Off-Season Drilling Workout

by Steve McGill

Often, hurdle drills serve the purpose of acting as a warmup prior to hurdle workouts, while sometimes they can comprise the workout itself. In the off-season, drilling as the workout can be very beneficial, as it provides a way to get in a combination of cardio work, technique work, and rhythm work all in one. I always say that the drilling a hurdler does should be reflective of that athlete’s skill level and of the athlete’s potential. For example, I wouldn’t have an athlete who runs the 100/110m hurdle hurdles in the 16.7 range do a lot of drills that involve being quick-footed, as an athlete at that level needs to work more on opening up the stride. If I have an athlete who is better suited to the 300/400m hurdles, then it would make sense for that athlete to do a lot of alternating drills, or to do the regular drills with one leg as the lead leg in some reps, and the other leg as the lead leg in other reps. Right now, the athlete I’m working with most regularly, Brandon Johnson, is a high school senior who ran 14.5 his sophomore year, probably would’ve been around 14.0-13.9 last year if not for the pandemic, and is looking to go well into the mid-13’s this year. So, the drills I have him do are specific to his needs and abilities. 

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With Brandon, his warmup consists of the usual dynamic stretches, and then we’ll end the warmup with two hurdle-specific drills that I created for any of my hurdlers to whom I teach the cycle-arms style that I’ve been chronicling in recent issues of the magazine, and in another article in this one. These two drills are the “jump-into-position” drill and the “lane line” drill. On days that we drill exclusively, these two drills will serve not only as the end of the warmup, but also the beginning of the workout. 

Next, we’ll do marching popovers, which is a staple of mine, and then we do the cycle drill, and then end with some quicksteps. In the video below, you’ll see the progression of drills, minus the quicksteps, as the field was too wet for him to go that fast. So we just added reps of the cycle drill.

Not every rep that he did is in the video. Here’s what the workout consists of specifically, although you should make adaptations based on your athlete’s needs:

• 4x25m of the jump-into-position drills
• 4 reps of the lane line drill (we used mini-cones spaced 36 inches apart–the same width of the lanes on narrower tracks)
• 6 reps of marching popovers over 5 hurdles, with the hurdles spaced 12 feet apart, at 33 inches.
• 6 reps of cycle drill, over 5 hurdles, with the hurdles spaced 17 feet apart, at 33 inches. (In the video, I had Brandon do a marching popover over the first hurdle, and then transition into the cycle drill for the rest of each rep).
• 6 reps of quicksteps, over 5 hurdles, with the hurdles spaced 24 feet apart, at 33 inches, from a six-step approach, with the first hurdle 33 feet from the start line. (As stated above, we didn’t do these in the video because of the mushy surface; instead, we did another set of the cycle drill.

Normally, we wouldn’t keep the hurdles at 33 inches for the whole workout. We’d go up to 36 or even 39 (race height), but again, with the grass being so soft and squishy, we didn’t want to take any chances of injury. In case you’re wondering, the track we’d been using was closed, which was why we had to return to the park. 

As mentioned before, consider the needs of the individual athlete when designing a drill workout. With Brandon, because I know that crowding will continue to be more and more of an issue as he continues to progress, we always want to emphasize quick hands and quick feet in everything that we do. 

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