Hurdling for New Athletes
In this article, I’m going to show you how to teach hurdling to absolute beginners and get them way ahead of their competition quickly. At the end, I’m going to tell you how you can get a detailed, step by step breakdown of this approach.
This is the 2nd article in this series about coaching hurdles. If you haven’t seen How to Identify Your Hurdlers, I recommend checking that out.
Once you have your hurdlers identified, how do you teach them how to actually hurdle properly? It can be complicated, but I’m going to make it as easy as I can.
First, there are two things you want to be coaching simultaneously at the same session.
- Technique
- Running over and between the hurdles.
Coaching Hurdling Technique
For this video, I’m going to focus on how to coach hurdling technique. Not teaching you the hurdling technique. If you don’t know this, don’t worry, I have other videos you can watch.
BTW, what I’m going to show you is pulled from my Hurdle 101 instructional video and handout where I go through a lot more detail and step-by-step. if you’d like to see that. I’ll include a link in the notes below.
For technique, there’s two halves to teach: lead leg/arm and trail leg/arm. For this article, I’ll use the lead side as an example.
My approach is based on the concept that new movements are best learned when you can isolate them and wait to add more complexity after they master each movement. In our example of the lead leg, you would first isolate the lead leg without moving the rest of the body. Once that is mastered, you can add arms into the motion. You can add one arm at a time until they have that mastered.
Keep in mind that once you graduate at one level, you shouldn’t have to go back and do all these steps again, unless the athlete is struggling with a particular component of their technique in which case you can always go back to break it down and relearn.
Now that they are comfortable with the lead leg mechanics while standing in place, you want to graduate to doing them while walking. You can use the same progression of adding limbs as they reach mastery.
After walking, they can graduate to walking over a hurdle and use the same progression. And, after that is mastered, they can graduate to skipping and jogging versions of the same motions..
To teach the trail leg, you would take the same step by step approach.
Going through this progression can take a few hours, days or weeks based on the athlete. While you are working on the technique, you should simultaneously maintain your athletes running over and between the short hurdles that I taught in the first video. This will further reinforce that hurdling is hard-charging over hurdles rather than jumping.
Your hurdlers should maintain these drills as part of their daily warm up progression.
Once they have gotten proficient with the technique over a hurdle as well as running over small hurdles, it’s time to bring it all together with real hurdles. It should go smoothly and you will see your athletes progress at light speed compared to other competitive peers.
If you would like help with your hurdlers, I have a few options for you:
