Mar

25

The Truth About Skating Treadmills

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Skating treadmills have become big business, hailed as the cure for slow hockey players. A look at the research shows that hockey players tend to increase their stride frequency on a skating treadmill compared to on-ice training, probably because of the increased friction of the skating treadmill surface. That makes sense. The take home is that for any given skating speed, you’ll have to turn your feet over quicker on a treadmill than on ice.

Random tangent: Growing up, I remember hearing lots of coaches emphasize the importance of lengthening your skating stride. I don’t disagree with this coaching cue at all, but thought it is necessary to present that research on different stride types has shown that those utilizing short/choppy strides, on average, were just as fast as those using longer strides. Obviously, for any given speed, utilizing shorter strides will require a higher stride frequency, but some people are just wired that way. With more experienced hockey players, I’m less likely to try to change their stride type than I am improve their edges and overall athleticism.

I’ve learned to be skeptical about cure-all solutions. The skating treadmill is a tool, with specific uses. If you’re considering paying to use a skating treadmill, consider the following things:

1) Do you have a good forward skating stride?

2) Are you comfortable on both your inside and outside edges moving forward and backward?

3) Can you quickly change directions while skating forward AND backward?

4) Can you quickly pivot between forward and backward skating?

5) Have you done anything to improve the strength/power of your legs and hips?

Truthfully answering these questions is extremely important. Here’s why:

The skating treadmill is an EXCELLENT tool to help hockey players perfect their forward skating stride and to get a ton of medium and high speed repetitions in to reinforce the new movement pattern. Unfortunately, I suspect that most people just throw their hockey players on the treadmill and don’t do much to coach the QUALITY of the movement. If used properly, I think the skating treadmill can be effectively used to improve skating stride and forward skating speed.

Unfortunately, the skating treadmill will do very little for most of the aspects of skating used commonly in games. Consider questions 2, 3, and 4. You won’t be on your outside edges or transitioning from forward to backward skating on a treadmill.

Once you perfect your skating stride, the key to speed is to drastically improve your muscular size and power. This can be done at the same time as skating treadmill training, but it’s important not to overlook. Most elite level hockey players have legs the size of tree trunks. This not only implies lower body strength and power, but means that a large percentage of their body weight will be in their lower body, decreasing their center of mass, improving their stability, making them harder to knock off the puck. See how these all go hand in hand?

- Kevin Neeld

Mar

23

The Only Way to Cruise

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First things first.  The other day I mentioned I would be providing a high frequency training template.  I will be, but instead of posting it, I’ll be sending it out in an upcoming newsletter.  If you haven’t yet, grab a free copy of “Strong Hockey Core Training” and sign-up for my newsletter.  Even if you already invested in my Off-Ice Performance Training Course, it’s still worth signing up for the newsletter to get updated information and other freebies.  Sign-up window in the upper right corner of this site.

Moving on…

On Saturday I got back to New York after a 7-day cruise through the Caribbean with Emily.  It was probably the most fun week of my life.  Up to this point, my foreign travel has consisted of hockey trips to Canada, and one  accidental journey through part of Mexico during a cross-country drive with my brother.  We spent one day each in: St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Antigua, St. Lucia, and Barbados.

If you know me at all, you know I’m exceptionally boring.  On an average week, I’m busy with something kinesiology or training related for about 14 hours a day, about 4-6 of which is spent reading.  I get about 7-8 hours of sleep, and spend the last 2 hours eating the same foods (pepper, onion, and cheddar cheese omelettes, ground turkey, spinach, broccoli, and smoothies).  Some would call me a workaholic.  I wouldn’t disagree.  I just happen to enjoy my work, so I don’t mind putting the time in.  

Having said all that, Emily made it clear that no constructive work would be done at anytime on this cruise, which was an ultimatum I agreed to without hesitation.  I needed a break.  It was time to relax and branch out.  It was a week of firsts.  Last week, for the first time ever, I:

  1. Have been on a cruise ship 
  2. Been outside North America
  3. Ate snails
  4. Ordered Shrimp, three times I might add
  5. Ate Wahoo…it’s a type of fish
  6. Ordered three desserts and ate all of them
  7. Enjoyed a bowl of Strawberry Bisque
  8. Eaten Cream of Asparagus Soup
  9. Rode a jetski
  10. Ordered a Mojito with an unaltered self-perception of manliness
  11. Feared for my life (Emily, driving the jetski at full speed through choppy waves straight toward the shoreline, turns her head and says “I can’t see anything.  I’m going to close my eyes. Let me know if I hit anything!”  She later added, “I had NO idea what I was doing” haha)
  12. Spontaneously slow danced in the middle of a hallway
  13. Saw SEVERAL senior citizens ripping their clothes off to win a cruise-hosted contest
  14. Saw several men provocatively dancing together to with the same contest
  15. Got a tan!  Due to my Irish, German, and English heritage, my skin tone usually varies between eggshell white and translucent.  In fact, I’m so pale, the people at the “Bodies” exhibit asked if I would be part of their tour, as it is indeed rare that you can see the muscles right through the skin in a life human.
  16. Stood up in the open back of a jeep while speeding through poorly paved roads in a rain forest
  17. Saw a banana plantation (it was cool to see where they come from since I’m single-handedly keeping the banana industry afloat by eating 5-6 a day).
  18. Snorkled above a ship wreck and with sea turtles
  19. Tasted banana ketchup
  20. Went a week without checking my email or voicemail once.  Nor did I send a text message.  First week without outside communication in as long as I can remember.
  21. Been to a cigar lounge
  22. Saw a towel animal (On different days, our room was inhabited by a towel elephant, monkey, and what Emily described as a “Sexy Antelope”)
  23. And lastly, interacted with such a diverse population.  I made friends with two bartenders from China and a small island off the coast of Africa, a piano player from England, a waiter from the Philippines, and a couple with the wife from Russia and husband from Albania.  I learned more about foreign culture in one week than I have in 18 years of school.  

It was a great break from reality.  I’m already looking forward to my next escape :-)

Hockey Training Take Home: Take a break every now and then.  You’ll feel well-rested and rejuvenated, allowing you to get back to training hard and making progress.

Mar

17

So You Want to Get Stronger?

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Want to get stronger?

I often get questions that start out something like:

“What’s the best way to…?”

The truth is, there is not right answer to this question. The best way to achieve any training goal depends very much on your training history, current training level, and injury history, among other things.

One programming approach to drastically improving strength is high-frequency training. The nervous system adapts to the demands we place on ourselves, such that specific movement patterns are strengthened the more we perform them.

Following this logic, the more we lift specific movements the stronger we’ll get, right? Sort of.

The answer is yes, IF we intelligently alter the intensity and speed of the exercises to allow for recovery. The body is in a continuous state of remodeling, meaning it is constantly breaking down and rebuilding. This goes for bone, muscles, connective tissue (e.g. ligaments and tendons), etc.

High frequency training, or training specific movement patterns 3+ times/week can be a very effective strategy in improving strength quickly. Stay tuned. In the next couple days I’m going to post the program I’ve been using for the last three weeks.

Keep training smart.

Mar

16

3 Strategies to Maximize Recovery

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You may be surprised by how simple these are. It’s not a matter of crack some magic code; it’s a matter of taking care of the things you already know are important.

1) Drink PLENTY of water. Maintaining proper hydration has positive implications on both mental and physical performance. Bluntly, it means you’ll be smarter and feel better if you drink enough water.  Plenty is not 6-8 cups a day.  That’s BARELY adequate for completely sedentary people on low caloric diets; you should be drinking AT LEAST double that. If you’re like most people, you’re not even close. It’s never too late to start. Increase your water intake significantly. You’ll likely be making many more trips to the bathroom than you’re used to, but that will cut back within a couple weeks when your body gets used to being fueled properly.

2) Sleep! Everyone’s sleep needs are different, but in general, most people should be getting 7-9 hours of QUALITY sleep. As in wake up in a pool of drool sleep. Wake up with no feeling in your arm because you didn’t move all night sleep. DEEP, QUALITY sleep. If you get 7 and you consistently wake up feeling tired, you need more sleep to recover from the stresses you’re experiencing (through training or other aspects of your life). Remember that this should be consistent from night to night. Your body doesn’t adjust well to 5 days of a lack of rest during the week, and then two days of excessive sleep on the weekend. Make it a priority to get a good night’s sleep every night.

3) Proper Nutrition. This comes in two parts: General Nutrition, and training-specific nutrition. With regards to general nutrition, it’s important that you eat adequate calories from QUALITY sources. This includes as many servings of vegetables as you can tolerate throughout the day, fats from olive oil, nuts, and cold-water fish (e.g. salmon), and carbohydrates from whole grain/high fiber sources. As a reminder, your carbohydrate intake should be determined by your activity level. The more medium-high intensity activity you do, the more carbohydrates you need. Training-specific nutrition is pretty straight forward. Consuming a liquid source of simple carbohydrates and rapidly digesting protein (e.g. whey protein) immediately after your training helps replenish glycogen (read: carbohydrate) stores within the body and stimulate protein synthesis (read: rebuilding). It shouldn’t be hard to see why this would be advantageous. There’s now research to support consuming these “shakes” immediately before and/or during your training, so the nutrients are readily available as your body begins to break down. Think of it as “on the fly” recovery. Personally, I usually make a half shake and sip it while I train, then make another half shake and drink it immediately after.  For the complete nutrition guide, check out John Berardi’s Precision Nutrition program.

Following these three simple (well, at least they’re simple conceptually…maybe not so simple to implement) strategies will help you maximize your rate of recovery, allowing you to get the most out of your training.

Keep training SMART!

Mar

13

24 Hours to Overtraining

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Overtraining is becoming a popular topic in ice hockey, and in youth sports in general, and for good reason. With the overemphasis on year-round sports participation (notably the crazy hockey parents that think it’s a good idea to have their kids ONLY play hockey year-round), we’re starting to see kids suffer symptoms of overtraining.

When I started to look into overtraining, something became clear to me:

There is no difference between OVERtraining and UNDERrecovery.

It’s a game of balancing stress with recovery. Stress, positive or negative, takes a toll on the body. I always joke that I can elicit overtraining symptoms in college students within 24 hours. How? I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to use this on anyone…Give them three exams, have their significant other break up with them, make a 15 page paper due in two days, and then have their neighbors throw a party, not only in their apartment, but also in all the campus libraries.

Boom! Overtraining symptoms.

And that’s without ANY training! You want to avoid overtraining-focus on recovery. For more information, don’t forget to check out Eric Cressey’s E-book: The Art of The Deload.

Keep training smart.

Mar

11

Classic Hockey

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I stumbled across this video today.  CLASSIC hockey-the PATRICK division finals.  Remember that name?  Kevin Stevens used to be my favorite hockey player.  Why?? I don’t know. Probably because his name is Kevin and he was on the first line of the Penguins in NHL ‘94 for Sega (still the only video game I play…what the hell is a rockband?).  Unfortunately, Kevin only makes it through the first 30 seconds of this one.  The fact that this is a Game 7 highlight shows evidence that the Islanders did, in fact, stumble across victories occasionally in the past.  Enjoy!

Mar

9

The Truth About Resistance Training Guidelines

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Usually I save my rants for Friday’s, but I didn’t have time last week to get this one out.  Happy Monday…

I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to spend my last two years at UMass Amherst, completing my graduate work.  While in Amherst, I’ve learned from some of the best, and interacted with several hundred students.  One area of education (notably for future professionals within the kinesiology field) that consistently disappoints me is the resistance training recommendations (actually-I don’t care much for the physical activity guidelines either, but I’ll leave that alone for today).

The recommendation goes something like: 8 exercises hitting all the major muscle groups in the body for 8-12 reps.  Nice.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they’re like that (as an aside: these stem from government-funded research, not from the brilliant faculty at UMass).  The rationale is simple: what’s the most basic recommendation we can make to a huge population of people.  I still don’t like it, but I understand why it’s so generic.  I’m much less okay with it being taught as a good recommendation to hundreds of students within the field of kinesiology.  Present the generic recommendations, because you have to, but then put a big asterisk next to them and go into more detail.

Saying you need to perform 8 exercises to target all the major muscle groups give most people the impression that they need to perform one exercise per muscle group.  Here’s the thing, your body doesn’t work in isolation, so neither should you.  The recommendation leads to the mind state of, “I’ll do something for my chest, for my back, my legs, my calves, my biceps, my triceps, my abs, then my lower back.”  

Great!  You’ve effectively found a way to spend a significantly longer time in the gym, getting worse results, training your body to function in a way it will never have to function.  I’ll let you in on a secret.  Better yet, I’ll challenge you.  Find me a major muscle group (or minor muscle group for that matter) that isn’t worked in a two exercise program utilizing the deadlift and push-up.

It’s time for people to stop subscribing to what I call the “Magic Muscle Theory.”  Simply, this is the idea that specific muscles just lie dormant, awaiting a specifically designed isolation exercise to strengthen them.  For example-Decline benching is great for the lower pec.  Lower pec!  I haven’t decline-benched in over 5 years, and, miraculously, my lower pectoralis major has found a way to survive.  The whole isolation mentality alludes me.

If you’re in anyway involved in the field of kinesiology (student, athletic coach, strength and conditioning coach, athletic trainer, physical therapist, etc.), you’ll do yourself and your clients the greatest service by learning how the body creates movement.  As a hint-it never happens because of the isolated contribution of one muscle. 

And another thing, high protein diets are good for you.  They result in greater fat loss and reduce your risk of Type II Diabetes.  There is absolutely NO evidence that high protein diets have a negative impact on kidney health in people with healthy kidneys (only on those that already have kidney damage/disease).  Contrarily, high amounts of poor quality carbohydrates are likely to rapidly decrease your quality of life and eventually kill you.  

That’s the end of my ranting for this week.  Enjoy your weekend.

Mar

5

Like Reeses?

Filed Under Fat Loss Training, Recipes | 2 Comments

This may look like dog food, but it tastes delicious.  If you don’t like the texture of cottage cheese, just throw this all in a blender or food processor-it’ll turn it into a creamy, chunk-free treat.  I eat this as a regular meal sometimes; although it makes for a great dessert.  Great for people trying to watch their carb intake (which should be most non-athletes).  I, contrary to normal, even measured out serving sizes and calculated some basic nutrition information.  Give it a shot.

Reese's Cottage Cheese 

Ingredients (Makes 4 servings)

  1. 4 cups 1% Cottage Cheese
  2. 8 tablespoons milled flax seed
  3. 4 tablespoons natural peanut butter
  4. 3 scoops Peanut Butter Chocolate (or regular Chocolate) Muscle Milk

Nutrition Info (per serving)

  1. Calories: 450
  2. Total Fat: 20.5 g (about 185 calories)
  3. Saturated Fat: 5 g
  4. Cholesterol: 25 mg
  5. Sodium: 195 mg
  6. Potassium: 615 mg
  7. Total Carbs: 23.5 g
  8. Dietary Fiber: 7 g
  9. Sugar: 10 g
  10. Protein: 45 g

Enjoy!

Mar

3

Hockey Conditioning

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Do you think like this?

Most hockey teams skate 3 lines consistently.

Most shifts are about 45 seconds.

If you were thinking about designing an overload-based conditioning program for hockey, the logical conclusion would be to:

  1. Put together intervals using a 1:2 work to rest (3 line system)
  2. Have the work intervals be between 30-60 seconds

Not a bad start.  It’s certainly better than the old “okay, now jog 8 laps around the rink as a team”.  Nothing will guarantee you a slacking, unmotivated, and probably injured team like that recommendation (Admittedly, I’ve both given AND received that type of program in the past, so don’t despair if that’s what you’re using now.  Read on…).

Think about this:

Most shifts last 30-45 seconds, ON THE CLOCK.  In real-time, this typically translates to 2-3 10-15s shifts, with stoppages of play interspersed throughout.  

Even within a continuous 45 second shift, rarely are players skating full speed throughout.  Usually shifts are broken up by periods of gliding and stopping altogether.

There’s nothing wrong with conditioning using:

10 x 20s work and 40s rest intervals

or 8 x 30s work and 60-90s rest intervals

A unique conditioning model 

Keeping in mind the demands of a hockey game, I’ve been spending more time playing around with interval conditioning like this:

  1. 12 x (30s work 1/10s work 2)/30s rest
  2. 5 x (4 x (10s work/20s rest))/2min rest

In the first example, the players would alternate the work times so that the protocol would go:

30s work, 30s rest, 10s work, 30s rest, 30s work, 30s rest, 10s work, 30s rest, etc., with every work interval counting toward the 12 so that they’d perform 6 x 30s work intervals and 6 x 10s intervals. 

In the second example, the players would perform 4 sets of 10s work then 20s rest in a row (2 minutes total), then take a 2 min rest, then repeat this five times through.  

Both of these examples allow hockey players to work at work:rest ratios that are more similar to what they face in games, maximizing the on-ice carryover.

I hope that makes sense.  Keep working hard.

Mar

2

Hockey Training Secret?

Filed Under Athletic Development, Off-Ice Hockey Training | Leave a Comment

What’s the hockey training secret to success?  

I’ve written a lot about the proper way to train the core, how to create adequate mobility and muscular balance around the hip to prevent groin and hip flexor injuries, how high intensity interval training is the only way to go for hockey players, why single-leg training is more appropriate than double leg training for athletes, and how to incorporate all of these things into one cohesive program. 

The truth is that none of that matters.

You will NEVER be successful if you aren’t willing to push yourself.
You will NEVER be successful if you aren’t willing to outwork your competitors.
You will NEVER be successful if you look for a handout from someone else. 

The ultimate key to hockey training is simple:   

Possess an inner drive that will not accept failure, ever.  

Always ask yourself if you have more to give.  If the answer is yes, then give it.  There will always be excuses-lack of time, lack of energy, linemates aren’t good, goalie had a bad game, no one else was working hard.  I could go one for hours. I’ve heard them all.  

It’s easy to make excuses.

That’s why, at the end of the season, there’s only one champion.

Keep working hard.  Keep working smart.