My Mantras

by Steve McGill

When you’ve been coaching for as long as I have, you get to a point where you know what works for you and you trust your methods totally, regardless of current trends or theories. I spent many of my early years as a coach studying and experimenting and seeking out information from coaches who had achieved a high level of success, and who had done so in a way that I respected and admired. Those foundational years have led me to where I am now, where I have absolute confidence that my coaching methods and my approach to helping athletes to run faster hurdle times are always going to work. Along those lines, I’ve noticed recently that I have certain phrases or mantras that I constantly repeat to my athletes, or to campers at the camps I conduct. In this article, I will go down the list of my go-to mantras, because if they work with my athletes, maybe then can work for yours.

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[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]Mantra #1: They Can’t Do What We Do for Ten Hurdles

Everything I do in training is designed to prepare my athletes for a 10-hurdle race. While I’m aware that indoor track has become much more popular and is taken far more seriously than it was when I was competing back in the 1980’s, I still feel that training specifically to peak during the indoor season is pointless and even counterproductive. If an athlete trains for a five-hurdle race—a 55m or 60m race—then once the indoor season is over, a lot of the speed-endurance work that should’ve been done in the winter must now be done in the spring. My thinking is, and what I tell my athletes is, I’m not worried about someone who can beat us over five hurdles. Everything we do is designed to put us in position to excel over hurdles eight through ten, and through the finish line. When other athletes start breaking down and losing form, we will stay solid and maintain form.

All of the other mantras that I will discuss in this article are predicated on this one. When it comes to different hurdling styles, lead-arm styles, lead-leg styles, etc., the litmus test question I ask is, can you do it for ten hurdles? The reason I emphasize efficiency and ease of motion is because it increases the chances of staying strong for an entire ten-hurdle race. Any style that makes an athlete prone to late-race breakdowns or even minor late-race mistakes is a style that has to be either refined or discarded.

Mantra #2: Let the Speed Happen to You

With the style of hurdling that I teach—which I refer to as cycling, in which I emphasize the importance of eliminating all pauses in the hurdling action—the aim is to put the body in positions that minimize the need to “try” to be fast. Another name I give to it is “downhill hurdling,” because the aim is to create a downhill angle over the hurdle so that you feel like you’re speeding up off the hurdle, the same as you would feel like you’re speeding up when you get to the bottom of a hill and back to flat land. The momentum of coming off the hill kind of throws you forward. Similarly, the momentum of coming off the hurdle kind of throws you forward. So, you speed up without trying to speed up.

Mantra #3: Push Forward

So, how do you create the downhill angle? How do you create the feeling that you’re being thrown forward, or pushed from behind, as you come off the hurdle? By pushing forcefully off the back leg. I don’t believe in secrets, necessarily. But if you were to ask me what it is that my hurdlers do consistently that I know other hurdlers don’t do consistently, if at all, that would be it: push off the back leg with force.

When you watch most people do the trail leg wall drill, for example, you’ll hardly ever see them pushing off first. Instead, the leg rotates continuously, or there is a soft tap of the ground with no significant force. But I would argue that the most important thing that the trail leg does is push off with force. If there is no push, there is no increase in momentum. If there is no push, then the lead leg is forced to do the majority of the work in getting the whole body over the hurdle. This extra work on the lead leg’s part can lead to a posture that is too upright and a trail leg that is too flat and a lead leg that is too horizontal.

When the push off the back leg is emphasized, and executed correctly, the hips are taller naturally, without the hips themselves rising vertically. Therefore, the hurdle instantly becomes smaller than it actually is, if that makes sense. When the hips are taller, the hurdle is smaller. And with the high knee-drive of the lead leg, the push off the back leg makes it easier to cycle the legs over the hurdle. The athlete feels like he or she is just “stepping” over the hurdle.

The “forward” part of the “push forward” has to do with the hips. Though the hips are elevated by the push off the back leg, the hips themselves don’t elevate; they push forward. So, simultaneously, the athlete is pushing up off the back leg and pushing forward with the hips. If the timing is off, the athlete will float, or sail. But if the timing is right, then hurdling the obstacle will feel like “stepping over a book bag in the hallway,” as I like to say to my athletes.

Mantra #4: Fluidity Creates Speed

You already get the idea of this one from what I’ve been saying up to this point. A lot of hurdlers have a habit of making power moves like snapping down the lead leg, or doing this whole big wind-up thing with the lead arm. A lot of these power moves create pauses in the hurdling action. So, although they are useful and often forceful, they are also tiring. Can you do it for ten? Again, that’s the question. Every time you pause the action, every time you execute a forceful action, every time you stand up off a hurdle, you’re creating fatigue, and you’re therefore setting yourself up to make mistakes later in the race.

So, in that sense, when there is continuous action, with no pauses, with no power moves, “speed happens to you,” as I tell my athletes. It is most notably felt in the first step off of each hurdle. When you’re being fluid, you will feel yourself accelerate off of every hurdle, even late in the race. So, instead of feeling like you’re decelerating in the last zone, you feel like you’re continuing to accelerate, even if you’re not literally. And in hurdling, how it feels matters. It indicates whether or not what you’re doing is working.

Mantra #5: When in Doubt, be Fast

With this mantra, I’m reminding my hurdlers not to over-think the hurdling part. This reminder comes when we’re doing a workout that focuses on coming out of the blocks, and it especially comes when it’s time to race. Because we focus so much on technique and rhythm development in our training, hurdlers are prone to be over-thinkers just for the simple fact that there is so much to think about. But when it comes time to unleash the beast, I tell my hurdlers to “forget everything I taught you and just run as fast as you can.” Any thinking during a race will slow you down and dull your instincts. So, if you get a bad start, be fast. If you hit a hurdle, be fast. If you land off a hurdle off-balance, be fast. When in doubt, be fast. Don’t pout, don’t panic. Trust your speed.

Mantra #6: Relationships Come First

This is a big one, even though it may sound cheesy. The truth is, it’s not cheesy at all. A coach’s job is to build trust. As your coach, I need you to trust that I know what I’m doing, and I need you to trust that I care about you. An athlete who believes in his or her coach will run faster than he or she thought possible. An athlete who knows that the coach only cares about him or her as an athlete, and not as a person, will give less than maximum effort, even though the lesser effort may be subconscious. And as I’ve discussed many times before on this website, the relationships are what endure and continue to flourish long after the athletic career comes to an end.

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