Should a hurdler count steps out loud, or just feel the rhythm?
Counting is a scaffold for a pattern that is not yet automatic, and the point of hurdling well is to take the scaffold away.
Watch a beginner hurdler and you will usually hear it: one-two-three, hurdle, one-two-three, hurdle, muttered under their breath. It looks like a crutch, and for a while it is supposed to be one.
Why counting helps early
A new hurdler has not yet built a reliable stride pattern between barriers. Counting out loud forces a consistent number of steps, which is the thing that has to be consistent before anything else about the hurdle can be coached. You cannot fix a lead leg or a trail leg on a pattern that changes every rep. Counting is how the pattern gets locked in.
Why it has to go away
Once the step pattern is automatic, counting starts costing more than it buys. Attention spent counting is attention not spent reading the hurdle in front of the athlete, and a race has variables counting cannot account for, like a headwind that shortens the last stride or a slightly early takeoff that needs a fast adjustment. An athlete still counting at that point reacts to the count instead of to the hurdle, which is backwards.
How to know which stage your hurdler is at
- If the number of steps between hurdles changes rep to rep, keep counting. The pattern is not set yet.
- If the steps are already consistent and the athlete can hold a conversation mid-rep, the count is just noise now.
- Time the gaps between hurdles rather than guessing. A consistent split between barriers is a better sign the pattern has settled than how confident the athlete sounds.
The Film Room reads trunk dip, lead-leg extension, hip rise and overstride between barriers from the clip, and none of those numbers care whether the athlete was counting in their head or not. What they will show is whether the pattern the counting was supposed to build has actually shown up on camera.
A single 2D camera cannot tell you what an athlete is thinking between hurdles, only what their body did. If the stride pattern on camera is steady, it probably does not matter anymore whether they are still counting.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
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Related
Why does your hurdler take a different number of strides between each hurdle?
The step count between hurdles is a symptom, not the problem, and Film Room's overstride number usually moves before the pattern actually breaks.
Read →Why does my hurdler's stride pattern fall apart on a windy day?
The steps between hurdles are built for still air, and wind changes the one variable a hurdler cannot adjust for mid-race: how far each stride actually carries.
Read →How do you adjust a hurdler's rhythm when the hurdle height goes up?
Same steps, same speed, a few extra centimetres of bar, and the rhythm that used to be automatic stops working.
Read →Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise