Dribble Drills: Andreas Behm on Rhythm and Speed

Based on Episode 49 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and sprints and hurdles coach Andreas Behm.

Dribble drills look like the simplest thing on a track, and Andreas Behm runs them in the opposite order from almost everyone else. Behm, a sprints and hurdles coach who has worked with 110m hurdles world record holder Aries Merritt, treats dribbles less as a mechanics drill and more as a way to install rhythm and teach an athlete to shrink their range of motion as speed climbs. For hurdlers in particular, that reversal is the whole point.

Key Takeaways

• Run the series descending for hurdlers. Start open over the knee, then bleed down to the calf, then the ankle.
• Dribbles buy coordination cheaply. Behm sees meaningful coordination gains from simple dribbling alone.
• Wickets mimic the average hurdle stride. They train frequency, speed, and contact time at close to event spacing.
• No drill replaces the event. Full-speed hurdling at competition spacing is where the real corrections happen.
• Rhythm is a shared language. A coach cannot feel what the athlete feels, but both can hear the same thing at the same time.

Run the dribble series descending

Most coaches teach dribbles from the ground up, starting at the ankle and progressing to higher knee action. Behm inverts that for his hurdlers, and the reasoning is specific to the event.

We do a lot of dribble work, which is truncated range of motion, high frequency movements. We actually do them for hurdlers particularly from what we call a descending manner, meaning that we start fairly open, so stepping over the knee. And we start bleeding down, stepping over the calf, stepping over the ankle.

The order mirrors what the race demands. A hurdler cannot keep a long, open stride as the race accelerates, because there is a barrier arriving every few steps.

Highly important for hurdlers in regards to as they pick up speed. In between the hurdles they have to continue to truncate their range of motion in order not to wipe out.

The drill therefore rehearses the actual sequence of the race: open early, then progressively tighter, under increasing speed.

Dribbles buy coordination cheaply

Behm is candid that the payoff from this work is larger than its simplicity suggests, and that it is mostly a coordination effect rather than a strength or conditioning one.

You’d be amazed how much coordination improvement you can make just from simply dribbling as you go along.

He also values the drill because it lets the athlete explore. Rather than locking one range of motion, dribbles let a sprinter or hurdler play with several and feel the differences, which is why he treats them as a staple rather than a warm-up formality.

Where the drills stop and the event begins

Behm’s other staple is the wicket drill, set to approximate the stride pattern of the race. He is precise about what it is standing in for.

We’ve tried doing wicket drills which mimic average hurdle stride lengths to work on frequency, speed, and contact times. The hurdle stride is fairly acyclical in nature. Each step in between the hurdles is of a slightly different length, because each step serves a slightly different purpose.

Because the real stride pattern is uneven and the drill averages it, he is careful not to oversell what any drill can do. The event itself remains the teacher.

There’s no real substitute for full speed, close to event spacing hurdling. That’s where a lot of the true corrections need to occur, and that’s also where you really see where an athlete is at.

Build the drills into a week that can absorb them

Drills only matter if the week around them allows quality. Behm lays out a structure of four training days and two regeneration days, front-loaded to catch athletes fresh.

We train four days a week, plus two regeneration days. Monday we have a potentiation day. We found that sprinters come off of a weekend fairly relaxed, and are not ready to necessarily dial it up all the way just yet. Generally our big sessions are Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, with our regen days being Wednesday and Friday.

On the Monday potentiation day he keeps the weight room quick rather than heavy, using light Olympic lifts with an emphasis on bar speed, plyometrics, or med ball throws, and saving heavier lifting for days that precede a rest day. He is also blunt that the theory matters less than whether the plan survives contact with a real schedule.

Don’t get too caught up in the theoretics of things without considering the practicality of what you’re trying to do. You have to factor that in, and then you can build the best framework around that as best you can.

Use rhythm to rescue a session

The thread connecting the drills to the coaching is rhythm, which Behm treats as the most practical communication tool he has. It solves a real problem in coaching, which is that the coach and the athlete are perceiving different things.

Coaches can’t feel what the athlete feels. The athlete can’t see what the coach sees. But in real time, we can all agree on what we heard at the same time.

That shared reference gives him a way to salvage a session that opens badly. Rather than abandoning the day or forcing the planned intensity, he shrinks the task until the pattern returns.

Just lowering hurdles a little bit, moving them in a little bit, letting an athlete feel a rhythm and a pattern before opening the session up in terms of intensity and speed, and letting them get a groove that way first.

Frequently asked questions

What are dribble drills?
Dribbles are high-frequency running drills performed with a deliberately truncated range of motion, where the athlete steps over the ankle, calf, or knee rather than running with a full stride. Behm uses them to build coordination and rhythm.

Should dribbles progress from the ankle up or the knee down?
For hurdlers, Behm runs them descending: starting open by stepping over the knee, then bleeding down to the calf and ankle. This is the reverse of the common ascending progression, and it mirrors how a hurdler must shorten their range of motion as race speed increases.

What are wicket drills used for?
Behm sets wickets to mimic average hurdle stride length in order to train frequency, speed, and ground contact times. He notes the real hurdle stride is acyclical, since each step between hurdles serves a different purpose, so the drill works with an average rather than the exact pattern.

Can drills replace event-specific work?
No. Behm is explicit that there is no substitute for full-speed hurdling at close to competition spacing, which is where the meaningful technical corrections happen and where an athlete’s true level shows.

How should a sprint training week be structured?
Behm uses four training days plus two regeneration days: a Monday potentiation day to ease athletes back in after the weekend, big sessions on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and regeneration on Wednesday and Friday. He stresses that practical constraints like facility access and weather should shape the plan as much as theory.

About the authors

Andreas Behm is a sprints and hurdles coach who served as education director at ALTIS in Phoenix, Arizona, and coached 110m hurdles world record holder and Olympic champion Aries Merritt. He came up through the University of Tennessee, shadowed Dan Pfaff at the University of Texas, interned at Athletes’ Performance, and spent eight years at Texas A&M under Vince Anderson, and he describes his technical foundation as second-generation Tom Tellez.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Andreas Behm on Just Fly Sports.