How to Determine Your Lead Leg for Hurdling

Video Transcript

"I know I promised you that if you didn't know how to determine which leg was the lead leg and which leg was the trail leg, I said I would give you some suggestions on how to find out which leg is lead and which leg is trail for yourself or for your athlete. What I'm going to do is borrow one of the crewmembers and give you an example. The first thing you do is simply by asking the person are they left handed or right handed. "I'm right handed." So, Lou is right handed. Chances are he's probably a right leg lead. But, that's not always a guarantee, because I'm right handed and I'm actually a left leg lead. So, there are always exceptions. There's about, I would say generally speaking, 90% of hurdlers if they're right handed, they're right leg lead, if they're left handed, they're left leg lead. That's just one way. The second way is to do the under sided push test. I'll ask Lou to turn around. Just stand straight. I'll give him a little nudge. As you notice, he stepped forward with his left leg first. So, there's actually the possibility, the strong possibility, that he could be a left leg lead even though he's right handed, like I mentioned. A third way to ascertain and make absolutely sure which leg your hurdler is to simply have them do a test hurdle flight over the hurdles. We're not going to have Lou do that but that is a great way to figure it out. Simply have the hurdler go over the hurdle to see which is more comfortable. If you see that they go over with their left leg first, and then get them to go over with their right leg. Whichever one looks more in control that's the leg that's going to be the lead leg. Meaning that the leg that's going to go over first. The trail leg, hence the word trail, is the one that's going to follow the person over the hurdle. That's how you find out, which leg is lead and which leg is trail."