Athletics

Abstract

The aim of this study was to understand changes in technique within an athlete's own performance during a sprint hurdles run. Four athletes performed a training session containing four trials each over 10 hurdles. Clearances at hurdles three and nine were videotaped from a side view and manually digitised. All athletes in this study yielded a lower running speed over the hurdle at the ninth hurdle in comparison to the third hurdle in each run. All athletes also showed further signs of potential tiredness in the clearances of the ninth hurdle. Interestingly, these changes in technique varied among the athletes. This poses challenges to coaches, as they need to evaluate individually what changes in training should be introduced to keep the quality of clearances as high as possible throughout training. To match more closely the velocities to those in competitions, consideration could be given in training to shorten gradually the distances between the hurdles more during the latter part of the run, although this should be individually checked, based on the athlete. This way, athletes could learn to clear the hurdle with a higher horizontal velocity, even when fatigue is potentially influencing the performance.

Keywords:

• athletics
• biomechanics
• coaching
• digitising
• hurdle technique
• two‐dimensional