Cycling on the Track
by Steve McGill
In the past few issues of this magazine, I’ve been sharing with you the beginning stages of the “cycle arms” journey that I’ve been traveling with my athlete Brandon Johnson, a rising senior. In those articles, the practice sessions I documented took place on a grass field in a local park over fold-up hurdles that I keep with me in the backseat of my car. But last weekend we were able to get back on a track, where we didn’t have to worry about any divots where an ankle could turn or any wet spots where he could slip.
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In past weeks, we focused exclusively on drills drills drills, starting with the hurdles well below race height and then gradually raising them up until we reached race height. Except for a little hip soreness that forced us to shut down our last workout with one rep left, he’s remained injury-free, as I’ve been extra careful in making sure we ease into this process slowly. So, in our latest session, we continued with drilling at the start of the workout, and then, for the first time, sped things up with a few reps over one hurdle, then two hurdles, then three hurdles from the start line, from a four-point start with no blocks. (I told him to do a three-point start, but it’s whatever).
Here’s the video from the session. I’ll be referring to it for the rest of this article:
Keep in mind, this video, and all the others that show Brandon’s development with this style, are unlisted on my YouTube page, so you magazine subscribers are the only people who have access to them. If you’re interested in learning more about how to implement this style with your own athletes, please feel free to contact me with questions. Right now, my aim is simply to prove that it works, that it helps hurdlers to run faster. After years and years of experimentation and figuring out what the pitfalls are and how to address them, I’m confident that this will be the year we can reveal how it looks full speed in a race, as long as this virus doesn’t squash our progress.
Anyway, the video starts with my go-to drill, the quickstep drill. I had him do five reps of this first before we transitioned to the four-point starts. I also had him do some warmup drills that aren’t in the video, but I have shown those in previous videos–the “jump into position” drill and the “lane line” drill. Check last month’s issue and the May issue to see the videos that include those drills. In last week’s session, the quicksteps served as a warmup for the full-speed work. I wanted to make sure he was reacting the way I wanted him to and adapting his speed the way I wanted him to. The thing about this style is, how the athlete cycles the arms between the hurdles becomes the most important factor in how well the style works. The lane-line drill ingrains the habit of cycling at a very quick rate and a very low hand height. We want to take that reactionary ability into the reps when we go faster. If the athlete tries to cycle the hands too high between the hurdles, the legs will follow by covering too much ground and putting the athlete too close to the next hurdle. During a rep, just as in during a race, the rhythm will change. The ability to adapt the hand speed to the increasing foot speed will be key to creating enough space to clear each hurdle without feeling the need to slow down or back off out of fear of crashing. So when we do the quickstep drill, we try to create that feeling of the hurdles coming at us. I tell Brandon, you want to feel like you’re standing still and the hurdles are coming at you. Force yourself to react, react, react!
With the quickstep drill, I have the first hurdle 33 feet from the start line, and the rest of the hurdles are spaced 24 feet apart. With Brandon, because he seven-steps in his block start, we take a five-step approach to the first hurdle in the quickstep drill. With most hurdlers, who take eight steps to the first hurdle, they’ll take six strides to the first hurdle in the quickstep drill. With Brandon earlier this summer, I had him taking six strides to the first hurdle because I had simply forgotten about him being a seven-stepper. He kept complaining about getting too close to the first hurdle, then finally it hit me that he needed to be five-stepping the first hurdle, and the problem was solved. Call me absent-minded; I’m getting old!
So, moving to the four-point start from the starting line was a big progression for us. It was our chance to see how much of the new style he had ingrained. As you well know, athletes can look and feel good doing new things in drills, but once they go full speed all their old bad habits come roaring back. That’s what I was hoping would not happen, and I felt confident that it wouldn’t since we’d been drilling for five weeks or so, and, before that, he hadn’t been doing any hurdling due to the quarantine. So, the old habits were a distant memory!
Indeed, when we transitioned from the drilling to the starts, none of the old habits came back. The worst of his habits was that his arms would swing across his body and then swing back the other way during descent. The elbows would be very high and it was just ugly. When I first started teaching him the cycle arms shortly before the quarantine period began, I noticed that the habit disappeared in drills, but still remained when doing block starts. But now that we’ve had this long period of no races, we’ve been able to ingrain the new and leave behind the old. The first four-point start rep was over one hurdle at 36 inches, one click below race height. In that rep, he cycled the arms perfectly and stepped over the hurdle with ease. It was so easy, in fact, that he laughed as he walked back to the line and said, “you need to raise that thing up.” As you can see in the video, the rest of the reps looked very good as well. Not only were the arms not swinging side to side at all, and not only was he cycling the arms properly, but he was also reaping the benefits of cycling the arms properly.
The biggest benefit of cycling the arms is that it keeps the torso pushing forward. Ordinarily, I have to always remind the athlete to “stay forward” and “don’t stand up off the hurdle.” But with this style, the arm action pulls you forward, so you don’t have to remember to stay forward; you’ll stay forward simply because your momentum is taking you forward, which is much different from when your arms punch up and down.
Another benefit is that you get “two booms,” as I like to put it. Ordinarily, you get one boom. When the lead arm cycles down with the lead leg, you get a “boom” upon landing that helps to speed you up off the hurdle. With this style, you get two booms because the second arm is cycling down the same as the first arm does. Boom boom. And if you’re getting two booms while everyone else is getting one (at most), then nobody can beat you unless they’re just superior athletically. Some hurdlers don’t get any booms because their arm action is so inefficient.
Moving forward, the plan is to just keep progressing to the next step. We’ll gradually wean ourselves away from the quicksteps altogether, although I still need them for conditioning purposes for the time being. In the not too distant future we’ll put starting blocks down and get some reps in out of the blocks. The goal will be to have everything in place from the block start through five hurdles by the time indoor season is scheduled to begin. Stay tuned, until next month.
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