Adapting the Workout to the Athlete

One of the beautiful things about hurdling, and one of the more difficult things from a coach’s perspective, is that not every hurdler responds the same way to the same workouts, and not every hurdler can be challenged in the same way. As a coach, I go into every workout with a clear idea of what I want to get accomplished. But how I get to that place won’t always be the same with each athlete. Recently I re-discovered how important it is to coach the individual athlete, to adapt the workout to the individual athlete’s ability level, and, quite honestly, maturity level.

[am4show not_have=’g5;’]

[/am4show][am4guest]

[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]

These days I do more private coaching than anything else. A couple weekends ago I had two hurdlers to work with. One, a boy, was a rising 14-year-old who is heading into his second year in the 13-14 year old age group in youth track. The other, a girl, is a sophomore at a nearby high school. The boy finished third at Junior Olympic Nationals last summer, and is hungry to do even better this year. The girl is heavily involved in cheerleading and doesn’t really have any definite track-related goals. She just started last year, and is still finding her way while juggling track with other commitments.

So, my pet workout once per week in the fall is the quick-step workout that I began implementing as a staple hurdle-conditioning workout about fifteen years ago. It’s a workout in which the volume increases gradually each week. The first week, the goal is for the athlete to clear a total of 100 hurdles. I set up five hurdles, at race height (or one click below for male collegians), spaced anywhere from 18-24 feet apart (depending on the athlete) for a quick three-step rhythm between the hurdles. The approach to the first hurdle is not all-out – more like a six-step approach from a standing start, speeding up in the last two strides before the hurdle, establishing the quick-step rhythm.

Between reps, the athlete bounces on the balls of the feet at a jogging pace back to the start line, then goes again. Between sets, the athlete rests 5-6 minutes. I generally divide the workout into three sets – two sets of eight and one set of four. With five hurdles set up, that equals a total of 100 hurdles.

I have found that this workout covers all the food groups, so to speak, that a hurdler needs in his or her diet. It’s a rhythm workout, a technique workout, and a hurdle endurance workout. The only factor not included is speed, but that will be added in later in the year when competition season rolls around. But because this workout already establishes the rhythm, it will be easy to maintain the rhythm when speed is added into the equation.

This workout is also valuable because it forces the athlete to work through mistakes on the fly. It also forces the athlete to address inefficient technique directly, as inefficient technique can lead to an onset of fatigue early in a set. The hurdler comes to understand that efficiency is vital to being able to maintain technique through a whole rep, a whole set, a whole workout, and ultimately, when the time comes, for a whole race.

So when working with the boy and girl a couple weekends ago, I worked with them separately – the boy came at 5pm, and the girl came at 6pm. One of the benefits of coaching privately is that it allows for more one-on-one instruction, more chance for individualized workouts, as the usual space issues that come up when coaching a whole team don’t come into play. With the boy, I cut no corners. I had him do the workout just as I had designed it, making sure he didn’t add in any extra rest, and being meticulous with details of technique and rhythm. Although only 13 going on 14, it was obvious to me from the beginning (this was only our second workout) that he took himself very seriously as an athlete, was eager to improve, and was willing to put in the work necessary to excel. So in his case, I didn’t look at his age; I looked at the athlete, at the mindset.

The workout went very well. He maintained his form and his rhythm the entire workout, with only a few bad hurdles here and there. The only time he hit a hurdle hard, he immediately righted himself and attacked the next one without me even needing to tell him to. He did as well with this workout as anyone ever has the first time doing it.

With the girl, whom I had been coaching off and on since last March, I knew I couldn’t expect to get the same quality and same volume if I didn’t make some adaptations to my expectations. Her conditioning level wasn’t nearly as high, and she was notorious for falling apart in the latter stages of workouts, no matter how good she looked early on.

So I decided that the non-negotiable element of the workout was to get in 100 hurdles worth of reps. Even if it took more sets and more rest to get there, that’s what we needed to get to. Fortunately, the blasting heat of the summer had finally died down, and the temperatures were relatively mild – in the low 70’s. I told her we’d start off with a set of four reps (20 hurdles), and that she could walk back between reps instead of jogging back on the balls of her feet. The first set went well enough that I felt confident we could get to 100 reps this way. I gave her three minutes between sets to somewhat compensate for the walking recovery between reps.

This formula ended up being successful for the whole workout. She did five sets of four reps over the five hurdles, for a total of 100 hurdles. The quality of the reps stayed high for the entire workout, which, to me, is the most important thing. I don’t want the volume without the quality. Just to say we made it to 100 hurdles doesn’t mean crap if 20 of those 100 hurdles were garbage.

Because I didn’t force the girl to do the workout exactly as I had originally designed it, but instead made concessions to accommodate her fitness level, we had a successful workout. Now, I can move toward adjusting her recovery periods to where I would prefer them to be. Instead of having her clear a higher volume of hurdles next time, I can tighten up her recovery periods, and keep her volume at 100 hurdles.

With the boy, meanwhile, I can go ahead and move forward according to script. Instead of setting up five hurdles, I’ll set up six. He’ll do a total of 20 reps (8, 8, and 4) over six, for a total of 120 hurdles. That’ll be 20 more hurdles than last workout. The next week, assuming all goes well, I’ll set up seven hurdles, and keep moving up until we get to ten hurdles each rep, for a total of 200 hurdles. If his first meet is in January (which I prefer, as opposed to earlier), that means we continue base-building through December, and can add more reps to each set. The most I’ve ever had an athlete do was three full sets of ten reps over ten hurdles, for a total of 300 hurdles. That was Johnny Dutch, his junior year of high school.

But yes, for the coach, it’s okay sometimes to lose the battle, so to speak. The important thing is to identify what it is you want to accomplish with the workout. If there is more than one thing, identify what is most important. I realize that with the situation I’ve described in this article, it would’ve been a different situation if I had had to coach them at the same time and needed more lane space. And there’s always the possibility that the athlete doing the more challenging version of the workout will resent the athlete doing the less challenging version. But that kind of issue won’t even come up if the coach has already developed strong relationships with the athletes as individuals and as a group.

[/am4show]