Fixing the Lead Arm
by Steve McGill
Lately I’ve been receiving a good deal of correspondence from athletes asking for tips with their technique. I’ve noticed that the question that comes up most often involves what to do with the lead arm. The answer is simple: drive it up and punch and down. With male hurdlers, however (especially shorter male hurdlers), it can get more complicated than that. Still, even for male hurdlers, the basic principles are the same as it is for females. But putting the body in position to use the lead arm efficiently can pose a challenge.
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The most common problem I’ve seen with the lead arm is that of it crossing the body during takeoff, which causes it to swing back in the other direction on the way down. Many hurdlers who have this habit already sprint with their elbows out and their arms going from side to side. So of course, that action will be exacerbated over the hurdle. In such cases, the side-to-side action of the arms must be addressed in drills and medium-paced sprints before they can be addressed over the hurdles. The athlete should probably be instructed to go back to A-Marches and relearn the arm action all over again. I always instruct the athletes to focus on the hands instead of focusing on the whole arm. In some cases, the elbows might be wide but the hands are moving in an up-and-down action as opposed to the side-to-side swinging action. In such cases, I don’t see that as an issue that needs to be fixed.
After A-Marches, the athlete can graduate to A-Skips, focusing on the same thing — moving the hands in an up-and-down motion. And if the elbows are egregiously wide, then there will also be the need to bring them in some. The action must be crisp and sharp, with the hands moving from cheek to backpocket. This motion has to become habitual, and it must be feeling natural in these two drills before the athlete tries to correct their arm action while sprinting. As mentioned above, the sprints should be at a medium pace, starting at maybe 50% of full speed — slow enough that the athlete can think and run at the same time. At first, this new arm action will feel weird and uncomfortable, so again, they need to do enough reps doing properly that it starts to feel natural, without the need to think about what they’re doing.
At that point, you can speed things up gradually, from 50% to 60%, all the way up to 90% of full speed. For athletes who are quick learners, this progression could occur within a single session. For most, however, it’ll probably require steady work for several weeks before the new habits become ingrained. At some point in the midst of this progression, you’ll need to introduce some hurdle work. I’ll generally start with hurdles at least two clicks below race height, spaced close together for an easy bop-bop-bop between the hurdles. From that, again, you just want to continue with a gradual progression. Gradually increase the spacing and gradually raise the height of the hurdles.
When it’s time to work on driving out of the starting blocks, you’ll need to start from the ground up again. If the arms are used to swinging side to side out of the blocks, they’ll continue to do so initially. So you’ll need to work on starts with no hurdles at first, allowing the athlete the time they need to learn to get the arms moving up and down. The thing is, in the first two or three strides out of the blocks, it’s okay for the arms to swing widely before settling into the natural driving action.
Recently a collegiate athlete asked me some questions about his technique, and I noticed that his lead arm was pausing before punching down. So even though the angles were good — hand above the elbow, hand driving up to the crown of the head — the pause was causing everything else (trail arm, lead leg, trail leg) to pause, causing a loss of velocity due to extended air time, and also causing a twist in the hips and shoulders. So I explained to him that he needed to get rid of that lead-arm, and in the next video he sent me, he was raising the elbow too high, causing the hips and shoulders to still twist. This showed me how difficult it can be to correct even a minor issue if it has been ingrained for a long period of time. I then suggested that he lower the hurdles in practice so he can teach his body to do what I’m suggesting he do, because as long as he keeps trying it at full speed he won’t be able to correct the flaw.
The general rule with the arms is to keep them as close to the natural sprinting motion as possible. If you want the hands to move up and down when sprinting, then you want the hands to be moving up and down when sprinting over the barriers. Again, I emphasize the hand. The elbow is going to have to open slightly no matter what, just like the knee of the trail leg will have to open slightly no matter what. My thing is, we just don’t want the elbow to open so widely that it ends up being as high as the hand, or higher than the hand.
But there are exceptions to that rule. GOAT candidate Allen Johnson used to raise his elbow very high while turning his palm outward, so that the back of his hand was facing his forehead. From that position, he would punch down, and that worked exceptionally well for him. I always say that when it comes to male hurdlers over 42-inch hurdles, there has to be a willingness to try things that don’t fit the usual script. That’s why I’m cool with what Johnson did, and with what Aries Merritt did, even though I don’t include what they do in my basic teachings.
Below is a quick instructional video about the lead arm that I shared with the collegiate athlete who contacted me. I posted it on my Instagram page because I assumed (correctly) that there were others who would benefit from the same instruction.
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