Push, heel, claw

In 1997, Mallett and Hanrahan gave a group of elite 100m sprinters three words to think about.

“Push” through the drive phase out of the blocks. “Heel” through max velocity. “Claw” through the back end when form starts going.

One word per phase. Nothing else in the head.

The sprinters came out faster. Around a quarter of a second off the 100m on average, and more consistent run to run.

A quarter of a second over a hundred metres is the gap between lanes at a championship.

Worth noticing what the cues weren’t.

Not “go”, not “you’ve got this”, not a single word of hype. Three plain mechanical instructions, one body part or action each.

That points at something most athletes get backwards on the day.

The research splits self-talk into two kinds, and they do two different jobs.

Instructional self-talk is a mechanical cue. Push, heel, claw, tall, knees. It directs attention to one thing the body is doing.

Motivational self-talk is the hype. Go, drive, you’ve got this.

The evidence is fairly clean on which works where. Instructional cues win for tasks that need timing and precision. Motivational cues do more for raw effort, strength and endurance work.

A 100m feels like the most aggressive thing you can do, so the instinct is to hype it up. But the clock is moved by hitting positions cleanly at speed, and that’s a precision job, not a strength one.

But the race isn’t the only moment that has a voice in it.

There’s a separate line of work out of Ethan Kross’s lab at Michigan on what they call self-distancing.

When you talk yourself through something stressful, the pronoun you use changes how it lands.

“Why am I nervous” keeps you inside the feeling. “Why are you nervous, what’s one thing you can control” steps you back from it.

Using your own name, or “you” instead of “I”, lowers the emotional spike and lets you reason better under pressure.

It’s held up across several studies, including stress tests like public speaking, where outside observers rated the performance.

That’s a regulation tool. It settles the nerves. It does nothing to steer the body once you’re moving.

So now there are two tools for two different moments. And the mistake is using them in the wrong order.

Walk through what most people actually do.

They stand behind the blocks winding themselves up. Go go go, biggest race of the year, this is the one.

Arousal climbs. The nerves climb with it. The internal monologue is all first person and all emotion, which is exactly the state the Kross work says reasons worst.

Then the gun goes and the head is a mess of feeling with no instruction in it. The body runs on default. Form goes early because nothing was pointing it anywhere.

The order’s inverted. The hype showed up at the line, where the nerves needed calming. And no cue showed up in the race, where the body needed steering.

Turn it the right way round and it looks like this.

In the call room and the walkout, the job is regulation. This is where distanced self-talk earns its place.

Use your own name, or “you”. Ask the question from the outside. “What do you need to do in the first thirty here.” Will this race matter in a year. The distance takes the edge off the spike.

Not hype. The line is already over-aroused. Adding fuel there is the mistake.

Then in the race, one cue per phase. Instructional, mechanical, short.

Out of the blocks, the cue for the drive. Push. Drive. Low.

Through the middle, the cue for posture and turnover. Tall. Heel.

Through the back end, the cue that holds form when it goes. Claw. Relax. Face loose.

A few things that decide whether this works.

The cue has to mean something to your body before race day. “Heel” only does anything if you’ve drilled what heel recovery feels like. Said for the first time at a meet, it’s noise.

So the cue gets trained, not just chosen. Say it on the reps it belongs to. Say “push” on your accelerations, “tall” on your build-ups, until the word and the movement fire together without thinking. By the time you race, the cue pulls up the feeling on its own.

Pick the cue off your own faults, not off a list. If you stand up too early out of the blocks, the drive-phase cue is whatever keeps you down. If you tie up at the end, the back-end cue is whatever keeps you loose. The word points at the thing you actually lose, which is different for every athlete.

One cue per phase, and let the event set the number. A 100m has three. A 200m wants a cue for the bend and one for the home straight, no more. A 400m needs fewer and calmer, because an over-cued, over-aroused 400 dies at 300. The longer the race, the quieter the voice.

Cues go stale. When the technical priority changes, change the cue. A sprinter who’s fixed their start doesn’t need the “stay down” cue any more, and holding onto it keeps their attention on a problem they’ve solved. The cue should always point at the current limiter.

And the line itself. If the head starts spiralling behind the blocks, you don’t need a new technique, you need the order.

One question from the outside to take the edge off (“what do you need to do in the first thirty”). Then drop straight into the first cue and let it carry you out.

That’s the whole thing. Calm yourself down at the line with distance. Give yourself one trained instruction per phase in the race. Build the cues in training so they fire on their own.

So this week, take one cue per phase and say it in training, not just on race day. Practice it. The race-day version only works if it’s already worn in.