Identifying and Addressing Technical Flaws
One of the most important things we do as hurdle coaches is identify and troubleshoot technical flaws. I’ve been doing it for over twenty years, and let me tell you, it never gets any easier. Each case is a new case, and while old solutions can prove valuable, relying on them doesn’t always work.
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This year I’m teaching several beginning hurdlers as I begin my first year as a member of the coaching staff at my new school. We don’t have a track. We don’t have any hurdles. We practice at a local middle school that has a concrete track. On Sundays I get with my hurdlers at a local public high school that has a serviceable rubberized track.
Coaching beginners isn’t anything new for me, but it has been a while since I’ve coached a group where everyone in it was a beginner. In the past, I’ve always relied heavily on my more experienced hurdlers to show the beginners the way. More so than I even realized.
This spring I’ve been developing one of my beginners, Michael, who happens to be a senior. He tells me has a little previous experience as a hurdler, dating back to middle school. He’s got pretty good speed and athleticism, having started at defensive back and wide receiver on our school’s football team. But still, even though he is a relative beginner, we don’t have a lot of time to get things right, as the season is already half-way over.
When I started working with Michael toward the end of January, I noticed that he did have a natural sense of rhythm when it came to hurdling, and that he was also not afraid of the barriers. Technique was decent, but there was a lot of twisting on the trail leg side. Earlier this spring season, I addressed the twisting in drills.
The video above includes footage of drill-speed reps Michael performed in an attempt to address the issue with his hips and shoulders. The first two reps took place on a Sunday – an obviously cold and windy Sunday, and the second two reps took place on the grass a few days later at the middle school where our team practices during the week. In the first two reps, the hurdles are at 36 inches; in the last two reps they are at 33.
This is where I want to get into how difficult it is as a coach to identify the root technical flaw. Let me explain the process we went through to get to where we ended up regarding his technique, even though it remains a work in progress.
First, I was trying to figure what he was doing wrong with his trail leg that was causing it to be so wide, and why the knee of the trail leg was unable to get all the way to facing the front by the time the lead leg landed. The knee was high, he had good heel recovery, so I was confused.
Then I noticed his lead arm, and how that was crossing his body during attack, then swinging wide the other way during descent. Fix the arm, I told him, and the leg will fix itself.
But after a few reps of focusing on the arm, the twist was still there. Finally, I noticed that the knee of his lead leg was locking. It wasn’t locking at a flat, horizontal angle, which is what I usually look for. Instead, it was locking during descent, as he was driving the foot back to the ground. The locking of the lead leg knee, I realized, was causing the twist in the hips. I instructed Michael to cycle the lead leg back to the ground; don’t let it pause. Between that and keeping the lead arm in a straight up-and-down motion, the problem would surely be fixed.
Or so I believed. In the next few reps, he did a good job with the lead arm action, and he tried to stop locking the knee of the lead leg, but wasn’t able to. I kept reminding him to run on the balls of his feet, to stay tall between the hurdles, and there was one rep where everything looked right for a hurdle or two.
Thing is, I’m so used to coaching more experienced athletes who have already established their proper sprinting mechanics, that I have grown accustomed to assuming that the athletes are running on the balls of their feet, with their ankles dorsi-flexed. But then I reminded myself that I’m dealing with a beginner here.
Finally I came to the conclusion that the reps where he wasn’t twisting, he was running on the balls of his feet, and the reps where he was twisting, he was running back on his heels. Could it be that simple?
It was that simple. When I told him to focus on staying tall on the balls of his feet, on keeping his ankles flexed and cycling every stride, the lead leg knee no longer locked, the lead arm didn’t cross the body, and the shoulders and hips didn’t twist.
Even though we had identified the problem, and how to fix it, it was far from gone. Even in the video you can see that looks far from perfect. That’s why, in the second two reps on the video, I lowered the hurdles, slowed things down, and had him step over 33’s. I knew it would be a while before the old habits would fade and the new habits would become ingrained. So we do a little bit of drilling every day, even on non-hurdle days, and Michael has also been good about marching on the balls of his feet at home, creating new muscle memory, speeding up the learning curve.
The point I want to make from a coaching standpoint is that it is so difficult, yet so important, to identify the root of a technical problem. For me staying humble in spite of my past success is never a challenge, because none of that past success makes improving a hurdler’s technique any easier. It took me several sessions to realize that before I focused on the hips twisting, before I focused on the lead arm swinging, before I focused on the lead leg locking, I needed to focus on simply making sure he was running on the balls of his feet. How can someone who has been coaching 20 years not have noticed something so fundamental from the very beginning?
Easily. The tendency is to notice that which is most obvious, and to fixate on that. That’s why I got stuck on the hips twisting. The lesson I’ve learned time and time again, and the lesson I want to pass on to you who are reading this, is that it takes a lot of patience and persistence to get to the root of the problem. You don’t have to be brilliant, you don’t have to be a genius. You just have to keep trying. Eventually, you are going to figure it out.
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