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.
Three strides between the first two hurdles, four between the next two, back to three after that. The pattern that was supposed to be automatic keeps changing, and telling the athlete to just do three again usually makes the next hurdle worse, not better.
The count is a symptom
Stride number between barriers is not a rule an athlete follows. It is what happens when a fixed distance meets whatever speed the athlete has left at that point in the race. Three strides cover the gap at one speed; slow down enough and three simply will not reach, so a fourth one appears whether anyone asked for it or not. Forcing the old count back onto a tired athlete does not fix the fatigue. It produces a cramped, chopped stride over a hurdle that used to be clean.
What is usually behind the change
- Fatigue, especially from hurdle five or six onward in a 300, which is the single most common reason the count grows late in a race.
- Landing short off the previous hurdle, which eats into the ground the next three strides were supposed to cover and forces a stutter step to make up the difference.
- A lead leg that floats too long in the air rather than snapping down, which stretches the stride without the athlete feeling like anything changed.
Any of the three can show up alone, and a hurdler who is both tired and landing short at the same hurdle will produce a pattern that looks confusing until you separate the two causes.
What the Film Room actually reports
It does not count strides. Nobody's pose tracker should be trusted to do that job better than a coach watching a slow-motion replay, and StatLap does not pretend otherwise. What the hurdles analysis reports is overstride between barriers, how far the trailing foot lands ahead of the hips on the strides between hurdles, alongside trunk dip and hip rise at each barrier. Those numbers tend to move before the stride count does. A shrinking stride length across a rep, with the count still holding at three, is the early warning that a four is coming.
The drills that address the actual cause
Walkover leads at a low height groove the trunk dip that keeps the hips from climbing. Lead-leg snap-downs fix a lead leg that hangs instead of pulling straight back down. Close-spacing run-throughs, with the hurdles set nearer than race spacing, make floating impossible and force the hips to stay flat, which is often the real fix for a stride pattern that keeps breaking.
None of this counts steps for you, and it was never going to. A phone at the side of the track sees trunk angle, hip height and stride length. It has no idea an athlete is on stride four instead of three unless a coach tells it, because that is arithmetic a person does by watching, not something a side-on clip reports on its own.
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Related
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 →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 stutters before the hurdle
A chopped last stride is almost never a problem at the barrier. It is a problem three strides earlier.
Read →Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise