Stay Fast, Stay Forward
by Steve McGill
One of the biggest advantages of being an English teacher as my full-time job over the years has been that it has made me very adept at explaining things on a level that people can understand them. As a teacher, I’m always gauging whether or not I need to rephrase an explanation about a character in a novel or about the best way to go about organizing an essay, or even a simple grammatical concept. The fact that I know what I’m talking about doesn’t mean a thing if I can’t explain it effectively to my students.
That skill of effective communication has naturally carried over to my coaching career, and has been a big reason why I’ve been able to help hurdlers improve and achieve high levels of success. On the track, my explanations need to be clear enough and simple enough that the athletes can not only understand them, but execute them, and ultimately make them their own.
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Effective communication often equals effective coaching. The opposite is also true — ineffective communication often leads to ineffective coaching. That’s one of the reasons why the best athletes don’t always make the best coaches. They know how to do it themselves, but they don’t necessarily know how to explain to someone else how to do it. When I first started coaching, I used to get frustrated at times with athletes’ inability to grasp what I felt to be simple concepts. Heck, even a few years ago there was a kid who asked me what I meant when I instructed him that he needed to push with more force. “What does ‘push’ mean?” he asked. At first I thought he was joking. But he really didn’t know. So I had to explain it to him. After a lengthy explanation and demonstration, he got it, and was able to apply it.
With some athletes it’s important to always keep things simple, while other athletes are able to grasp complex concepts and are even able to ask questions that challenge my knowledge base. So, how I speak to an athlete depends on their level of intellectual capabilities. With beginners, keeping things simple is almost always the best option, because even the basic vocabulary is new to them.
Recently a high school athlete DMed me on Instagram, asking me what I think is the most essential thing in running fast hurdle races. Of course, this kind of question is very difficult to answer because there are so many factors that contribute to a fast hurdle race. At first, I was going to respond to him in that manner. But after thinking about it for a second, I thought to myself, yeah, what do I think is the most important thing for a hurdler to remember?
I eventually responded with the title of this article — stay fast, stay forward, with the heavier emphasis being on upper body posture — staying forward. The logic there is, if you’re not staying forward, it’s gonna be hard to stay fast.
As I thought about it more, I recognized that “stay fast, stay forward” has become a sort of mantra of mine over the past two years or so.
In a recent indoor meet, I was helping my girl Janie Coble to warm up, and in the last part of the warmup she did block starts over three hurdles. She looked really good the first rep, but on the second rep she hit a hurdle with her trail leg. I low-key panicked because the same thing had happened in the previous race, leading her to run a slow time and leave the track in tears, angry and frustrated that she wasn’t dropping time. So when I saw it happen again in the warmup, I reminded her to stay forward. “If you stay forward,” I said, “the trail leg won’t hit the hurdle and you’ll be fine.” The next rep, she followed my instruction and ran a fast, clean rep. In the race, she did the same thing and ran a new personal best of 8.97 over the 55 meter hurdles — her first time under 9.00 and her first time being on pace to run under 16.00 in the outdoor 100 meter race.
As I’ve explained in previous articles and in videos on YouTube and Instagram, leaning forward from the waist helps to raise the trail leg, while running in a more erect posture lowers the trail leg, forcing it to work harder to get over the hurdle. And often, it doesn’t; it smacks the hurdle instead.
Back in May of 2024, when I was helping my man Malik Mixon to return from an Achilles injury, we did a lot of drilling in which we emphasized body posture. Stay forward, push forward, I kept telling him. Everything in hurdling is about body angles. You’ve gotta put your body in a position where it can do what it needs to do in order to get over the hurdle quickly. If you’re too erect, your body is not in position to push forward and to accelerate through the hurdle.
The clip below features a marching popover rep from one of my sessions with Malik. After the rep, I explain why staying forward off the hurdle is so important:
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So, when you’re staying forward, it’s easy to stay fast. You don’t have to exert a whole lot of effort in getting over the hurdle. You can run with more of a sprinter’s mindset. That’s why, recently, I’ve honed in on preaching that gospel to all of my hurdlers — in practice and in races. Unless I see obvious flaws in technique that need to be addressed, I’ll stick to “stay fast, stay forward.” At this point, all of the hurdlers I’m working with on a regular basis have a strong foundation in regards to technique and rhythm, so “stay fast stay forward” actually reinforces the other lessons I had been teaching them that I no longer need to say aloud anymore. I don’t have to say “trail leg to the front” during a rep because “stay forward” implies that. I don’t have to say “drive your knees” because “stay fast” implies that.
When you can minimize the amount of cues the athletes need to remember, you free them to run more instinctively and more aggressively. Hurdlers often forget to stay fast because they’re thinking so much about technique. They often forget to stay forward because standing up off of hurdles can feel natural as well. But once they get in the habit of staying fast and staying forward all the time, they grow confidence in their ability to negotiate the barriers and in their ability to adapt to the shrinking space between the hurdles. Staying fast and staying forward can also eliminate mistakes like Janie’s low/wide trail leg and a lead leg foot that kicks out too soon.
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