Breaking down the Shuffle

In the last article we talked about how and when to use an effective crossover run.

Here, we’re going to slow down a bit, literally, and talk about a movement that every performance coach (and most athletic coaches) teach on some level: The shuffle.

Most coaches understand that a shuffle is simply a lateral movement where we don’t cross our feet.

Just like with the crossover run, it’s important to understand why and when an athlete should use a shuffle in the first place.

While the crossover is used when we need to move as fast as possible while keeping square with an opponent, or tracking a ball, the shuffle is generally used in small spaces where we’re able to keep the opponent in front of us without crossing our feet.

This is as fast as I can move at 9:30pm at 34 years old. Notice the feet coming together (they don't have to click, but it's not the worst thing if they do). The key question as a coach, before you step in to change something: "Is that as fast as this athlete can possibly move right now?" If the answer is "yes" or even "probably", then they just need time, repetition and strength.

The advantage here is the ability to change directions really quickly – our lateral orientation stays intact. The disadvantage is it is slower than either a crossover or a straight ahead sprint.

Athletes that compete aggressively on defense (or without looking over their shoulder at a coach or parent) generally learn to transition from a shuffle to a crossover or sprint when needed. In other words, they use a shuffle whenever possible until it can’t get the job done on a given play.

Think man-to-man defense in basketball.

Their only focus should be on doing whatever it takes to keep the opponent in front.

Now that we have an understanding of the when and why, let’s take a look at the how.

There’s a couple of mistakes we see made when teaching or coaching this movement that I’m going to try to clarify and simplify here.

COACHING MISTAKE #1: COACHING TO AVOID FEET “CLICKING”

First, we hear coaches consistently tell their players to avoid letting their feet come together. Their hearts are in the right place – the assumption is that allowing the feet to meet underneath the pelvis might make the athlete trip over their own feet. I can speak from experience as an athlete (and a clumsy one at that), along with countless coaching sessions working on this movement and confidently say that this is not the case – you will almost never see an athlete fall over from this.

The next question should be “so what?” What’s the advantage of not restricting the feet?

It should help to think of the shuffle as a gait cycle (Lee Taft specifically coined the term “Lateral Gait Cycle”). Just like in sprinting, each leg has an entire cycle to work through to produce the maximum amount of force with each push. With the shuffle, it’s an alternating push-pull cycle. The lead leg (i.e. left leg when moving to the left) is the “pull” leg. The back leg (right leg when moving left) is the “push” leg.

[Slow Mo Video]

A full cycle for the lead leg means a big reach out to the side in the direction of travel (with the toe turned out), the heel digs into the ground and begins to pull. The full phase is finished once that foot is underneath the pelvis or center of mass.

While that is happening with the lead leg we see the back leg go through an entire push cycle. We’ll start with the finish: “Toe off” with this leg coincides with heel contact on the front leg. While the front leg pulls, the push leg gathers and prepares for the next push by moving underneath the center of mass. This will happen as the front leg finishes its pull (also under the center of mass). This is where the feet meet in the middle.

In some athletes, but not all, this means the feet will actually hit in the middle when attempting to shuffle at full-speed. My suggestion is to let this happen and focus on something else that may need cleaning up. By trying to take away the feet meeting in the middle, you would essentially be asking the athlete to use less power on each leg. The push-pull cycle would be incomplete and they’d gain less distance with each stride. In other words, they’re toast.

COACHING MISTAKE #2: COACHING TO AVOID TURNING LEAD TOE OUT

I briefly mentioned above that the toe on the lead leg will turn out during the pull cycle. The second most common mistake we see many coaches make is putting it in the head of the athlete that their lead toe should never turn out.

But why?

The rationale seems valid on the surface. Most speed & agility coaches will turn to deceleration and say “we need the ankle dorsiflexed (toe straight ahead) in order to cut properly, so it’s more efficient to shuffle with it already straight ahead”.

You may remember from the crossover article why we let the toe turn out at the start (called the directional step) and the analogy of trying intentionally to run an 8 cylinder car on only 4 cylinders just to improve stopping ability.

That’s great, unless you’re in a quarter mile race and need every last bit of power you can muster.

In the situations in sport where we’d need to use a shuffle at full speed we know it’s faster to shuffle with the toe out. And the great thing is we don’t have to coach it as long as the athlete is focused on the right thing – competing and not letting an opponent by!

The next great thing is we usually don’t have to teach the athlete what to do with the foot when they do have to stop and change directions. It’s another one of the innate abilities we have to figure out the best position possible for a given situation – part of our fight or flight response – if the athlete can get into a fight-or-flight mentality while competing.

An obvious exception here would be any physical restriction that keeps them from getting into dorsiflexion.

Toe turns out, hips stay mostly on the same level. Focus is on pushing the ground away and being fast!

SO WHAT CAN WE COACH?

We’ve focused mostly on points of shuffling that we shouldn’t step in and correct, but where does that leave us as coaches?

Don’t worry, there’s plenty for us to do when it comes to developing lateral speed!

ATHLETIC POSITION

Athletic position is something that’s talked about often but I don’t want to downplay it here. Having an athlete that understands what a good athletic position looks, and more importantly, feels like is a great way to start working on a strong shuffle. Spend time getting an athlete to know the difference between a defensive athletic stance and a more traditional one.

A defensive stance will typically have a much wider base than your run-of-the-mill shoulder width stance that most will refer to. Why? Better to push laterally!

GET IN THE TUNNEL, STAY IN THE TUNNEL

Once the athlete is in a good athletic stance, we like to cue them to imagine being in a short tunnel. The goal with the athletic position, along with the shuffle itself, is to avoid hitting your head on the top of the tunnel. This is a good visual to keep their elevation consistent and make sure no energy is lost through the body moving up and down during a drill or competition.

With younger, weaker athletes (especially if they’ve gone through a recent growth spurt) you’ll see a little bit of struggle with this, but that’s OK…stay patient, encourage and make sure they want to come back. Eventually they’ll get it!

BIG POWERFUL SHUFFLES!

Many coaches will teach athletes to take short, quick shuffles where their feet move fast but they don’t really go anywhere. This can also be a byproduct of having them avoid clicking their feet together.

What we really want to see is an athlete that is so aggressive they gain maximum ground with each shuffle without overreaching and changing their elevation. A fun demonstration is to take two athletes of very different speeds and make them race using a shuffle for 8-10 yards. The athlete who is clearly faster is told to take short quick shuffles and to not let their feet come together. The other athlete is simply told that their focus is to win! I’m sure by now you can guess where this is going.

SUMMARY

To wrap up, we need to look at shuffling and all lateral movement from a “whole-part” vantage point rather than a “part-whole”. In other words, instead of trying to deconstruct the movement and piece it together one-by-one with each athlete based on what we’ve read or heard, try to observe great athletes move in competition.

Sometimes our instinct as performance coaches is to immediately find things for us to “fix” but I’m a firm believer that understanding the natural ability humans have to be fast in a fight-or-flight environment will teach us more about how to coach speed than we ever could by trying to teach from an anatomical & biomechanical standpoint. 

One cool thing is when we take this “whole-part” approach, the anatomy and biomechanics make complete sense within that framework, but if we try to put an anatomical solution to movement first, it’s easy to misinterpret what is actually going on.

So go ahead coaches – use some of your continuing ed time to go to YouTube or check out a live game where these movements are necessary and just watch without trying to fix!

Perfecting the Start to the Crossover Run

NOTE: It’s been 4 years since I’ve written anything here. Fun but time consuming process – reading over old articles and either laughing or cringing!

In the world of speed training, one of the biggest mistakes we can make as coaches is becoming a “reductionist”. Attempting to boil down a complex movement such as sprinting, shuffling, cutting, etc. into a single trainable part and expecting that to transfer can be a fools’ errand. The thought process tends to go: Observe Primary Movement à Ask what joints are moving à Determine which muscles control those joints à Create an exercise that trains these muscles or individual parts of the movement.

This can work the other way as well. We may read a piece of research, an article or blog, and take a single part of it (possibly out of context) to apply to our training and try to give it a bigger meaning than we probably should.

Having an understanding of how the nervous system works as a whole, integrated with other systems - not parts - will lead to the athlete designing your training plan for them. One great way to do this is to spend time watching competitive athletes go to work. Really, just watch. Try to avoid deciding what you as a performance coach would correct. Just watch. What did they do? Did their strategy work? If yes, why? If not, why not? Did they do everything right and just get outperformed, or did they make a trainable mistake?

I think way too often as performance coaches our automatic is that we can “fix” an athlete because we know best. But are you sure? If you’re making changes to what an athlete does – especially to movements that are specific to the field or court – you want to be sure!

In watching countless videos on social media, there might not be a better example of this than the crossover run.

First, what is the crossover?

The easiest way to explain the movement would be as a mix between a sprint and a shuffle. The lower body is sprinting, and the upper body is “shuffling” by keeping the chest square to the opponent, the ball or whatever object needs to be kept in front.

Why use it in the first place?

The crossover run is utilized mostly in defensive situations in field and court sports. It comes with two distinct advantages: 1) It’s faster than a shuffle, and if you kept shuffling your opponent would get by you, or you wouldn’t get to the ball and 2) It allows you to change directions easier than a sprint because your upper body (shoulders) is oriented in a way to allow for more efficient cuts than if you were running straight ahead.

You see this often in basketball, soccer, baseball & softball (in the outfield), lacrosse and more. It can happen for 1 short step, or over a longer distance depending on the situation.

If you watch in competition, you’ll notice that a great athlete will make this look effortless. The transition from a shuffle to a crossover, or from standing to a hard crossover, is done reactively and reflexively – two key words for the sake of training this movement.

The reason it happens reflexively is a competitive athlete is only focused on the external environment. A basketball players’ mindset might be to do whatever it takes to keep the opponent in front of her.

One mistake we see when we get to training is shifting the focus to something completely internal and taking away the reflexive nature of a crossover – becoming a reductionist and instructing the athlete to focus on a part of the movement that really shouldn’t be focused on at all.

Even worse, we see drills designed around this focus. One of my least favorite exercises (when performed incorrectly) that demonstrates this is a classic “crossover and stick”. The exercise itself can be harmless when used correctly, but when the focus is placed on the wrong part we are, at best, wasting an athletes’ time.

When observing a great crossover run, you should notice that it is initiated by a push with the outside leg. What we often see in videos is teaching a narrow stance, and coaching the athletes to pull with the inside leg. They’re also told to keep that lead toe straight ahead (perpendicular to the direction of travel).

There’s a few problems with this. First, it is extremely inefficient. Looking at this from two perspectives. First, if we pull with the front leg that means the push-off point on the lead leg is actually in front of the center of mass. This is not an effective way to work.

Second, by keeping the toes straight ahead we are taking maybe the most powerful part of our engine out of play by putting the focus on the adductors of that lead leg (very small muscles) and leaving glutes and hamstrings just hanging on for the ride. The rationale for this is often that stopping and changing directions is easier if the toe is already in the right direction for stopping.

That would be like trying to accelerate an 8 cylinder engine as fast as you could, but intentionally only using 4 because it’ll be easier to stop when you need to.

The payoff is bigger than the “risk” in this case.

So what should we see and why?

·        If starting from a static position, the movement will be initiated by the outside leg to overcome inertia. The push off point coming from behind the center of mass is much more effective.

      
     With the lead leg, you will see the foot turn out in the direction of travel. This engages the glutes and hamstrings, and opens up the lead hip to allow for better motion. We’re effectively becoming a “Sprinter” without the shoulders turning. This also allow the back leg to do its job and get the center of mass moving over the front leg, making the front leg more effective by getting the push off point more under the pelvis, like in a sprint.

     Check out this clip from maybe the best era of NBA basketball and watch Michael Jordan use a crossover run on defense twice in just a few seconds while guarding Isaiah Thomas - just start the video at the 1:47 mark

Are you sure enough in what you're teaching to tell the greatest players in the world they need to make significant changes to their footwork?

·       Just like with running, the opposite leg will push off as we better position the lead leg for the next step (swing phase and stanceàpush off).

·      The chest should stay square to the “target” (A common mistake the athlete will only turn their head

·      The motion should be fluid, aggressive and fast. Using reactive and reflexive strategies is almost always the best way to illicit this with athletes in a training setting!

The next chance you get to watch a game that has a lot of defense with reactive movement, try observing for a bit. Following the ball is a tough habit to break, but you’ll start to notice little things that can help guide your training when you follow a single athlete for a while instead!