What Drills Should I Do?
by Steve McGill
The title of this article refers to a question I hear often. Sometimes it’s from an athlete, sometimes it’s from a coach, and sometimes it’s from a parent; regardless of who it’s from, people want to know what the best drills are to improve in the hurdles. People assume that doing the “right” drills will lead to the desired results. But it’s not always that simple. In fact, it rarely is.
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The fact of the matter is, doing the “right” drills isn’t as important as doing drills properly. Even the most basic of drills can be useful in addressing technical flaws if the drills are done properly, whereas even the “perfect” drill that is designed to address a specific issue can do more harm than good if done improperly. That’s why I always tell people, if you’re asking me which drills you should do, you’re asking the wrong question.
With that being said, I do have a series of drills that I use when teaching my athletes hurdling mechanics, and I’ll break those down in detail a little later here. For now, though I want to emphasize the following points:
Quality always matters more than quantity. Doing a lot of drills but doing them improperly only serves to reinforce bad habits and to ingrain flaws. For that reason, it’s always important that a coach is present to make sure that good habits are being ingrained. For a hurdler who is trying to correct flaws, any reps that simulate the old way of doing things are setting that athlete further backward. Also, because the body will always revert to what it is most familiar with as its default, the coach must be very hands-on in making sure that new habits are being ingrained. I always tell my hurdlers that when you’re learning something new, right should feel wrong; it should feel awkward, or weird, or “funny.” It won’t initially feel faster or easier. The coach’s role is to be a set of eyes and to correct mistakes in the moment. If I have an athlete doing marching popovers, for example, and I notice that she is not marching on the balls of her feet in her approach to the first hurdle, I’ll stop her before she gets to the first hurdle? Why? Because I can see that she’s setting herself up for failure; I can see that rep is going to be a bad rep. And I absolutely do not want to waste reps.
Know what you’re trying to accomplish. Never do drills just to be doing drills. Know what your purpose is. Know what you’re trying to correct, or ingrain, or improve upon. In this social media age, athletes will often see a professional hurdler doing drills on YouTube or Instagram and try to copy what they see without understanding the reason the athlete is doing the drill, or the context in which it is being done. Is it an off-season drill? A pre-meet drill? Is it designed to increase quickness? Is it designed to improve explosive power? Without knowing why a drill is being done, it’s easy to end up doing it for the wrong reason, or to do it incorrectly. With my athletes, I’ll always explain, prior to having them do a drill, what we’re looking to accomplish with it.
To me, hurdle drills serve two general purposes: to improve technique and to ingrain rhythm. That’s why I’m always specific about which technical flaws we’ll be addressing, and that’s why I try to design every drill so that it fits a three-step rhythm. In any hurdle drill, I want my athletes to be able to visualize themselves racing, I want them to be able to imagine how what they’re doing will feel like when they’re doing it at full-speed, out of the blocks. I’m not a fan of one-step drills or five-step drills, although I’ll use them when I have a specific purpose in mind. For example, if I have an athlete who has a really bad habit of kicking out the foot of his lead leg, I might give him a dose of one-steps so that he has no room to kick out and so that he must keep reacting super-quickly to the next hurdle. Or, if I have an athlete who can benefit from having more time to think between the hurdles, then a five-step drill might be appropriate. So yes, I’ll break my own rules on occasion if I can explain to the athlete why I am doing so.
My go-to hurdle drills are the marching popovers, the cycle drill, and the quickstep drill. I believe that all hurdling flaws can be corrected and that the race rhythm can be ingrained using these three drills, in the above order. I like drills that teach athletes to explode into hurdling position, to push their hips forward, to cycle their legs, and to generally eliminate all extraneous effort.
With the marching popovers, the hurdles are spaced 10-12 feet apart, at least one click below race height, and often two clicks below race height. I like this drill because it forces hurdlers to push off the back leg with force in order to get up and over the hurdle. So many hurdlers are lead-leg dependent that they never learn to push off the back leg. With the popovers, because the athlete must march to the first hurdle instead of running to it, the athlete can’t rely on speed to get over the hurdles. Speed masks flaws, and in drills, you want to expose the flaws. Only by exposing the flaws can you address them and correct them.
With the cycle drill, the hurdles are spaced 15-17 feet apart, again at least one click below race height. The hurdler takes a high-knee cycling approach to the first hurdle, and the idea is to maintain that cycling action over each hurdle. So, in the marching popovers, the idea is to march, march, march, march over the hurdle; in the cycle drill the idea is to cycle, cycle, cycle, cycle over the hurdle. We don’t do want to do anything different over the hurdle that we aren’t already doing as we approach the hurdle. Instead, we want to continue what we are doing, which is why the push off the back leg is so important. Without the push, the lead leg foot is forced to kick out in order to ensure hurdle clearance.
With the quicksteps drill, the hurdles are spaced 21-24 feet apart, either at race height or a click below race height. I like for my hurdlers to take a 6-step approach to the first hurdle from a standing start, 30-33 feet from the first hurdle, quickening up the last three strides into the first hurdle in order to establish the rhythm of the rep. This drill is designed to mimic the full-race tempo between the hurdles without putting the pounding on the legs that running full speed requires. Here, flaws that may have been corrected in the marching popovers and the cycle drill might suddenly reappear because of the increased tempo. Again, that’s fine; we want to expose the flaw in order to correct it. We will go through the same process later when we put the blocks down and go full speed. Increased speed always re-exposes flaws that had been corrected when going slower, but eventually the body learns the new habits to the point where it can execute them at full speed.
So, those are my favorite drills, for the reasons that I mentioned above. If you’re a coach and you have drills that you prefer that I didn’t mention, that’s fine. There’s more than one way to attain one’s goals. The key is, and will always be, know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and be able to explain to the athletes why you’re having them do it. And finally, have no patience with allowing athletes to do drills incorrectly. You have to be able to teach them out of the bad habits.
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