The A-Skip Approach to Hurdling
A lot of times as a coach, you have to decide how much to address a hurdler’s technical flaws, because if you try to fix all that you see that’s wrong, the athlete may not be willing for a total tear-down and rebuild. I faced this dilemma about a month ago, when I started working with a kid named Geoffrey who is a high school junior at a nearby school. A smaller hurdler – in the 5’8” range – Geoffrey was still able to run in the mid-15’s without a hurdle coach.
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When I started working with him, I did what I always do in the first session with a hurdler who is new to me – I had him do some slower reps over five hurdles, five-stepping between with the hurdles at race distance, lowered three inches below race height.
The first thing that jumped out at me was that Geoffrey was a swing-from-the-hip hurdler with his lead leg. The fact that he swung the leg forcefully helped him to power through, but he was really putting in a lot of work to get up and over each hurdle. And of course, the swing from the hip led to the arms swinging across the body. He also had no lean whatsoever when attacking each hurdle. And his hips twisted. And his trail leg was wide. And he ran flat-footed. And he had a lot of back-kick in his stride.
I didn’t know where to start. Should I even try to fix anything at all? How to address so many issues without creating an information overload? I started by explaining front-side mechanics. Run on the ball of the foot. Keep the ankle dorsi-flexed. Cycle the legs.
The first session didn’t go so well. Although Geoffrey was an eager student, he had grown accustomed to using his speed to push him through the hurdles. I couldn’t get him to slow down. It took a lot of A-marches to get him to even understand the concept of front-side mechanics. This is why, I thought to myself, it is so much harder to coach someone who has developed bad habits than it is to coach a beginner. Those bad habits are so hard to break.
I’ve worked with Geoffrey once a week since that initial session, and I can see the progress coming. I told him at the beginning of our second session that I could he could either really learn how to hurdle, which would be a long-term project, or we could just get him through the rest of this season by working on refining his start and improving his speed between. He said he wanted to really learn how to hurdle. I said, “that’s what I wanted to hear.”
In our most recent session, I had him five-step over 33-inch hurdles, at the spacing for the girls race. Finally, I started seeing what I’d been eager to see: The knee of the lead leg leading the way. A forward lean over the thigh during take-off. In previous sessions, lowering the hurdles to 36 inches had proven to not be low enough. Even at 33, he was still swinging from the hip, even though the hurdles were low enough to step over. What worked was, I told him to exaggerate the knee lift. That was something I had forgotten – that when trying to do something new, the athlete should exaggerate the motion. It should feel, I told him, like you’re bringing up the knee too high. If it doesn’t feel too high, it’s not high enough, because you don’t bring up at all normally.
Also, I reminded him of the importance of keeping the heel coming up, under the hamstring, when taking off. He was faking himself out on a lot of reps because he was keeping the knee bent when attacking the hurdle, but he was still swinging from the hip. It’s not just about bending the knee, I explained to him, it’s about leading with the knee, and you can’t lead with the knee if your heel is getting in front of your knee too soon. The first direction, off the ground, must be up, not forward. The hips push forward, but the knee and heel come up. The effort should be in the hip flexor, not the hamstring, when taking off.
Once he understood these concepts, he was looking like I wanted him to look. He was stepping over hurdle. His legs were cycling. He looked fluid, not herky-jerky. I couldn’t have been more excited.
What was odd the whole time, since our first day together, was that he did his sprint drills very well. He did all of his drills on the balls of his feet. But when it came to running, all the proper mechanics disappeared. I realized there was a disconnect. He just did his drills as a warmup; he didn’t realize that his drills were teaching him how he’s supposed to run .When I explained that to him, that helped to speed up the learning curve.
The key drill was the A-skip. That’s the drill that emphasizes the knee action, applying force to the track, running tall on the ball of the foot, etc. And I’ve noticed that, in my coaching, I’ve come to rely more and more on the A-skip as the foundation for hurdling technique. With many athletes, I have abandoned the B-skip. Back in the day, I swore by the B-skip because the B-skip mimics the hurdle motion – drive the knee, extend the leg, pull the heel back under the hip.
I still believe in the B-skip, but I find that athletes who are first learning it get too caught up in the extension phase of the stride, and they rush through the knee-lift phase. So they end up kicking the foot up, which in hurdling will lead to a pause and a twist, which is the last thing I want to teach.
The A-skip is a much easier teaching tool, and it is excellent for hurdlers like Geoffrey, who swing from the hip. With Geoffrey, therefore, I teach the hurdling motion as an A-skip, not as a B-skip. The more I look at videos from coaching compatriots like Hector Cotto and Terry Reese, the more I can see that the A-skip has everything the B-skip has. The A-Skip, when done properly, is not a straight-up-and-down motion. It is a cyclical motion. There is a slight extension in the second phase of the motion, but not an exaggerated one like in the B-skip. There is a pull-under at the bottom of the stride as well, but again, it just isn’t as obvious. Emphasis is on the knee action.
So with Geoffrey, I told him to do the a-skip motion with his lead leg when clearing the hurdles. Don’t think about extending the foot. Focus on getting the knee up, higher than the crossbar, and on keeping that heel tucked under the hamstring. The leg will know to extend when the time comes for it to extend. But don’t tell it to extend, because you’ll extend too much, and you’ll extend too soon.
That last session went very well, and I look forward to increasing the spacing so that Geoffrey can continue to master this approach to hurdling while adding more speed into the equation. I’ll wait until later before raising the hurdles to 36. First, I really want to ingrain the action. If we go to 36 too soon, the old habit of swinging from the hip might come back immediately. And I don’t want to see that mess ever again!
The video above features Hector Cotto performing the one-step drill. While I’m more of a 3-step guy with the majority of my drills, I certainly concur that the one-step drill is very effective when it comes to forcing the athlete to get the knee up and not allowing the foot to swing outward. In the one-step drill, you will crash if you don’t get your knee up. In the vid, Hector is lifting his lead leg knee much higher than he would in a race. But again, that’s the point of drills – to exaggerate what you want to do in a race, so that you can ingrain the habits that you actually want to execute when the gun goes off.
In the above video from Coach Reese, fast forward past the first minute of trail leg fence-drilling, and you’ll see him doing a quick three-step drill with the hurdles increasing in height. Notice the emphasis on knee lift at each hurdle. Noticing how the lead leg is cycling, thereby enabling the trail leg to cycle as well. As the hurdles get higher, the lead leg extends further, but the emphasis is not on extending. The emphasis is still on cycling. The leg extends further because it knows it needs to, not because there’s any conscious effort on his part to extend it. Therefore, the feeling is the same, and the fluidity of the action is maintained.
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