Puddle Hopping Blues
Over the past couple months, I’ve gotten a fair amount of correspondence from high school coaches asking me about helping their four-steppers to three-step. I feel like this is a much more complicated question than it appears to be on the surface. To me, the biggest danger when it comes to coaching four-steppers is trying to rush the process of getting them to three-step.
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I understand the eagerness, the impatience. Four-steppers are at a distinct disadvantage when racing against three-steppers. Still, rushing the process can end up doing more harm than good. Why? Because if the three-step doesn’t have speed behind it, it’ll make the athlete slower, not faster. That’s the short-term issue. The long-term issue is that the athlete will develop bad habits that will be very hard to break later on.
Case in point: I started working with a ninth grade girl back named Madi in March who was running in the 20-flat range. When she and her mother came to me, their focus was on getting her to three-step, believing that three-stepping would help her to drop a lot of time. As it was, she told me she could three-step part of the way, but then would switch to five-stepping because she couldn’t alternate lead legs.
In working with her, I noticed that her knee lift in her sprint mechanics was very low, she carried her arms very low, and covered very little ground with each stride. Later in our first session, I put up two hurdles and her go at them full speed, with the second one moved in one foot, and both hurdles set at 30 inches. She was able to three-step hurdle two, but she took huge, bounding, slow strides in order to do so. Also, instead of lifting her knees, she was reaching with her foreleg with each stride between the hurdles. A very bad habit. This action, by definition, is what I call puddle hopping. Instead of sprinting, the hurdler sort of “puddle-hops” from hurdle to hurdle, just trying to reach each hurdle.
At that point, I knew that I needed to teach her how to alternate lead legs so that she wouldn’t be forced to four-step the whole way in races, as I didn’t see her as being able to three-step any hurdles without puddle hopping.
The next session a week later, I taught her to alternate. She was very resistant to it at first, as her school coaches said that it would be very difficult to learn. I had her do slow drills over low hurdles, clearing the hurdles with just her weaker leg. This way, she gradually developed a trust in the leg, and a belief that she could actually do it. Gradually I increased the spacing so she would have to go faster.
Then I set up a drill spaced for a slow and easy four-step rhythm so that she could put in some muscle memory of alternating. Then I gradually increased the spacing with that. One-two-three-four-hurdle, one-two-three-four-hurdle. As she grew more comfortable with the rhythm, her trust in her weaker leg also increased. By the end of the workout, she was four-stepping with little problem at race spacing, with the hurdles at 30 inches.
In the month and a half since we started together, Madi has dropped her personal best from 20-whatever to 18.35. Because of the switch to four-stepping, she’s actually been able to three-step through the third hurdle, with speed, before switching to four-stepping the rest of the way. She has conditioning issues, and she is stretching herself super-thin with cheerleading and tumbling practices, so I know going into each workout that I’ll only get a small window of quality work from her.
I told her, as I tell those with the same issues and questions, that the ability to three-step a whole race is going to come. But it has to come naturally. It can’t be forced. It has to happen as a result of the four-stepping feeling too crowded. Proper sprint mechanics cannot be sacrificed in the name of reaching for the four-step. Indeed, proper sprint mechanics are essential to being able to three-step. In addition, the proper sprint mechanics will help to ensure efficient hurdling technique, eliminating the puddle hopping that makes hurdling very strenuous. A lot of three-steppers who can’t three-step the whole way can’t do so because of errors in their sprint mechanics. On my school team, I have a 5-11 girl who can’t three-step past hurdle seven in most races because she runs so flat-footed and is so heavy on her feet. Ultimately, she just gets tired running that way, and can’t keep it up. She misses a lot of practice because she plays basketball year-round, so I’ve had to cut my losses in regards to training her properly, which is a source of endless frustration for me, but that’s a topic for another day.
My advice to four-steppers and coaches of four-steppers looking to transition to three-stepping is to always move the hurdles in far enough that the athlete can three-step in practice without reaching with the foreleg, without puddle hopping. Trust the four-step as a transitional phase. Don’t assume that because you’re four-stepping now you’ll be stuck four-stepping forever. And if you’re really in a hurry to three-step effectively for a whole race, then work on your sprint mechanics and work on your speed. And work on your start, as that is the part of the race that sets up the rest, and that is where you establish your speed, aggression, and confidence.
Workouts for developing speed would be short distances from a standing start. I’m talking sets of 40m, 50m, 60m sprints. Distances that allow you to focus totally on speed without worrying about fatigue.
As for the start, the coach has to facilitate those practices. A lot of beginners don’t really use the blocks; they don’t push off the pedals, but instead just kind of step out.
The coach must provide hands-on guidance and instruction when it comes to sprint mechanics, and sprint mechanics must be taught as an aspect of hurdling mechanics so that the athlete can understand the relation between the two, and thereby understand how improving their sprinting form will speed up the process toward becoming a consistent three-stepper.
But by all means, don’t learn how to three-step by puddle-hopping, because the reaching and bounding will become so ingrained that even though you may be fast enough to sprint between the hurdles and three-step, you’ll still puddle-hop because that’s what you have conditioned your body to do, and because you won’t trust your speed to get you there.
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