Hurdling without rhythm is like trying to dance the tango with two left feet— indeed disastrous. Since the hurdle race has several different components to rhythm, athletes with high cadence typically make great hurdlers. A hurdler’s rhythmic stride pattern begins the moment they take their first step out of the blocks. In hurdle races, the…
Archives for hurdle drills
How to Fix a Lazy Hurdle Trail Leg
If you attend clinics and seminars with any degree of regularity, you know that some of the best information gets shared between sessions and at the social when talking shop with presenters and other coaches. That’s why I think the Q&A aspect of Coach Veney’s new Advanced Hurdle Development program is extremely underrated. Today, I’m…
How to Fix 6 Common Mistakes in the Sprint Hurdles
When starting a new track season, many coaches and athletes alike busy themselves setting goals based on performances from the previous year. Getting faster, stronger, tougher, and more powerful are among the many attributes that when increased can lead to new personal bests. But sometimes the new goals are still a ways off due to…
Top 6 Sprint Hurdle Training Parameters
With hurdle training, before you decide how fast you want your hurdler to run in 2014, you need to determine what is necessary in order to drop from 15.50 to 14.65, or 17.00 to 15.70. Look at your annual track schedule and decide how many races you expect your hurdler to run for the year….
“Working the Dirt II”
Let’s look at three more hurdle qualities I believe can assist coaches in making them better able to make your “Newbie” hurdlers fast and your experienced hurdlers faster. I had a community college guy who was competition in his first decathlon, and was terrified of the high hurdles. The hurdle height did not scare him…
Specific Development Drills for the Sprint Hurdles
Since the Fall of 2011, I have presented what I believe is a comprehensive approach to developing young and experienced 100 and 110 meter sprint hurdles. The Hurdle Master Class through CompleteTrackandField.com has given me the platform to show that any girl or boy able to run the flat 100 meters in 14 and 12…
Sprint Hurdle 101
In this prep for the Master class, we are going to cover the basics of what hurdling is and what hurdling isn’t. First, hurdling is not gathering together everyone that isn’t fast enough to run the short sprints or gain a spot on the 4×100 relay. If you will avoid this first No-No, you will…
Annual Planning for High School Hurdlers (Part II)
In Part One of the annual planning for your high school hurdlers; I covered 8 questions that every hurdle coach should be concerned with as they plan for the coming track season. In part two I will cover how to model the hurdle race so your boy or girl will go into each race ready…
Annual Planning for High School Hurdlers (Part I)
Since the high school track season in some states can be as short as 11-12 weeks, the purpose of this article is to assist those coaches who struggle with organizing their high school hurdler annual plan. The first part of this article will ask questions: How long is your high school hurdler’s season? The number of…
How to ‘three step’ in the sprint hurdles
At the end of the day, if we can’t get our athletes to three step their race, we’re not very good hurdle coaches. But, the reason they’re not three stepping between, say, hurdle three and four, isn’t because of what they’re doing between hurdle three and four. In the jumps, we know that every problem…
Speed Endurance for the Sprint Hurdles
Every sprint race has a period where the ability to hold off the effects of fatigue hurts overall performance. In the 100 meter and 100 meter sprint hurdle races, the transition from acceleration, to top end and speed endurance are almost identical. Both races hit max velocity at almost the same location in sub-elite and…
Why even bother doing that drill?
Last week, I shared a new (to me) drill for teaching acceleration. However, since the athletes in the video displayed poor posture, poor mechanics (or both), there was some disagreement about the viability of the drill. And that brings us to an important teachable moment: You cannot separate reality from the observer. I may think…