better visual than the lane lines.
With the cones in place, he began to better conceptualize how to tap his feet and fit in the three steps. Still, because he was so used to stomping heavily, he was still covering too much ground to fit in the steps. That’s when I told him, “You’re dad drove six hours to bring you here, and you’re not gonna move on from this drill until you master it, even if we spend the whole session on it.” Finally, it started to click. He was able to fit in three steps between the cones every now and then. Gradually, he was able to do it all the time. After a few more reps, he was looking quick and light on his feet, doing the drill the way it’s supposed to look. At that point, I said we were ready to move on to the next drill.
Usually, I have no love for drills that don’t involve a three-step rhythm. But when trying to get an athlete to break an old habit and create a new one, you need to slow things down sometimes. So we transitioned to a 5-step drill, old-school Renaldo Nehemiah style, like Nehemiah used to do it in the torture drill known as back-and-forths that he did in his high school training. For our purposes, we would not be going back and forth, but we would be 5-stepping over five hurdles, with the hurdles moved out four feet beyond the race distance. And, like Nehemiah did it, the first two steps off of each hurdle would be recovery steps, and then he’d return to the quick-three rhythm for the last three strides. Taking two extra strides between each hurdle gave Malik more time to think, so that he could more easily incorporate all the concepts I was bombarding him with – stay light on your feet, keep the heels tucked, relax the hands, drive the knee higher than the crossbar before extending the foot, don’t let the trail leg lag after it pushes off the ground.
I was borderline amazed at how smooth and fluid he looked in the 5-step drill. Everything we had worked on in the lane-line drill carried over to the 5-step dill, with no regression. After a solid set of five reps of that, we transitioned into my go-to quick-step drill, with the hurdles 25 feet apart for a quick 3-step rhythm. Again, there was no regression. Even though he had less time to think between the hurdles, he was still looking smooth and fluid, and he was no longer stomping the track between the hurdles. The tension in his upper body was minimal. Between reps, he was expressing excitement at the fact that he was starting to really get it, and feel it. “This is so easy!” he said after one rep, and found himself wondering what he’d been doing all his life putting so much wasted effort into getting over a hurdle.
He did so well, in fact, that we ended up doing something that I had felt certain at the beginning of practice we wouldn’t get to: going over the first hurdle out of the starting blocks. Even there, the lessons he had learned continued to carry over. Adding speed increases the odds of making mistakes. I always say, we want to expose the mistake so we can correct the mistake. But Malik didn’t revert to his old self, even out of the blocks. So I like where we are.
What I learned from this session is not to compromise. As a coach, if I compromise, I’m cheating the athlete, I’m cheating the sport, I’m cheating the hurdles. I could’ve rushed. I could’ve said, hey, he’s good enough doing what he’s doing, so let’s just make it work. But his dad didn’t drive him up six hours from Georgia for me to let him get away with the same old same old. To his immense credit, he proved himself to be a willing and eager student. That’s the kind of athlete I love to coach.
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