A Fourth Excerpt from The Spiritual Dimension of Hurdling
by Steve McGill
To progress as a hurdler, and to make hurdling easier, requires harmonizing its three main components: technique, rhythm, and speed. All three are interrelated and interdependent. Technique affects rhythm and rhythm affects speed and speed affects technique, etc. Which of the three is emphasized the most varies from coach to coach. Coaches who are very knowledgeable about technique and can teach it will often place a primary emphasis on technique. Coaches who are excellent teachers of sprint mechanics tend to emphasize speed the most and coach the hurdles as just another sprint event. Those are the two main categories. But there are some coaches who emphasize rhythm; their philosophy is that if you do enough certain reps a certain way and you ingrain a consistent rhythm, you’ll be able to maintain that rhythm regardless of weather conditions, the track surface, etc.
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When I first started coaching, I was a technique-based coach. Technique was all I cared about. I believed that races were always won by the hurdler with the best technique. But after seeing some races where that was not the case, I started reevaluating. The real turning point for me came around 2009-10, when I was coaching two post-collegiate hurdlers, Byron Gibson and Hector Cotto, both of whom were hoping to run professionally. I learned a ton of stuff from both of them about sprint mechanics, and the importance of critiquing sprint mechanics when coaching hurdlers. Integrating the lessons I learned from them, I eventually came to the realization that hurdling mechanics and sprinting mechanics are ultimately one and the same, in the sense that flaws in hurdling technique are almost always rooted in flaws in sprint mechanics. That realization helped me a lot when I started coaching Ayden Thompson, as I discussed in the previous chapter.
I also came to realize that rhythm isn’t a consistent, fixed thing, like I had thought. It’s an ever-changing thing – in the course of a career, in the course of a season, in the course of a race, and even in the course of a practice rep. Rhythm gets quickened by improvements in technique and speed, and the hurdler must be able to adjust, constantly.
So now, I coach all three – technique, rhythm, and technique – as an integrated whole. Which one I emphasize the most will vary from athlete to athlete, depending on the individual athlete’s strengths and weaknesses, and will also change through the course of a season. Generally, I’ll emphasize technique and rhythm in the off-season, and then shift the emphasis to speed during the competitive season. But all of them matter all of the time. In the next part of this chapter, I would like to talk about each of these three components individually in further detail.
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Let’s start with technique. What is technique? Technique is a hurdler’s “style,” if you will. As demonstrated in the earlier anecdote about Johnny Dutch copying the styles of well-known hurdlers, you can identify hurdlers by their technique. Even hurdlers coached by the same coach won’t necessarily have the same style. Allen Johnson and Terrence Trammell had the same coach but had very different styles. When I was coaching Johnny Dutch, Wayne Davis, and Booker Nunley, all three of them had very different styles, partly because Johnny was 6-0, Wayne was 5-10, and Booker was 6-2. But not only that, they each their own natural tendencies. Wayne, being shorter, developed a style where he would lock the lead leg at the knee on top of the hurdle, but would unlock it during descent so that it could then extend like it would in a normal sprinting stride. The foot could then land under his hip instead of slightly in front of his hips, as it would’ve done had he used the traditional snapdown method. Booker’s lead leg looked a lot like that of 2005 World Champion Ladji Doucoure of France. It locked at the knee, but it snapped down so fast that I decided not to mess with it. Johnny, meanwhile, was the most fluid of them all. Watching him run over hurdles was like watching water in a stream running over rocks.
Being able to work with an athlete’s natural tendencies is important. For example, I like the lead arm to stay on the same side of the body the whole time, punching up then punching down, or cycling in sync with the lead leg. But hurdlers who come to me with the flaw of swinging the arm across the body may have difficulty going from doing that to doing what I’d ideally like for them to do. There’s a kid named Micah Cooney who attended one of my hurdling camps in March of 2024, and then came to me again for one-on-one training in June of the same year. When trying to fix his lead arm so that it didn’t swing to the other side of his body, he kind of did a move where he slightly turned his wrist so that his palm was facing forward, and then he punched down from that position, similar to a swimmer grabbing water and pulling it back. I liked that move because it kept the lead arm from swinging across, and it allowed for the hand to punch down with force. “Let’s go with that!” I said the first time he did it. I had filmed the rep, so I showed it to him right afterward so that he could see what it looked like, and that’s what we went with for the rest of the session.
So yes, technique is style. Another way to define technique is to call it an amalgamation of body parts. Lead leg, trail leg, lead arm, trail arm, shoulders, abs, waist, head. Then there are more detailed body parts: lead leg knee, trail leg knee, ankles (dorsiflexion – toes pointing up vs. plantarflexion – toes pointing down), hands, wrists, elbows, eyes, chin. Good technique is all about good body positioning.
When I first started coaching, I coached each body part separately, starting with the lead leg, because that’s how I had learned. Spend a lot of time getting the lead to where it’s real quick and snappy, and then work on the trail leg. Once the trail leg is whipping to the front nicely, then take a look at the arms and make sure they’re not causing any balance issues. Then add in the relatively minor aspects (or so I thought of them), such as the forward lean and keeping the chin up so that the eyes don’t look down.
As I have evolved as a coach, the way I coach technique has changed dramatically from how I used to do it. If present-day me were watching old-school me coach, I’d be saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, step aside my friend, let me handle this.” Again, I have to credit Byron Gibson for inspiring the change. Byron, who had run for the University of Alabama under Harvey Glance, had a brilliant mind when it came to sprinting and hurdling. We’ve lost touch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s coaching somewhere. Anyway, when I was coaching him, he sometimes grew frustrated with my feedback, as I stayed locked in on one thing at a time. He instructed me to “take a snapshot” in my mind of what I see when he’s taking off, when he’s on top of the hurdle, when he’s coming off the hurdle. Instead of just seeing parts, he said, see it as one thing.
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