Hurdle Clearance

JAMES HILLIER COACHES, AMONG OTHERS, SPRINT HURDLER DAVID KING AND HERE PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF SOME OF THE ELEMENTS NEEDED TO DEVELOP GREAT TECHNIQUE

Reflexive power

AS its name implies, reflexive power is all about developing power reactively from a reflex action. To hurdle effectively using reflexive power requires the athlete to generate a powerful hurdle take-off-step through the reflexive actions which occur on the penultimate step.

The resultant power that’s generated on the subsequent hurdle-take-off will be the product of previous physical and psychosomatic interactions. Where possible when we are coaching we want to shift the focus away from the actual element being worked on, while still working on it – of which more later.

Reflexive power is a concept I am always trying to develop with the athletes I coach. It underpins all of our technical hurdling and more specifically how we prepare the body to clear a hurdle.

In hurdling we want to create a very powerful take-off-step that projects the hurdler toward and over the hurdle. It is this powerful take-off (set up by a quick and reactive penultimate step) that initiates good hurdle clearance.

Good hurdle clearance is a result of what happens at take-off and on the penultimate step as indicated. Think of a child connecting a dot-to-dot drawing – imagine the point of hurdle take-off is a dot and the point of hurdle run-off is the next dot. The shortest distance between these two points is a straight line. So in hurdling, the hurdle clearance is like connecting the dots.

The body will do what it is pre-set to do at the point of take-off and it will find the quickest and most efficient way to do this. This is why in hurdling I talk about “connecting the dots” – so the hurdler needs to get into the correct position at take-off and the correct position at run-off. When they achieve this the rest of the hurdle clearance will somewhat take care of itself.