Staying Low over the Hurdles
by Steve McGill
With the way I coach hurdlers, I compare it to how a sculptor shapes a sculpture. First you have a big slab of rock, and then you gradually, with love and care and by paying attention to every meticulous detail, mold that slab of rock into something that takes shape and comes to life. You can’t skip steps. While you must a vision of what the finished product will look like, you can’t rush ahead to that finished product.
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When coaching hurdlers, the steps I take would consist of the following:
- Establish proper sprinting mechanics (reference the article “Staying on the Balls of the Feet” in this issue). This will be done through a lot of sprint drills with a lot of hands-on teaching on my part. My personal pet drills are A-marches and A-skips and high knees. When you can do all three of those efficiently, you are ready to learn how to hurdle.
- Through constant drilling, incorporate the efficient sprinting mechanics into hurdling mechanics. My pet drills for this are the marching pop-overs, the cycle drill, and the quick-step drill. All of these have been discussed in previous articles and can be seen in many videos on my YouTube channel. In all the drills, the hurdles are lower than race height and spaced more closely together than race distance.
- Once proper mechanics have been mastered in the drills, then we incorporate the start into the mix, facing the biggest challenge, which is to maintain proper sprinting and hurdling mechanics when moving at full speed.
- Usually, I’ll begin with the three-point start before putting the blocks down, just to ease the transition.
- Once we put the blocks down, we’ll work on developing a stride pattern to hurdle one, and between the rest, that allows us the take-off distance we need to execute our style, which emphasizes a significant knee-drive of the lead leg and a big push off the back leg at take-off.
- Then we’ll work on maintaining our angles – knee-first lead leg, knee-first trail leg, up-and-down action with the arms, forward lean from the waist, forward posture between the hurdles, trail leg knee facing the front upon touchdown, chin up and eyes up throughout hurdle clearance.
- Once we have our angles in place, then we work on streamlining everything. Our aim is to clear the hurdles as low as possible without hitting them. We want the heel of the lead leg to skim each hurdle, minimizing our air time. The less time we spend in the air, the more time we can spend sprinting, and the more space we’ll have to sprint. And that, my friend, is the key – creating space to sprint. Hurdle races are won on the ground, by hurdlers who are able to cover the ground between the hurdles faster than their opponents. But, paradoxically perhaps, the reason they are able to run faster between the hurdles is because of their efficiency over the hurdles.
This past weekend, in working with two of my athletes whom I coach privately, I found myself in the same enjoyable position with both of them – being at a point where we’re ready to focus on staying low. Josh Brockman is a high school junior who broke 14.0 last year, before I started working with him. Falon Spearman is an 8th grader in the 13-14 year old age group in youth track. Both of them have appeared in a lot of my YouTube videos over the past few months. Although both are young, both have an exceptionally high hurdling IQ. In both cases, they have reached a point where they have mastered the angles. In working with them both this past weekend, we emphasized skimming the hurdles, but not in the old-school way of a horizontally straight lead leg, but in our way of a slightly bent lead leg that cycles over the hurdle.
In both cases, the lead arm was the main trigger to serve as a cue. Two things the lead arm must do to help reduce air time: 1) the hand must rise no higher than the forehead, and 2) the hand must begin its descent before the heel of the lead leg reaches the crossbar.
If the hand rises too high, that will cause the lead leg to clear higher than we would like. Our aim is to reduce the space between the heel and the crossbar, between the calf and the crossbar, between the hamstring and the crossbar. All while cycling. No straight-leg lead followed by a snapdown. I can’t emphasize that enough. A straight-leg lead flattens out the trail leg and delays the trail leg’s movement to the front, disrupting the flow and increasing the chances of making contact with the obstacles. We want the hand to rise high enough to allow the knee of the lead leg to rise higher than the crossbar, but not so high that it creates space between the lead leg and the crossbar when the foot extends.
If the hand punches down too late (for us, “late” would be after the heel of the lead leg has already reached the crossbar), then you will float out too far and land farther out than what would be optimal.
So, by speeding up the action of the lead arm, that naturally speeds up the action of the lead leg, which then speeds up the action of the trail leg. And that’s the order in which things happen. But the only cue the athlete needs is to speed up the lead arm. In some cases, the trail leg might have trouble keeping up because it has to push off first. If I see that the trail leg is flattening out, I’ll remind the athlete to make sure the trail leg speeds up with everything else. Think about it, talk yourself through it for a couple reps, and then the trail leg will be able to do it on its own.
In the videos below, the first one of Josh and the second one of Falon, take note of the lead arm action, and how its quickness makes everything else quicker. When I asked Falon if she knew why I hadn’t pointed out this aspect of hurdling in previous sessions, she astutely gave the correct answer, “because I had other things to fix, and if you had told me this before, it would’ve thrown the other stuff off.”
Indeed, that’s why I reiterate, you can’t skip steps. And again, in the way I coach hurdlers, lowering hurdle clearance by emphasizing a tighter, speedier lead arm action is the final piece to the puzzle of putting together a complete hurdler who is in total control of his or her race from start to finish.
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