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Aug
2
Long-Term Hockey Development and Injury Prevention
Filed Under Hip/Lower Abdominal Injuries, Hockey Player Development, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
At Endeavor, we really pride ourselves on constantly looking for better ways to develop our athletes. All of our coaches continuously look for cutting edge information on program design, more effective exercises, nutrition, recovery strategies, and injury prevention (amongst others). Working alongside such passionate people is what makes my job so much fun to do.
Over the weekend I spent some time watching DVDs of a 3-hour presentation from Dr. Vladimir Issurin on Block Periodization. Dr. Issurin is a scientific advisor to the Soviet and Israeli Olympic teams. His presentation delved into how to alter the emphasis of various training aspects to best peak for competition. Eastern European training methods have always intrigued me, so I was psyched I got an opportunity to hear from one of their secret weapons.
The Death of Development
One of the things he said that really caught my attention was (to paraphrase) that in today’s athletic development systems, competitive workloads have replaced training workloads. Think about it. Add up the total time athletes spend practicing and training in a given month. Add up the total time hockey players spend playing games. In previous hockey development models, a ratio of preparation: competition would likely be AT LEAST 5:1, meaning players would spend 5 hours of preparation (practice and training) for every 1 hour of competition. Now this ratio is significantly closer to 1:1, if not 1:2.
Concomitant with this shift in competition emphasis, we’ve seen a drastic increase in the amount of burnout amongst high school players and an UNACCEPTABLE increase in the number of non-contact and overuse injuries. To address the former, this means that when hockey players should be entering their best years, they’re so burnt out from 70+ game youth seasons, spring league, summer league,a nd select teams that they give it up. This is tragic.
Tissue Stress Accumulation
The increase in overuse injuries is related to what I think of as “tissue stress accumulation”. Simply, this means that the stresses placed across tissues within your body (muscle, tendon, ligament, etc.) accumulate over time, ESPECIALLY if special attention isn’t paid to recovery. When I was in San Jose, John Pallof (a brilliant physical therapist) said he thought one of the reasons groin strains, hip flexor strains and sports hernias were so much more prevalent now is because hockey players are training more than ever before. John noted that the training is absolutely necessary for the prevention of a host of other injuries, but he alluded to a great point: With the increase in competitions both within a season and across multiple seasons (Issurin) and the necessary increase in training (Pallof), our body’s just aren’t given the time to recover that they need. This reality is exemplified by the fact that almost ZERO attention is paid to recovery and improving soft-tissue quality.
Take Home Messages
There are three things you should take from this (and pass along to everyone you know and love):
1) As a hockey community, we need to ease up on the number of games (and number of seasons for that matter) and put a greater emphasis on practices with components of skill development. It’s okay to slow down practice and focus on individual skills. In fact, it’s paramount for development.
2) From a training standpoint, the goal is to get the maximum benefit from the minimum amount of training. This comes back to minimizing tissue stress accumulation and highlights the fatal flaw in the “more is better” idea. This focus underlies the design of all our athletic development programs at Endeavor. It’s why we sometimes use 2 sets instead of 3, why we tell athletes to lift lighter weights on certain sets, and why we dial back our strength work significantly when it’s time to really hammer home conditioning. Maximum results, minimum stress. That’s the goal.
3) Lastly, EVERY hockey player should be actively pursuing improved soft-tissue quality. I recently heard someone say that athletes ignoring performance-limiting factors (such as poor soft-tissue quality) are essentially driving with the brakes on. At Endeavor, we address soft-tissue quality by having our athletes go through a self-myofascial release circuit before they do their dynamic warm-up, which uses foam rollers, tennis balls, and medicine balls to break up knots and adhesions within the muscle (taking the breaks off). These implements can help restore normal muscle extensibility and fluid motion in young athletes and help maintain tissue quality in older athletes.
As athletes get older, it is ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE that they go see a manual therapist on a regular basis to do some soft-tissue work done on their hip musculature. In this case, manual therapists include professionals that can do massage, A.R.T. (Active Release Technique), and Graston. This is truly the secret behind long-term injury-free athletic excellence. I’ve found that most massage therapists avoid the hip musculature for liability reasons, and therefore aren’t of much use for our purposes (although the relaxation is still awesome and I’d never tell anyone not to get a massage).
Me on my walk home after a great massage.
Because not all manual therapists are created equally, I made it a mission to seek out the top professionals in our area to refer our athletes to. I generally tell our older athletes to go see one of these therapists once per month to get work done, sometimes more or less depending on the therapists recommendation. I highly recommend you find someone in your area too. It’ll be worth it in the long run.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Jun
25
Groin Soft Tissue Work for Hockey Players
Filed Under Hip/Lower Abdominal Injuries, Stretching | 2 Comments
As you know, the adductors “groin” present a lot of problems for hockey players. Some are tight; some are weak, some are injured. The more time players spend on the ice, the more of an issue this becomes.
One area that hockey players are frequently locked up is in the area of the posterior adductor magnus and medial hamstrings. Adhesions can form in this area and almost “glue” these muscles together.
Restrictions in this area can affect both hip and knee joint motion. More specifically, hockey players with restrictions in this area will have a difficult time achieving full hip flexion, which will affect their ability to do exercises like reverse lunges and back leg raised split squats correctly.
A great manual therapist can help alleviate this problem by re-creating separation and smooth movement of these muscles. With that said, we don’t all have a great manual therapist waiting to help our players address these problems. My colleague David Lasnier recently posted a great video on an adductor soft tissue technique that we use at Endeavor. Check out the video here: Soft Tissue Work For Groin Pain
To your continued success,
Kevin Neeld
May
19
I’ve been outspoken about the importance of achieving and maintaining optimal hip mobility (read: range of motion) as a means of improving rotational power (important for skating fast and shooting hard) and preventing hip-related injuries like groin and hip flexor strains, sports hernias, and low back pain.
This is one of my favorite hip mobility exercises that has found it’s way into the warm-up of every hockey training program I write. This is another great exercise that I’ve borrowed from my friend and colleague Nick Tumminello. It emphasizes all three planes of hip movement in diagonal patterns. This is a must for all hockey players.
Diagonal Hip Rock -> Step
To your continued success,
Kevin Neeld
P.S. I’m on my way to the 2nd Annual Boston Hockey Conference. Stay tuned, on Monday I’ll be revealing the hockey development project I’ve spent the last several months working on!
May
14
Hockey Core Training Exercises
Filed Under Hip/Lower Abdominal Injuries, Off-Ice Hockey Training | 4 Comments
A couple weeks ago, my colleague Dr. Jeff Cubos told me to check out a relatively new assessment protocol called the Bunkie Test. I had never heard of it before so I took a look and found some interesting stuff. We haven’t integrated these “tests” into our assessment protcol at Endeavor, but I am integrating a few of the concepts into our hockey training programs.
The whole idea behind the Bunkie Tests is to assess the performance of different functional lines within the body. As an example, there is a well established connection between the external obliques and contralateral (opposite side) hip adductors (“groin” muscles). They frequently serve integrated functions in athletic movements. If you look at this picture of me taking a slap shot while at Delaware, you’ll see that my upper body is turning to the left, while my right leg extends and external rotates. This means that my left external oblique and right hip adductors are decelerating the movement. On the opposite side of things, my right external oblique and left hip adductors are both shortening.
This is just one illustration of this connection between the trunk and hip “core” musculature. Below is a video of an advanced core training exercise we’ve been using with a lot of our athletes recently.
There is also a lateral connection between the obliques and same side hip abductors. A great core training exercise to strengthen this functional path is:
To your continued success,
Kevin Neeld
Ice Hockey Training
Hockey Strength and Conditioning
Apr
28
Performance Implications of Muscultendinous Stiffness
Filed Under Hip/Lower Abdominal Injuries, Stretching | 1 Comment
On Monday, we went over the difference between muscle length and muscle stiffness. If you missed it, check it out here:
Muscle Properties: Short vs. Stiff
The big question I left you with is: Is stiffness a bad thing?
There isn’t a simple answer to this complex question. A few considerations:
1) Over the years, I’ve noticed that the athletes that seemed the stiffest were also usually the fastest. This actually makes sense since stiffer muscles would allow greater force to be produced in less range of motion, allowing rapid changes of direction and foot turnover.
2) A lot of people associate stifness with limited range of motion. If you recall back to Monday’s post, range of motion is only limited by stiffness if their is insufficient force to achieve a range of motion. Think of two 180lb athletes stepping off a 24 inch box and “sticking” the landing. Since they’re both the same weight and are jumping from the same height, the relative force requirements of the landing would be the same. Assuming they have an identical anatomical and neural make up (this is an absurd assumption, but necessary for this example), the athlete with stiffer muscles would not descend as far into a squat landing position as the athlete with less stiff muscles.
Since the force requirements are the same, and stiffer muscles require MORE force to go through a given range of motion, the stiffer athlete would probably land higher than the less stiff athlete. Consider the implications this has in stops and starts. The ability to reduce more force through a smaller range of motion would allow for a more rapid change of direction (as mentioned above).
3) Muscle hypertrophy leads to an increase in the number of muscle fibers in parallel. This, by definition, increases muscle stiffness.
4) Stiffness has somewhat haphazardly been accused as the cause of musculotendinous injuries. In reality, it’s a stiffness imbalance that results in the over-stretching or over-working of synergistic or antagonistic muscles.
5) Stretching prior to activity, long thought of as an injury-reduction strategy, actually increases the risk of injury. This is only the case if stretching is performed IMMEDIATELY before the activity. This can be explained by the results of a study by Ryan et al. (2009) demonstrating that decrements in musculotendinous stiffness last about 20 minutes following static stretching protocols. Not that static stretching is unviersally bad, but stretching and then immediately going into activity involving the same joints creates laxity around the joints and can lead to undesired movements.
I realize this is a lot of information to digest. Increased stiffness itself is not a bad thing. In other words, increased stiffness won’t decrease your athletic performance. In fact, it likely improves your performance! The big take home message is that you want to avoid is a stiffness IMBALANCE between synergistic and antagonistic muscles. A common imbalance in hockey players is having stiffer glutes than adductors, resulting in excessive stress to the adductors (and potentially adductor or “groin” strains). I talked about this imbalance specifically in a previous post:
Does Flexibility INCREASE Your Risk of Injury?
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
P.S. I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone that has been emailing me positive feedback about my Off-Ice Performance Training Course. It’s always great to hear how it’s helping your kids or teams!
Reference:
Ryan, Beck, Herda, et al. (2009). The Time Course of Musculotendinous Stiffness Responses Following Different Durations of Passive Stretching. Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, 38(10), 632-639.