Beginner Level Drills
by Steve McGill
When it comes to coaching beginning hurdlers, or coaching hurdlers with some experience but who have not been taught proper mechanics, the coach has to do a whole lot of teaching. I have found that when coaching beginners with no prior experience whatsoever, I often have to move at a very slow pace, gradually implementing new aspects of technique and rhythm as I go. The same is also true for hurdlers who have been told by their coach to “go hurdle” as their hurdle workout, and have therefore been provided on direct on guidance on how to hurdle efficiently. With such hurdlers, I find that if I move too fast, bad habits go unaddressed, and therefore become ingrained. This is particularly true when hurdlers come to me mid-season for private coaching, looking to gain a competitive edge.
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This spring I’ve had a few hurdlers come to me for help. One of them, Anna, a middle schooler, came to me with several bad habits. Although 5’6” and pretty fast, Anna could not three-step – not due to a lack of speed, but because her technical issues caused her to lose so much speed over the hurdles. So while we made some progress in getting her to come out of the starting blocks more aggressively and to three-step at least part of the race, what was driving me crazy was the fact that I didn’t have the time I needed to address her flaws the way I knew they needed to be addressed.
The most noticeable flaw – and the root cause of all the others – was that she tilted heavily to her left (over her lead leg) when attacking the hurdles. This tilt began when she planted her last stride, before she even took off. This tilt caused her lead arm to cross her body, and to do so at a very high angle – over her head, like she was trying to dunk a basketball sideways. It also caused the trail leg to kick back, which caused the hips to twist.
Fortunately, the middle school season is short. It ended two weeks ago. Since then, I have continued working with Anna, and have gone back to basics. “Now that the season is over,” I told her, “I can teach you how to hurdle.”
With hurdlers like her, who have to unlearn bad habits and ingrain new ones, the process takes even longer than it does for a beginner who has never hurdled before, and has therefore not developed any bad habits. As I’ve grown and evolved as a coach, I’ve always made it a point to never throw away old drills that I don’t prefer to use anymore. Instead, I put those old drills in the closet in case I may need them again. And with Anna, I’m finding that I’m going back into the closet quite often to dust off and use some old drills.
In recent years, I’ve moved away almost totally from using side drills (isolating the lead or trail leg), and from doing any type of walk-over drills. I don’t like side drills because they allow one leg to cheat – to not execute the actual hurdling motion. And I don’t like walk-overs because they allow for one foot to always be on the ground, which is not what real hurdling is like. I’ve developed some of my own drills, such as marching pop-overs and the cycle drill, which more so mimic what a hurdler needs to do in a race – push off the back leg, explode into hurdling position, and run off the hurdle.
But what I have found with Anna is that the marching pop-overs and the cycle drill – although they slow things down – didn’t slow things down enough. She was still tilting at take-off, still swinging that lead arm. So, if she was going to get it – to the point where she could begin to ingrain it – we’d have to slow things down even further.
So in our most recent workout last week, we went back to the absolute basics – walking side drills for trail leg, walking side drills for lead leg, and walk-overs over the top. I had her do three (good reps) of each, with the hurdles spaced 12 feet apart, taking a 3-step march between the hurdles. Once she looked efficient doing all of these, then we moved on to the marching pop-overs before ending the session with reps of the cycle drill.
The session went very well, and I must admit I felt a bit proud of myself for breaking my own rules in order to help this particular athlete. The walking drills were incredibly helpful, allowing Anna the time to think about everything in her technique. The isolation walking drills were especially helpful because they allowed her to focus on one leg at a time. It was like we were deconstructing her hurdling mechanics in order to reconstruct them. In the isolation drills, she learned the importance of leaning forward. When leaning forward, she didn’t need to tilt. When you want to tilt, I told her, lean. The lean enabled her to keep her hips straight, to keep her lead arm from raising so high and crossing, and to keep the knee and heel of her trail leg tight and moving forward.
From my end of things, I found that I didn’t mind the isolation drills and walk-overs so much now that I realized I could use them as foundational drills that would make the pop-overs and cycle drill much more efficient. When it came time for both feet to leave the ground at the same time, all I had to explain to her was how the timing (of the lean, of the lead arm’s punch-down) was different. But the angles, I told her, remain the same.
I’m learning all the time, man. Learning, un-learning, re-learning. Dropping old approaches, adopting new ones, picking old ones back up. In my sophomore English class I’m teaching Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson, which he wrote shortly after the Chicago Bulls teams he coached in the 1990s won the first set of back-to-back-to-back championships. In one paragraph, he talks about how, when asked how he knows how to get the best out of his players, he doesn’t have a blueprint or a manual or a set of guidelines. He makes decisions in the moment. His point is that each moment may dictate the need for a new approach, a different approach, perhaps even an approach that he has never tried before.
He is so right. That’s why I get annoyed sometimes when people ask me for workouts. The workout is not where the magic happens. The magic happens when workouts are altered or adjusted during the workout to fit an individual athlete’s needs. If I give another coach a workout that says have the athlete do 10 reps over five hurdles at race pace, but all of those reps are only serving to ingrain bad technical habits, those ten reps did more harm than good. As Renaldo Nehemiah once said, “You have to learn how to hurdle.”
If you’re coaching beginners or relatively inexperienced hurdlers who have developed bad habits, the drills described in this article can be very helpful in helping the athlete to establish good fundamental mechanics.
The video below provides a visual for the drills I have discussed here. In it, you’ll see the progression from the side walking drills, to the walk-overs, to the marching pop-overs, to the cycle drill.
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