Cycle Arms Update
by Steve McGill
In the fall of this track season I began teaching two of my athlete the “cycle arms” – a style of hurdling in which the arms cycle in a way that mimics the cycling of the legs. In previous issues of this magazine I explained the details of the style and provided some details regarding my athletes’ grasping of it. In the fall, it was all about implementing the basics of the style, and getting the arms to understand this new way of functioning. Then there was the matter of getting the timing aspect of it down when going over hurdles. With this style, if the timing is off, the hurdler can look downright silly.
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Both of my athletes grasped the basics pretty quickly. The younger of the two – Falon Spearman, a high school freshman who finished first last summer in the 13-14 year old age group at USATF Junior Olympic Nationals in the 100m hurdles – picked up the basics on the first day. The older of the two – Joshua Brockman, a high school senior who has accepted a scholarship offer to attend North Carolina State University next year – took a little longer to pick up the basics, but once he did, he mastered them with little effort.
Let me first give a quick review of what the cycle arms style is all about. Inspired by a dream I had back around 2008, and by my personal mission to figure out how to eliminate all pauses in the hurdling action, the cycle arms style originated as a way to prevent the trail arm from pausing. The lead arm, during the hurdling action, can cycle with the lead leg: knee drives up, hand drives up; foot extends forward, hand extends forward; heel cycles back under the hip, hand cycles down to the waist. What I discovered was that the only way for the trail arm to be able to cycle like the lead arm was if it was already cycling in the strides between the hurdles. As a result, “cycle arms” evolved into a method of running, not just of running over hurdles.
Around the Christmas holidays, Josh Brockman decided he wasn’t comfortable enough with the cycle-arm style to continue with it into the competitive season. Because he seemed to be doing so well with it in workouts, and because we had dedicated the fall to implementing it, I was, of course, disappointed. And because I had yet to have an athlete race with this style, I felt the self-doubt creeping back in. Yet at the same time I understood how he felt and accepted his decision to revert back to the traditional way of using the arms. He wasn’t feeling like he was generating enough power with the style; he felt like his arms were kind of just chicken-winging between the hurdles. And because he was a senior with a scholarship in hand, I felt it would’ve been foolish of me to try to push forward any further with the style. That’s a general rule – if the athlete isn’t feeling comfortable with a drill, or workout, or style, or change in style, move on to something else. Never force the athlete to do something you feel he “could” do or “should” do if the athlete himself isn’t feeling it (unless what he or she is currently doing is absolutely wrong). Especially with someone like Josh, I knew that whether he cycle-armed or not he would run very fast times and continue to pursue his goal of running in the 13-low range outdoors.
As for Falon, as the video above shows, we have continued to move forward with the cycle arms. In this learn-as-I-go process as I journey further into the unknown, I’m becoming aware of the personality type that best suits this style. One of the things I love about Josh is that he is very cerebral; he’s a thinker, an analyzer. But ironically, that quality of personality gets in the way of being able to use the cycle arms style under the pressure-filled conditions of a race. Whereas Josh and I often have long conversations about possible ideas to try out in practice, Falon and I hardly talk at all during practice. She’s the kind who will listen to instruction, and then implement what you told her in the very next rep. She digests information, and then spits it back out in the form of doing it on the track. I now understand that someone like her is more suited to following a crazy coach like myself into the unchartered waters.
The video above is from a practice session a few weeks ago. We started with some quick-step drilling before moving into some three-point starts. In both the drilling and the starts, you can see the timing aspect of the style. The trail arm cycles just after the lead arm cycles, and the trail leg cycles just after the lead leg cycles. If you look closely, you’ll see that the trail arm cycles down when a normal trail arm would be punching back up. The trail arm cycles down as the trail leg cycles down to the track. So the arm and the leg mirror each other.
As for the start (whether it’s a three-point start or a block start), the arms pump up and down – like they would in normal sprinting – for the first five strides. Then, in the last three strides before hurdle one, the arms transition into the cycle action, which they continue to do for the rest of the rep (or race).
As Falon continues to master the style and add her own personal nuances to it, I feel very confident that she can go very far with it. She’s only a freshman, and has already run indoor times that would put her in the 14.4-14.5 range outdoors. With the outdoor season and four more years of high school ahead of her, I’m very excited about her potential.
When Falon and I do talk between reps, or prior to the beginning of a workout, our terminology differs from the vocabulary I use with my other athletes. For example, we don’t say lead leg and trail leg; we say first leg and second leg. We don’t say lead arm and trail arm; we say first arm and second arm. The logic is, we don’t want the second leg to trail, and we don’t want the second arm to trail. We want them to come to the front, right behind the first leg, right behind the first arm.
As we continue forward, I will continue to learn and grow right along with Falon. And the dream I had more than ten years ago, in which Liu Xiang kept urging me to come closer prior to jumping up and down right in front of me, will become less and less of a hazy vision and more and more of a wonderfully fluid hurdling style.
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