How have your hurdlers peformed their hurdle work during training in terms of starting positions? Like sprint work, did you do some hurdle sprints with high starts and block starts?
I personally never used high starts with full speed hurdles but it is very common. I just did starts over one at regular spacing, though I would move in the others whenever it seemed appropriate.
The only time I used high starts was with tempo hurdles (ie 5 down and 5 back in sets as a tempo replacement) This was a workout used by Nehemiah and Mark McKoy did it often.
So were most/all of the starts from blocks?
All speed related but high start for tempo related
What is a high start? And what volume of ‘back and forths’ (that’s what I call that workout) did McKoy do?
I’ve read that Nehemiah did extremely high volumes of this type of work and I personally have had great benefits from this workout.
Are we saying doing tempo style pace with hurdles interspersed? I’m confused on what exactly takes place.
Yes do tempo with hurdles interspaced - e.g. 5-7 stride rhythm work with lower hurdles. E.g. 5 hurdles over 100m going down the track then turn around and run 5 hurdles on the way back in another lane.
I used hurdles spaced 12 yards apart. 5 down 5 back. I would five step them. The most I ever did was 4 sets of ‘8 times down and back non stop’
Interesting. Would this be more beneficial for lower level hurdlers? or all levels?
I’m really not sure, all I can do is speculate. I used it senior year of high school. My PR dropped from 15.0 to 14.6 despite missing the first half of the track season as well as being injured 6 times that year. I speculate I could’ve broken 14.3 without all of those injuries, of which several were severe and required an MRI. I think a 14.6 was pretty decent for myself considering that my 100m time was probably only around 11.7 at the time. I don’t know whether I would consider myself lower level…or higher level for that matter. Getting so many reps IMO is the best way to attain efficiency for lower level hurdlers. I think if you do the workout that I said you should GRADUALLY build up the volume of the workout each week and do it CONSISTENTLY to avoid injury. Whenever I did that workout, I would focus on one aspect of technique at a time. Whenever I had my next hurdle workout, I felt like my body was on autopilot over the hurdles. It felt automatic. I think it can be useful, you just have to be careful about how you implement it.
If you didn’t notice that is a huge volume of hurdles and may sound absolutely stupid to some people. It helped me though. 4 sets of 8 would equal a 320 hurdle workout.