How do you know when a hurdler is ready to go from eight steps to seven between hurdles?
The step count between hurdles is decided by speed and stride length, not by age or grade, and film is a better test of readiness than a coach's gut feel on race day.
The barriers are a fixed distance apart. An athlete who has always taken eight steps between them starts arriving cramped, chopping the last two steps to fit a ninth-and-a-half stride into an eighth-step gap. The question every coach eventually gets is whether it is time to switch to seven.
Why eight steps stops working
Eight steps between hurdles only fits a narrow range of stride length and speed. An athlete who gets faster or taller over a season starts covering the fixed distance in fewer real strides than eight, so the last one or two steps before each hurdle get squeezed to make the count come out right. That squeeze is what shows up as a stutter, not a mysterious loss of rhythm.
What the squeeze looks like on film
- A visible chop or stutter in the last stride before the barrier.
- The trunk dipping more than usual right at the hurdle, as the body compensates for a step that landed too close.
- Hips rising higher over the barrier than they do mid-race, a sign of jumping it rather than running it.
- Overstride between hurdles creeping up, the reach a runner uses to make a short step feel less short.
The hurdles setting in the Film Room reports exactly these: trunk dip over the barrier, lead-leg extension, how far the hips rise, and overstride between barriers. Filmed side on at a couple of consecutive hurdles, a squeezed eight-step pattern and a clean seven-step pattern do not look alike on the numbers, even when both look fine at race speed to the naked eye.
The test is not to declare seven steps and hope. Run a few reps of each over three or four hurdles, film both, and compare the trunk dip and overstride numbers rather than just the stopwatch. A pattern that is cleaner and no slower is the one to keep.
A camera cannot tell you the right step count in the abstract. That depends on leg length, growth still to come, and the event distance, none of which one clip shows you. What the numbers can tell you is whether a given pattern, on this day, is clean or squeezed. The decision to change it stays with the coach.
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Related
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.
Read →Why your hurdler can't three-step
Three-stepping is a speed problem wearing a stride-length costume, and the fix is almost always the spacing rather than the athlete.
Read →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 →Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise