Getting to the First Hurdle

by Steve McGill

In another article in this issue, I talk about seven-stepping to the first hurdle in the 100/110m hurdle races. There, I discuss what adjustments need to be made for a hurdler who is getting too close to the first hurdle when 8-stepping. Here, I want to discuss the issue that occurs on the opposite end of the spectrum–hurdlers who don’t get close enough to hurdle one in order to accelerate through it. 

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Whenever I have my athletes work on their start, we’ll first do a rep or two with no hurdles, but with a cone where the eighth step should be for take-off into the first hurdle. For males, I’ll put the cone seven feet away from the hurdle mark, and for females I’ll put it six feet away. Any adjustments we make in terms of optimal take-off distance will be based on that standard. The idea is, as the race goes on and speed increases, you’re going to end up taking off closer to hurdles in the middle part of the race. So, if you’re taking off seven feet away (male) from hurdle one, that gives you room to increase speed, and take off 6’11” away, 6’10” away, 6’9” away as your speed increases. 

When doing starts with no hurdles but with the cone at the desired take-off distance for hurdle one, I’m looking for the athlete’s last step to land beyond the cone. So, if the cone at a 6-feet take-off distance for a female hurdler, I’ll want her eighth step to land at least six inches beyond it, for a 5’6” take-off distance. That way, when we put the hurdle up, I know she will need to cut that last stride in order to have room to clear the hurdle. WIthout a cut step, the approach to the first hurdle is not working. 

So, what do you do with an athlete who is not reaching the cone? Option one is to get frustrated and annoyed and ask the athlete if she is not feeling well. That’s what I did last week with a female hurdler of mine who was struggling with this issue. Once I realized that blaming her wasn’t working, I decided I had to figure something out quickly, because that practice session was going nowhere fast. We did about five starts with no hurdles, and each time she was at least six inches in front of the cone, meaning she wasn’t reaching it. What in the world? What was bothering me the most was her cadence. The usual problems with hurdlers who don’t reach their take-off spot weren’t what I was seeing. She was pushing off the pedals well, she was driving and staying low; she wasn’t popping up. But always, at step three, her cadence would quicken up. I like for my hurdlers to take five big strides, followed by three quick strides, with the last three strides establishing the cadence we want to take into the rest of the race. She was quickening up her strides too soon. So yes, she was in position to reach hurdle, but not in position to sprint through the hurdle. And in a ten-hurdle race, there will be a price to pay for that. 

So I instructed her to leave the blocks alone for a minute, and just do jumper-style bounds for eight strides, with exaggerated arm swing and exaggerated knee lift. With the bounding, her eighth stride landed way past the cone; it landed beyond the hurdle itself. Okay, I thought, we’re getting somewhere now. I had her do a couple more bounds past the first hurdle, and then instructed her to bound the same distance, except from a three-point start instead of from a standing start. From the three-point start, we had success again. Her eighth step landed well beyond the cone. 

Finally, I instructed her to step back into the starting blocks, and told her to bound the same way out of the blocks as she had from the three-point start. Again, success. Her eighth step was beyond the cone again. We did two more starts like that with no hurdle, because I wanted her to ingrain this cadence before putting the hurdle back up. 

With the hurdle there, she landed exactly even with the cone, and she did so with her eighth stride being a shorter, explosive stride that allowed her to push through the hurdle. For the first time all day I shouted, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!” 

After a couple more reps just over one hurdle, I added a second hurdle so that we could see what the transition between one and two would be like. Indeed, as I was hoping and expecting, it looked great. Now that she was taking off close enough to the hurdle, she was accelerating through it.

Cadence is a strange thing in the hurdles. It’s the thing that personalizes the event, as every hurdler has to dial into his or her own cadence and allow it to take him or her down the track. Yet, on the other hand, hurdlers can get so locked into a cadence that they become addicted to it and can’t break themselves free from it. In the case of this girl, me telling her to keep pushing, to exaggerate her arm swing, wasn’t working. She would always fall back into the quick tempo that was causing her to prematurely shorten her strides. It wasn’t until I finally resorted to the somewhat extreme measure of abandoning the blocks and having her do bounding drills that her body was able to learn the cadence that was more suitable for this part of the race. As I told her, further down the track, I’ll want her to be quick; it’ll be essential to be quick. But out of the blocks, we need big strides. Powerful strides. Pushhh … pushhh … pushhh. Not push push push. 

So, between my other athlete who was getting so crowded to the first hurdle that he had to switch to seven-stepping, and this athlete who was not getting close enough to the first hurdle, I’ve had to troubleshoot problems from one end of the spectrum to the other. I’ve learned a lot along the way, particularly about staying sharp in my ability to provide the individual athlete with what he or she needs at a particular time. One thing I can say for sure is that I definitely recommend bounding drills for hurdlers who don’t get enough push in their first eight strides. Sometimes, it’s not a lack of power or core strength that causes the problem, but a cadence issues caused by the desire to rush into “quick” mode before quickness is what’s needed. 

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