Hurdle Training for High School and Middle School Athletes
There are a lot hurdle drills out there, but which ones do you need for your team? In this video, I’m going to show you the ones I feel are the most important. Just as important, I’m also how to incorporate them into your practices to help you build a champion squad!
This is the 3rd video in this series about coaching hurdles. If you haven’t seen the others, I recommend checking them out, too.
Drills are designed to teach the athlete how to perform a movement properly and to prepare their bodies for what is about to come. With that, the place in the practice session where doing drills makes the most sense is as part of the warm up progression before starting your top speed work.
I like to keep it simple and part of the routine that we do at every hurdle session and at meets. I’m going to give highllights here, but if you want to get my complete warm up progression video, you can see a link in the notes below.
https://acemethodcoaching.com/hurdle-warm-up-progression-landing/
After the general warm up, we go into a hurdle-specific progression. We line up 8 hurdles end to end and progress from walking to skipping to running.
We start out with 5 activities that are primarily for hip mobility
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Walkovers 2X 1X each leg
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Step Overs (2 sets): Just step over, alternating legs with each step)
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Backwards step overs: (Same as 2 but backwards)
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Side Stepping Drill Skip over sideways
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Then we raise every other hurdle to 42”:Over-Unders
Then, we separate the tall hurdles (lower to 33” for boys) and do a hanging trail leg drill and some skipping drills
Hanging trail leg -1 time each leg
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Step Skipping Drills
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Trail leg-1 time each leg
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Lead Leg-1 time each leg
Then, we spread hurdles out even further and so some running drills:
Girls: 8 walking steps apart (approx X feet). hurdles at 30” height.
Boys: 9-10 walking steps-hurdles at 36” height.
In my opinion, this is where the biggest development happens because you are teaching the athletes to use technique while moving forward. Everything so far has been a lead up this:
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Trail leg (1-2 time each leg)
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Lead Leg (1-2 time each leg)
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Over center of hurdle (1-2 time each leg)
The focus is to teach them to wrap their legs around the hurdle while staying horizontal, rather than letting the COM raise.
Once they finish this, we spike up and go into some full speed hurdling.
But, as I mentioned, there’s one other time that doing drills
I hope that was helpful. I also have links to other things that can help you; like my hurdle training plan and my ACE coach subscription where I can be your mentor throughout the season to ensure that your team does great. Check it out. It works great!