Stepping over

[sady]

@Flash

This is probably the single most important lesson I learned from my short training period with Charlie. As I have written ad nauseum in several posts over the years, there is a big difference between what your body is actually doing (as seen by an outside observer) and what you subjectively feel it doing. (This is why Charlie continually writes in Speed Trap that it was more challenging to coach his sprinters when they became faster than him because he had no personal reference point of what sprinting at the level should feel like, which makes it harder to give the right cues.)

In the case of stepping over and down you really shouldn’t feel the recovery of the swing foot over the support knee (let alone a butt kick) because the action is occurring so quickly. If you consciously emphasize the recovery so that you actually feel the foot passing over the knee you will end up exaggerating the knee lift which will cause your hips to drop. This will retard your stride frequency and cause deflection in the support knee. This was the mistake I was making. I was trying to feel the description of proper technique.

After Charlie corrected my technique, the action subjectively felt more like I was stepping over the support ankle (rather than the knee), and the overall sensation was more like stamping my feet up and down rather than a cyclical motion. It felt very odd at first, and if Charlie had not been standing there telling me that my technique was correct I never would have known in a million years that’s what correct sprinting feels like. This a great example of the difference between hands-on coaching versus just words on paper. It pretty much changed my whole running technique.

Different cues will work for different people, but my advice would be to not even think about stepping over and think more about simply stepping down. That goes for early acceleration mechanics as well. Just cock the foot and step straight down (and pump the arms) and the rest will fall into place. I’ve also found that concentrating on stepping straight down during acceleration prevents me from popping up prematurely.

Goes back to teaching a reaction, it is a waste of time.