Transcending Technique
by Steve McGill
When talking about what makes great hurdlers great, a key element in such conversations involves who has the most efficient technique. However, we also know that it’s not always the best technicians who win races, due to other factors, such as speed, power, flexibility, hurdle-endurance, mental toughness, and mental preparation. A better question to ask, then, as opposed to asking who has the best technique, is to ask what is the purpose of developing technique? If the hurdler with the best technique doesn’t always win, then how does improving your technique help you to run faster hurdle races? Should technique be emphasized more than speed and strength?
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Okay, so what is the purpose of technique? If you’re asking me that question, my answer would be that the primary purpose of developing technical mastery is to create space. Everything in hurdling is about creating space. The faster you are, the less space you have. The less space you have, the more you have to rely on technique to prevent overcrowding and crashes. In the age-old argument about the straight lead leg vs. the bent lead leg, for example, it can be argued that neither is inherently better than the other. There have been plenty of straight-legged hurdlers who have had enormous success. Tony Dees back in the early 1990s. Greg Foster throughout the late 70s and 80s. I don’t know if y’all remember Duane Ross, who was a 13-low guy and made some international teams back in the early 2000s. He currently coaches at North Carolina A & T University. Ross was a straight-legged lead. But all those guys had issues with hitting hurdles and/or getting turned sideways in races, because the straight-legged lead took away space. So, once their speed really cranked up, they couldn’t negotiate the space. So they either had to back off a bit, crash and burn, or resort to just bulldozing the hurdles.
Meanwhile, a hurdler who leads with a bent lead leg can actually take off closer to each hurdle with less danger of getting too crowded. Omar McLeod is a good example of a modern-day hurdler whose technique is his own worst enemy. With McLeod, he’s either going to dominate or he’s going to be stumbling into someone else’s lane. The dominance is because he’s fast and powerful; the stumbling is because that straight-leg lead always might lead to disaster, regardless of how prepared he is physically and mentally.
What’s true for the lead leg is true for all aspects of technique. The lead arm, for example, is a huge space creator if used effectively. A lead arm that punches up and down in a tight motion helps the legs to attack the ground sooner, which leads to touching down closer to the hurdle that you just cleared, which means more space to clear the next one. A lead arm that swings widely or that has a more elaborate motion that takes longer to execute will lead to a loss of space and perhaps a crash. Think Lolo Jones in that 2008 Olympic final. Her wide arms caused the contact with that hurdle.
Another purpose of developing masterful technique is that it reduces fatigue, which is huge in the hurdles, because even the slightest bit of fatigue, when you’re moving at hyper-speeds over barriers, can lead to mistakes and even disasters. The Lolo Jones mistake that I referenced above was the result of fatigue. When your arms are working that hard, eventually they’re going to get tired. The harder you work to get up and down over the hurdles and off the hurdles, the greater the chances that something bad is going to happen further down the line.
On the flip side of that, hurdlers with excellent technique have an uncanny ability to surge and either walk people down or leave people behind in the latter stages of a race. Liu Xiang is the first name that jumps to my mind when i think of this skill. Liu, to me, was the greatest technician the event had ever seen. Lead leg, trail leg, forward lean, lead arm action—this was a man who wasted no motions. So, though I’m sure he must’ve decelerated late in races (just because it’s impossible not to), he certainly decelerated less than anyone else. While I think that the current era of male hurdlers has more technically sound hurdlers than any other era in history, none of these guys are as efficient as Liu was. Liu simply did not make mistakes.
A third reason that technique matters is because good technique allows you to utilize your other strengths more. Specifically, or should I say especially, it allows you to maximize your flat speed. The more space you create, the more room you have to sprint. The more space you take away, the less room you have to sprint. One of the hurdlers that Liu Xiang used to walk down in some classic battles was Terrence Trammel, who was a beast of a sprinter. Except for maybe McLeod and possibly Renaldo Nehemiah, there has never been a faster flat sprinter running the hurdles than Trammel. Yet, in his technique, he did two things that took away space and thereby created less room to sprint. One, he led with a straight lead leg, and two, he leaned from his upper body instead of from the waist. I’ve heard it argued that Liu’s lack of blazing flat speed actually helped him in the hurdles, because that’s why he didn’t have the crowding issues that Trammel and others had. I disagree with that viewpoint. Liu was a better technician, plain and simple.
For the reasons discussed above, I feel that it is very important, when developing hurdlers at the youth level and high school level, to instill good habits early with a lot of drilling. Young hurdlers absolutely cannot afford to have hurdle coaches who don’t know what they’re doing, or who allow their hurdlers to work out over the hurdles on their own. Efficient technique must be ingrained at the very beginning of a hurdler’s career. That way, other aspects of training can be emphasized later on in his or her career while the technical elements can be executed properly without thought. But even still, when male hurdlers transition to the international height in that first year of college, almost all of them will have to re-learn much of what they’ve already learned, because the 42-inch hurdles present a whole new set of challenges.
Once a hurdler has mastered technique, that athlete has the potential to then transcend technique. It’s like a musician spending endless hours learning to play notes and chords and scales so that when it comes time to perform on stage, he or she feels it all comes out naturally. That’s what mastering technique does—it allows you to transcend technique, so that you don’t hardly even feel like the hurdles are even there.
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