Did you know that moving your trail leg wrong can cause you to be too high over the hurdle? It can! Check it out:
I recently helped a young hurdler who’s trying to get better at hurdling.
She’s a HS freshman, she’s a four stepper, which BTW, is what you should do if you can’t 3 step yet, rather than 5 tiny steps. Like most young hurdlers, she’s WAY too high over the hurdles, but the most striking thing about her form is her trail leg. I see this approach quite a bit with younger hurdlers so I want to show it to you and why it’s a problem that you can fix.
If you notice, she pulls her trail leg through underneath her body rather than around the side. Interestingly, she does the same thing on both sides. Here’s another young hurdler that does a simil;ar thing.
While it’s actually the fastest way to pull a trail through, here’s why it’s a problem. Notice how high she is over the hurdle? She’d have to be this high in order to clear the hurdle. See. her foot is way down here.
The great thing about this video is that her training partner has a contrasting style with her trail leg so we can see how it’s supposed to work-sort of.
Notice that she swings her trail leg around the side rather than underneath. Having her though in this position means that she could theoretically be lower as she goes over the hurdle, which would be a lot faster, but, for some reason she doesn’t. I can only imagine that her issues is more a lack of confidence to go lower over the hurdle, because I don’t see any mechanical reason why she should be this high.
Here’s an example of how a trail leg should look when you go over a hurdle.
Talk about it.
If you want to see how I can help you with your hurdling, go here.
I’ve got something for any level of hurdling and hurdle coaching, I’ll leave a link in the notes.