Tearing Down to Rebuild
The more ingrained the habit, the harder it is to break. As long as wrong feels wrong, it’s going to be hard to change wrong into right. Or, to put it more specifically, as long as inefficient feels efficient, it’s gonna be hard to get the athlete to buy into the process of making significant changes to hurdling technique. My argument, however, is always that making those changes can lead to major improvements in one’s time. Correcting one technical flaw can improve the efficiency of the entire hurdling motion, leading to more speed coming off each hurdle, and more speed between the hurdles.
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As the saying goes, sometimes you have to move backwards in order to move forward. Sometimes you have to tear down in order to rebuild. My experience has been that hurdlers who have had success hurdling a certain way–whether that was efficient or not–are the hurdlers who are most difficult to coach when it comes to teaching them to fix bad habits. Once we are in season and we have races to prepare for, I’ll limit the amount of technical corrections I’ll pursue, sometimes severely, so that the athlete’s bodies aren’t too confused when it comes time to compete. In the competitive seasons, especially outdoors, I’ll emphasize speed over technique, and I’ll encourage my hurdlers to use their speed to compensate for any technical flaws that I may see.
But this is the off-season. I consider September, October, November to be the three months when I as a coach can experiment freely without fear of my experimentations coming back to bite me in the butt. This is the time of year to address technical flaws that would have been dangerous to address during the competitive seasons. In addition, any major changes in rhythm–like from 8-stepping to 7-stepping to the first hurdle, or from 4-stepping to 3-stepping between the hurdles, should be established in these off-season months, even if the process of mastering these changes will most surely carry over into the competitive seasons.
One thing I’ve learned since I’ve started focusing almost exclusively on private coaching in the last two years is that new hurdlers will most often come to me during the spring season rather than in the fall. Most athletes are looking for that competitive edge that will help them drop time within a week or two in order to qualify for their conference meet, regional meet, state meet, or post-season championship meets. By that time, all I can do is work with what they’re already doing technically, try to improve their start to the first hurdle, and make sure they’re not clearing the hurdles too high. Any other flaws, no matter how glaring, I’ll just have to live with.
One of the girls I started with last spring, Sofia, was a middle-schooler who was preparing to compete in her first heptathlon in the summer. She came to me as a five-stepper over the middle-school 30-inch hurdles. We quickly transitioned to 4-stepping, and then to 3-stepping by the end of the school season. The hurdle race in middle school consisted of only five hurdles, which made things easier when it came to getting her through a race. But when it came to compete in the heptathlon, she would have to compete in the 15-16 age group even though she was still only 14. The hurdles would be 33 inches, and there would be ten to clear.
Even though only 5-3, Sofia, through sheer will and determination, solid sprint mechanics, and above-average speed, was able to three-step a whole race over the 33’s by the end of the summer. She accomplished this although I was not coaching her in any way shape or form like I wanted to. Her lead leg locked at the knee, her lead arm crossed her body and then swung back the other way, and her hurdle clearance was very high. I kept reminding her that she didn’t really know how to hurdle, that she was just going on pure athleticism. Once the season is over, I told her, I’m gonna teach you how to really hurdle. But of course, I knew that because her body had learned how to hurdle in an inefficient manner, she had been doing it long enough that it felt right to her, so it was going to take a while to undo the damage that I had helped to create.
We have met twice thus far this fall. And we’ve been slowing things down drastically in order to unlearn the bad habits and to ingrain the new ones. While relying on speed to compensate for flaws is essential when competing, it is quite counterproductive when working to maximize one’s efficiency. In our first session, I placed a lot of emphasis on correcting the lead leg–getting it to cycle instead of kicking. But even in cycle drills with the hurdles spaced only 15 feet apart, the leg kicked. So we switched to the marching drill, which doesn’t allow for speed to enter into the equation, thereby exposing technical flaws so that they can be corrected. In the marching drill, her lead leg cycled like I wanted it to, which marked the beginning of establishing a new muscle memory.
In our second session, I decided to hone in on the lead arm. I instructed her to keep the thumb pointing up (an old trick that I had found to be effective in the past), and to focus on the action of the hand, not the whole arm. “The hand goes up, the hand goes down, just like when you run,” I told her. On the reps when she kept the arm motion tight like I wanted her to, I noticed an unexpected additional benefit: the hips didn’t rise at all, but pushed straight ahead, significantly reducing her air time. Even when the lead leg kicked, the arm really helped the hips.Now I feel confident that if we stay patient and keep moving in the direction that we’re moving, her technique will be close to flawless by the time the indoor season arrives, and then once we work on start and ensuring a good take-off distance to the first hurdle, she will begin to reap the benefits of the tedious technique work she put in during the fall.
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