Hurdle Conditioning

The fall is a time of year for getting back in shape. When it comes to workouts, whether you’re talking about on the track or in the weight room, it’s a time for heavier volume at a  lower intensity level. It’s all about building a foundation that will enable you to sustain yourself and stay injury-free when the races start piling up and the workouts require higher levels of concentrated effort.

For hurdlers, building that foundation on the track and in the weight room is just as important as it is for any of their non-hurdling compatriots. But for hurdlers, there is a third dimension that sprinters don’t have to deal with. For hurdlers, getting in shape through running and sprinting, and getting stronger through lifting and plyometric exercises, are only two-thirds of the equation. In order to get into hurdling shape, a hurdler must clear a lot of hurdles.

What does it mean to get into “hurdling shape?” It means a lot of things. In my mind, it means all of the following:

• Developing muscle memory.
• Developing adaptability.
• Developing the ability to correct technical flaws.
• Developing the ability to recover from mistakes.
• Developing hurdler-specific endurance.
• Developing a hurdling identity.
• Developing a style.

Let’s break it down.

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Muscle Memory

In hurdling, muscle memory means knowing without thinking. The body knowing what positions it needs to be in – during take-off, during clearance, during descent, during landing. The lead leg knowing where it’s supposed to be, the trail leg knowing where it’s supposed to be, the lead arm and trail arm knowing where they’re supposed to be. The feet knowing how high off the ground they need to get, the knees knowing how high they need to rise. The lower back knowing how deeply it needs to lean. The hips knowing when and how forcefully to thrust. All these body parts being in sync with each other in regards to timing. This kind of muscle memory can only come through doing many repetitions.

Adaptability

Adaptability means being able to adapt to different conditions, to different spacings, to different speeds, depending on the workout or drill and the weather. It means being able to make subtle adjustments on the fly. It means being able to react instinctively. So in the off-season, it’s important to do different types of workouts and drills in which the spacings aren’t the race spacings, the heights aren’t the race heights, with different numbers of steps to take between the hurdles. Don’t postpone hurdle workouts for only when the sun is shining and the weather is free. Hurdle in the rain. Hurdle into a headwind. Hurdle with a tail wind pushing you from behind. A lot of hurdlers only practice with the hurdles at race height and at race spacings, and they go each rep full-blast from the starting line. If that’s the only hurdling you do in practice, you won’t be clearing enough hurdles to develop adaptability. As the season goes on and your speed increases, your improved speed will cause more problems that it solves. There should be a certain speed at which you do your warm-up drills, a certain speed at which you do different workouts based on the spacings and the heights, there should a certain speed at which you practice your start over the first three hurdles, etc. And your body should know the difference. It should be able to adapt to what the situation demands.

Correcting Technical Flaws

Again, if you only practice at full speed all the time, you can’t correct technical flaws. A key aspect of hurdle conditioning involves clearing enough hurdles at slower speeds to allow yourself to identify your technical flaws and to troubleshoot solutions, through reps, until the flaws are corrected. Renaldo Nehemiah’s high school coach, Jean Poquette, once spoke of how he would have the young Renaldo spend an entire session of endurance hurdling focusing exclusively on the lead leg. Then once that aspect of technique was mastered, the next session would be spent focusing exclusively on synchronizing the trail leg with the lead leg. With this kind of diligence, a hurdler can enter the racing portion of the season ready to focus on racing, as technical flaws were already addressed in the off-season.

And it’s very important to have a coach present whenever hurdling so that bad habits aren’t developed and ingrained. Doing a lot of reps without addressing technical flaws is a whole lot of hard work wasted. Even worse, it’s a whole lot of hard work that is counterproductive. So, especially you young hurdlers out there, keep in mind that working smart is just as important as working hard.  Don’t ingrain technical flaws by practicing them over and over again.

Recovering from Mistakes

​This one is huge. A lot of hurdlers don’t know how to recover when they make mistakes in a race. They panic, they press, they chase. They grow discouraged. They slow down, or stop altogether. Let me put it to you plainly: no matter how advanced you are, no matter how high a level of hurdle master you are, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re not ever going to run a perfect race. Because there’s no such thing.

If you clear a high amount of hurdles in off-season hurdle training, you’re going to learn how to deal with adversity. When you hit hurdles with your trail leg, you’ll learn how to roll with the loss of balance and how to regain balance when you land. When you hit hurdles with your lead leg, you’ll learn how to allow yourself to stumble for a step so that you can get tall again by step two, and be ready for the next hurdle by step three. If you don’t do enough reps in the off-season, then, when you hit hurdles in races, you won’t know what to do. And you’ll run tentatively because you’ll be afraid of making mistakes.

Hurdler-Specific Endurance

A hurdle race is a long race. Except for the indoor distances of 55 and 60 meters, a hurdle race is a long race. At any other distance, fatigue will become a factor, and the possibility of making mistakes increases significantly in the race’s latter stages. So a big part of fall training involves building the necessary hurdle endurance for the last half of the race. One way to build this endurance is to do many series of over-distance reps (150’s, 200’s, 300’s, etc. for the 100/110m hurdles; 400’s, 500’s, 600’s, etc. for the 300/400m hurdles). Another way to do this is to do heavy-volume hurdle workouts, in which you clear 100+ workouts in a single session. To me, the over-distance is important, but doesn’t suffice in and of itself, because it’s not hurdle-specific. A hurdler has to get used to the hurdling motion – the energy required to make that up-down motion, to make that push into the hurdle, to maintain speed coming off the hurdle.

So if you’re in sprinting shape but you’re not in hurdling shape, you’re still going to be more prone to late-race mistakes caused by fatigue. Nehemiah worked his way up to 400 hurdles cleared in a single session during his senior year of high school. That’s kind of hard to fathom. But 100 hurdles isn’t so hard to fathom. Nor should 150, or even 200 be. Later in this article I’ll discuss the types of workouts you can do to get this type of volume without sacrificing quality.

A Hurdling Identity

Here’s my point with this one: When you train with the sprinters 90% of the time and only get in some hurdling where you can fit it in, you don’t feel like a hurdler. You feel more like a sprinter who hurdles. And that’s a hugely significant distinction. To me, it’s important to develop a relationship with the hurdles. The days in which you do hurdling workouts should feel like you’re coming home, to a place of sanctuary. You want to feel like you’re doing something that the other athletes on the team cannot do, are afraid to even try. You want to feel like you have something unique that you can claim as your own. You want to be able to say, “I’m a hurdler.” If you don’t get enough hurdling reps in, you never gain that identity. You never feel comfortable in that skin. You don’t trust the hurdles, you don’t trust your abilities, you don’t trust your training.

A true hurdler is often misunderstood by teammates. Other track athletes see hurdlers hurdling during practice and claim that hurdlers “have it easy” because they don’t have to do a lot of repeats. They don’t understand how exhausting a high-volume hurdle workout is. They don’t understand that if they knew how fatiguing a hurdle workout is, they’d rather do the repeats. To me, developing that hurdling identity early on is very important. Through the course of a long season, there will be so many times when frustration mounts and you doubt the wisdom of your decision to stick with the hurdles. The sprints are more glamorous and all you have to do is run. But if you know you are a hurdler, if you’ve cleared enough hurdles that the hurdles are coursing through your bloodstream, then you will be able to pass through those pangs of doubt with little trouble.

A Style

Developing a style means discovering who you are as a hurdler. Just as hurdlers are distinctive from the other athletes on the track team, each hurdler is distinctive from the other hurdlers, even hurdlers who practice on the same track at the same time doing the same workouts. Every hurdler has his or her own style. While there are certain principles that must be in place for effective hurdling, there is also an inner quality that is indefinable, yet perceptible. A hurdler’s style is like a musician’s sound. It’s what makes you you.

My dad, who was a huge fan of jazz music from the 1940’s and 1950’s, could listen to a recording and point out each musician who was playing on that song. He could tell me who the trumpet player was, who the sax player was, who the pianist was, who the bass player was, who the drummer was. Without looking at the credits on the liner notes. “Every musician has a sound,” he explained to me once. “You can tell who ‘s playing by his sound.” And this sound is developed through practice. For a hurdler, a style is developed through practice, through reps over the hurdles. On the practice track, you discover little nuances in technique that work for you, although you haven’t seen anyone else do them. You try something new that doesn’t work, but that leads to a new idea that does. You learn to trust your rhythm. You know when hurdling “feels” right, without needing validation from a coach or a stopwatch. That’s when you know you have a style.

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 Hurdle-Endurance Workouts

Probably the most well-known of hurdle-endurance workouts is the back-and-forths that Nehemiah made famous under the guidance of Poquette. This workout involves setting up five hurdles in one direction, and five hurdles beside them facing the other direction. The hurdler goes over the five hurdles going up, turns around, then goes over the five hurdles heading back. The rhythm in-between the hurdles is a five-step. This used to be a mainstay for me as a coach, but in recent years I’ve moved away from it. The reason is simple: it’s too hard. I find that it’s hard to get in a high number of hurdles at a high level of quality. Athletes fatigue too soon into the workout, technique gets sloppy, and the whole thing gets to be pointless. It’s really a distance workout for hurdlers, and if you don’t have a distance-running background, you’ll struggle.

My preferred hurdle-endurance workout, which has become a staple in the off-season training program for my hurdlers, is the quick-step workout. This workout involves setting up anywhere from 5-10 hurdles, approximately 8 yards apart for males, 7 yards apart for females, going over them with a quick 3-step rhythm, fast-walking or jogging back, and going again. Because it’s not continuous like the back-and-forths, the recovery time does allow the hurdler time to regroup before going again.

For the long hurdle races, I created my own spin-off of the original back-and-forths. I have the long hurdlers do 100 meter back-and-forths, with the hurdles set at the 300/400m hurdle height, at every odd-numbered marking of the 100/110m hurdles. They go up 100 meters clearing five hurdles one way, then come back 100 meters clearing five hurdles the other way. That’s 200 meters of running over 10 hurdles per rep. The stride pattern varies, but will usually fall somewhere between 8 and 11 steps between the hurdles. What I look for is consistency and the ability to adjust when fatigue sets in.

Another conditioning workout for the long hurdles is what I call the “steeplechase” workout, in which the hurdler runs 800m repeats with hurdles set up randomly around the track.

All of these workouts are explained in detail in the “Free Articles” menu of this website, under “workouts,” if you want to learn more about the set-up, etc. And they all serve the purpose of making sure the athlete gets into “hurdle shape” before the competitive season begins.

Indoor Season Conflict

One of the reasons that it’s difficult to get in the hurdle-endurance workouts that will establish a firm base for the long haul is that the indoor season seems to be starting sooner and sooner, lasting longer and longer, and becoming more and more competitive. At least that’s the case at the high school level, where I live. There are indoor meets as early as the first week of December, and the number of national meets – invitationals, championships, etc. – seems to be increasing every year. Part of the reason for this magnified focus on indoor competition is that scholarships are harder to come by because collegiate athletic programs have to ration them out in a very miserly fashion. So if you’re a senior hoping to earn a scholarship and you didn’t make enough noise your junior year, the indoor season represents your last chance to shine before the money’s all gone.

Obviously, if you’re preparing to race indoors, and you want to peak indoors, then there’s just not much time for hurdle-conditioning workouts. You gotta put the blocks down, get race-sharp, and let your technique be what it is. Of course, I’m not a fan of this approach. It stunts growth, inhibits development, and ultimately gets in the way of maximizing one’s potential. But, as the saying goes, it is what it is.

Older Hurdlers

I do believe that there comes a point in a hurdler’s career when hurdle-conditioning workouts become less important, and arguably even detrimental. High volume can be hard on the body, so once you’re in your early 20’s or so, clearing 100 hurdles in one session doesn’t make much sense. By then, you should have developed your own style, found your own rhythm, so it’s best to spare your body the pounding. The muscle memory is already in there from years of training and racing. The trust factor has already been established. You know what you’re body can do, you know how to prepare it to race, and you know when it’s ready to race.

But for you younger hurdlers, get your reps in. It’ll pay off in the long run.

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