What are Hurdling Drills?

Series Summary

Sprinting is not easy. Running as fast as you can in an almost anaerobic workout is tough, especially if you throw in a bunch of obstacles to jump over. Running the hurdles, whether the 110m hurdles or the 400m hurdles can be a grueling undertaking if you aren't prepared. But how do you get ready to run the hurdles? Well, you need to decide that you want to hurdle in the first place; then you need to do some hurdle agility drills and acquire some basic hurdling skills. If you would like to learn hurdle agility drills and learn basic hurdling skills, you can learn for free, online, from one of our experts.

In this free hurdling tutorial, learn hurdle agility drills and tips for great hurdling from expert hurdler Saidia Rafel. Saidia will teach you A skip hurdle drills, how to warm up for running the hurdles, and the karaoke hurdle drill. She will give you free expert tips for great hurdling such as how to determine your lead leg, how to alternate steps when running the 110m hurdles and the 400m hurdles, and how to stay hydrated when hurdling.

Video Transcript

"Hi everyone, my name is Saida Rafel, and I'm here with Expert Village at my alma mater UCLA, and on my home turf at UCLA Drake Stadium track, where I'll be showing you, as an expert hurdler, how to do some breakdown in the 100 meters and 400-meter hurdling. So what we're going to start with, we're going to start with some basic drills that all sprinters and hurdlers do, and then I'm going to show you some drills that are specific for hurdlers only. Then, we're going to put out the hurdles, and I'll show you how to build up to going over the hurdle. And then, finally, we'll finish up with some plyometrics, which is basically the fundamentals of building up strength and conditioning for the hurdles. Ok, so what we're going to do is - one of the key things about being a great hurdler is that you always have to make sure that your body is nice and warmed up before you get on the track because hurdling takes a lot of speed, it takes a lot of strength, it takes a lot of agility. So the best way to get your body prepared for that is to warm up. And like I said, we're going to start with some basic warm-ups that every sprinter, hurdler, distance runners, we all do these types of drills. The first one I'm going to start with is called the A skip. An A skip is pretty much - it's just a skip going down the track. You want to do about 50 meters of those and come back, and you can repeat it twice. And then we're going to do the B skip, which is the same thing, it's just up, to the side, up. And then we're going to do the C skip, which is simply up, to the side, and out. And then we're also going to do karaokes - no, it doesn't involve singing - it's just simply side to side with a big hop at the end. Something a little bit like a karate-type style of warming up. And then, it's a more complicated type of drill, too, so if you're a beginner, and you're new at this, you can definitely save the karaokes, but it's an excellent warm-up to do. And then we also have like the sideways warm-up, which gives it a lot of arm action, gets your arms warmed up that way. And then we also have walking lunges that you do and a little bit more stretching at the end to get you prepared for the hurdle drills and then for actually going over the hurdles. So let's go ahead and get started."