← Blog

How many steps should a hurdler take to the first hurdle?

Seven and eight both show up at the highest level of the sport, so the number that matters is not tradition, it is whether the athlete arrives at the mark running over the barrier rather than jumping it.

This question arrives every hurdle season, usually from a parent who has read that eight steps is correct and wants to know why their athlete needs nine. The honest answer is that the count is not a rule. It is an output.

The run-in decides the count, not the other way round

The distance from the blocks to the first hurdle is fixed for the race. What is not fixed is how quickly an individual athlete covers it, and that speed is what sets how many strides fit. A fast, efficient accelerator reaches a longer stride sooner and needs fewer steps to get there. A shorter athlete, or one still building acceleration mechanics, covers the same ground in more, shorter strides. Neither is wrong. Both are simply describing a different athlete running to the same mark.

What actually moves the number

• Leg length and standing height, which set how much ground each stride naturally covers at a given speed.
• How quickly the athlete accelerates out of the blocks, since a slower first few steps leaves more ground still to cover in shorter strides by the time the mark arrives.
• Which leg the athlete leads with, because changing the step count usually forces a change of lead leg too, and that has to be relearned separately from the count itself.

More steps is not slower. It usually means a shorter, quicker stride pattern rather than a longer, more powerful one, and both patterns produce fast hurdlers. What actually costs time is arriving at the mark on the wrong foot, or arriving already chopping strides to make the distance fit, which is a different and far more fixable problem than the step count itself.

What the Film Room can tell you, and what it cannot

It does not count steps. What the hurdles setting reports is trunk dip over the barrier, lead-leg extension, how far the hips rise at the hurdle, and overstride between the barriers that follow. Filming the run-in to hurdle one under the sprint setting instead will show whether the athlete is still accelerating cleanly into the mark or braking into it in the last two strides, which tells you the mark itself is wrong even when the step count is right. If the first clearance still comes back with a low hip rise and a real trunk dip, the count worked, whatever it turned out to be.

The only real test is to run the same mark with both counts across a couple of sessions and compare the first clearance, not to guess from a table.

One camera at the side cannot see the whole run from the blocks to the first hurdle unless it is set far enough back to keep both in frame, and it cannot tell you which leg an athlete prefers to lead with. Those still need a coach's eye and a tape measure on the runway.

Related

Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise