Curve Hurdling Workout for the Long Hurdler
by Steve McGill

For the long hurdlers, negotiating the curve is an art unto itself, as it calls for the need to re-think body positioning, arm and hip angles, it can directly affect stride length (and therefore stride pattern), and mistakes on the curve  can lead to disastrous results. That is why, with any drill I have my athletes do on the straightaway, I will also move that drill to the curve, which is the case with this month’s workout. Years ago, I experimented with, and then implemented, a workout in which the athletes clear five hurdles on the curve, five-stepping between the hurdles, and having the option to go at a slower pace and seven-step. We would do reps leading with the dominant leg, and if the athlete had the ability to alternate lead legs, we would do the same amount of reps leading with the non-dominant lead leg. If the athlete was learning to develop the weaker leg, then we might do entire sessions just leading with the weaker leg. 

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This summer, I’ve been working with a collegiate athlete who is town for a few months before he heads back to college. He’s a converted 400m hurdler who has run the 800 in the past, and ran a few 400h races toward the end of his recently completed collegiate season. So, he came to me looking to develop a stride pattern for the hurdles, but, as is almost always the case, we had some foundation-building to do before we could straight to the starting blocks and start figuring things out. He told me he took 23 steps to the first hurdle and wasn’t really sure what he was doing after that. When I asked him if he was able to alternate, he answered yes, but that using the weaker leg could get ugly at times. So I created a workout that we first did on the straightaway before moving it to the curve the following session:

• 8×80 meters, clearing four hurdles
• 19 meters from start line to first hurdle for an 11-step sprint to the first hurdle
• The last three hurdles are spaced 21 meters apart for a 10-step rhythm.
• With the 10-step rhythm, we are switching lead legs every hurdle.

So, these numbers aren’t set in stone by any means. In our case, they were tailored to his specific needs. Because he takes 23 steps to the first hurdle, I wanted him taking an odd number of steps to the first hurdle. If you have an athlete who takes an even number of steps to the first hurdle in a race (which most hurdlers do), you’ll want to mimic that in the drill. And then the spacing between the hurdles was designed to give him room to sprint and force him to trust his weaker leg and high speeds. If we weren’t working on alternating, the spacing would’ve been adjusted so that he could either 9-step or 11-step between the hurdles. We actually had to “waste” a few reps in the beginning of the first session figuring out what the optimal spacing for him was, which is okay, because once we know, we won’t have to guess again.

So, as mentioned earlier, the second time we did this workout, we moved it to the curve. We started at the 400 meter start line and ran over the four hurdles, using the first curve. The dropoff in execution was prodigious at first. On the straight, he’d been having problems staying dorsiflexed when taking off into the hurdles using his weaker leg, which was a relatively easy fix, and I saw improvement immediately after pointing it out to him. But on the curve, the arms were swinging wildly, the hips were twisting, and the foot stomp into the hurdle came back. Even over the first and third hurdles — where he was leading with his dominant leg — there were issues with balance and with the arms and with elevating too much. 

So, we engaged in lengthy discussions between reps in which I explained to him to run in straight lines on the curve — meaning, hurdlers can’t hug the curve like sprinters do; they can’t lean their body into it like sprinters do. Hurdlers have to keep moving in straight lines, even if that means landing in the outside part of the lane (for a right-leg lead). We made plenty of progress by the end of the session, but we still have a way to go before we can start working on race-modeling. The thing with this athlete is, he needs to alternate from the giddy up. His most natural rhythm would be 23 strides to hurdle one, and then 16 strides to hurdle two, and to maintain 16 through at least the fifth hurdle (the last hurdle on the backstretch). 

So, going forward, we’ll need to do some work specifically on the weaker leg, getting it to where it’s almost just as reliable as the dominant leg. Which will mean doing the same workout we just did, but adjusting the spacing so that he’s leading with his weaker leg over all of the hurdles. 

One last factor to consider is that of hurdle heights. In our case, we started at one click below race height, and then moved up to race height in the following session. That was both on the straight, and then on the curve. With girls, a click below race height is 27 inches, so that would mean needing to use practice hurdles that go down to lower heights than the regulation hurdles. 

Below is a clip of a reps from the workout described in this article. This rep was over 33’s.

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