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As the chaos typical of off-season hockey training starts to die down, I wanted to share some “Wednesday Wisdom” with you.

1) Hockey Development includes, or should I say necessitates, taking time AWAY from hockey! My friend David Lasnier talks about this and other great hockey training tips in a podcast he recently did with Perry Nickelston. Check it out here: Stop Chasing Pain Podcast with David Lasnier

2) I recently got an email question from my colleague Dennis Adsit asking about heart rate responses to slideboarding compared to shuttle runs. There is a very long-winded response to this question which outlines what we’re really looking for out of our conditioning, but the simple answer is you can get comparable heart rates if you really push the tempo. While this isn’t always possible as fatigue really starts to infiltrate, this is the tempo we want to aim for on EVERY interval (at least, every interval under 30s).

20s Slideboard

3) About 6 weeks ago, Robert Morris University goalie Marissa Angel set a personal record with 2 chin-ups. The next week she set a PR with 3 chin-ups. The next week 4. The next week 5. Last week 6. And just yesterday 8. I couldn’t be more proud of the hard work she’s put forth this Summer. Getting strong isn’t only for male hockey players. For most females, doing 8 chin-ups seems like a tall feet. As with any long-term goal, the most important step is the first one!

4) Being an explosive hockey player on the ice starts with being explosive off the ice. Check out the videos below. In the first video, where (from left to right) Dave Macalino (URI), Jeff Buvinow (Brown), and Charlie Vasaturo (Salmon Arm Silverbacks; BCHL) perform a 1-Arm DB Hang Snatch with an 80, 90, and 90 lb dumbbell (respectively).In the second, Colby Cohen (in the Colorado Avalanche system) does a Hang Clean with 230 for 2 reps.

1-Arm DB Hang Snatch

Hang Clean

5) You don’t need to wait until a certain age before you can start getting strong. This video is of ’96 Conor Landrigan doing DB Reverse Lunges with 65 lb DBs. Conor had zero lifting experience before starting with us about 3 months before this video was taken. We have about a half dozen ’96 hockey players that are of comparable strength. It’s no coincidence that these players are amongst the top players in the country. The work ethic that goes into building strength like this also transfers into other aspects of hockey.

DB Reverse Lunge

6) Last week I was driving on a state highway in Maryland and was abruptly stopped by a red light at a 4-way intersection. One of the “ways” was a parking lot. The quick red light caused about a half dozen cars on each side of the road to come to screeching halt. I looked at the perpendicular lights to see who triggered it and saw it was the car coming from the parking lot. I looked at the driver, who was texting on a phone inconspicuously positioned on his lap. I looked at his green light. I looked at him, back at the green light. Hilariously for him, and enragingly for me, he glanced up to see if the light had turned green right after it returned back to red. This struck me as a great symbol of current sociological norms. As we make an effort to occupy every second of our time, life is often passing us by.

7) Speed training with a crossover and transitional emphasis is a must in any hockey training program. I outline a lot of the dynamic starts and transitional speed drills in my hockey speed training manual Breakaway Hockey Speed.

10-Yard Sprint (5-Yard Back Run Start) 1

10-Yard Sprint (5-Yard Back Run Start) 2

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

 

I have some exciting news to share with you, but before I do, I want to remind you about one of my favorite newsletters. Personal Development expert Brian Tracy offers about a dozen different newsletters through his site, all of which are great. Depending on your business/interests, you may not be interested in all of them, but I think you’ll love the “Quote of the Day” newsletter he sends out. I saved a few recent ones that I really like:

“We can learn from past failures and mistakes, but we shouldn’t get stuck there. We can keep future goals in mind, but we shouldn’t get stuck there, either. The only way to reach our potential is to focus on what we must do now – this moment, this day – to perform effectively and win.” – Joe Torre

The Move

Emily and I found a great place in Philadelphia (randomly, since we found the place because a woman randomly approached us on a street corner after overhearing us talk about places) so the move is official. We’re both really excited. We’ll be Philadelphia residents by the end of the month. If you’re ever in the area, let me know and I’d be happy to show you around Endeavor.

Ultimate Hockey Development Coaching Program

I got such great feedback from the first go-around with my Ultimate Hockey Development Coaching Program that I’ve decided to re-release it. If you didn’t know, since the first launch, Bill Hartman and Mike Potenza hopped on board as contributors, both of which KILLED their Coaching Calls. Go to the link below for more information!

=> Ultimate Hockey Development Coaching Program <=

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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

We’ve been EXTREMELY fortunate at Endeavor to have David Lasnier join our team. He’s really been the man behind the mirror with a lot of the success we’ve had with our athletes recently. He’s not only a great coach, but a really smart guy and someone that I look to regularly for new ideas. He was kind enough to take some time to answer a few questions I had for him that I wanted to share with you.

KN: I really liked the post you recently put up on your site called The Mental Aspect of Training. Do you notice a difference in the mentality between higher-level hockey players compared to players that aren’t competing at the elite level?

DL: Yes, I think there is a pretty significant difference. This can be attributed to a lot of different reasons. First of all, I think every hockey player that trains wanst to get better, but as I mentioned in my post, not all of them are really willing to put in all the hard work and dedication it takes. Most of the time, when they have a short-term, concrete goal to reach it will make the athlete feel like they are putting all the hard work in for something. It might be for any young hockey player trying to make the cut for a higher-level team or it can be for a professional athlete trying to sign a big contract. These are just 2 examples that will make athletes bust their ass training because they know that if they don’t they won’t make it.

For some others (probably not the majority), it is just in their mentality to work hard all the time. I’m sure every coach out there can relate to a couple of their athletes being very dedicated workers that give all they have 100% of the time. Unfortunately, I’m also sure that every coach can testify that this is not the case for all of the players. These hard working types are found at any level and I personally think this discipline is coming from education and discipline at home, but this might be a whole other discussion. The thing with these players is that, most of the time, they’re not the most skilled ones at a young age. But when these kids keep working hard and do the right stuff to continue improving they usually catch up to the more skilled players sooner than later; and they are the ones who have a very good chance of making it to the professional level. Dedication, hard work, and discipline over the years will always pay off in the end.

KN: Great points. I know we’ve shared a couple conversations about footwear in athletes. Many hockey players aren’t concerned with their ankle/feet at all, rationalizing this standpoint with the fact that skates limit end range ankle movement. Should they be?

When you think about it, hockey skates limit the range of motion at the ankles pretty significantly. Also, hockey skate companies are making more rigid skates than ever before (just compare an old pair of skates from the 70s made almost completely out of leather to today’s skates made of rigid composite material). So considering that, hockey players will always have some sort of range of motion restriction at the ankles after spending so many hours on the ice every week. What happens when you lose range of motion at a joint like the ankle that is supposed to have good mobility? The body will try to get that range of motion somewhere else; and most of the time, the knee, which is the closest joint, will compensate for the that lost range of motion. That is where it can cause big problems because the knee is not meant for that; the knee is a joint that should be more stable, at least in side-to-side and rotational movements. But I won’t go into too much detail about that, since I think you already did a very good job at explaining that in your joint-by-joint approach to training post the other day (The Mobility-Stability Continuum). Another thing is that I think athletes in general, including hockey players, make very poor shoe choices when it comes to their training. Or I should say that they are simply not educated enough on what to look for when getting shoes to train in. As you know, we see so much people walking in through our door wearing Nike Shox or other high-heeled running shoe; they don’t understand that this is affecting their feet and ankles too, as much as skates do. Athletes should be more informed on that kind of thing, and they should know that Nike Frees, Vibram Five Fingers and other pliable, low-heeled shoes are the way to go for optimal ankle health.

KN: I completely agree. We’ve had pretty good success in convincing our male players to buy new shoes after we tell them how great they look in high heels. What common movement abnormalities/dysfunctions have you noticed with the hockey players you’ve trained? Do you notice differences between younger and older players (slash those with more playing years than those with less)?

Well, as we’ve just discussed, the ankle range of motion seems to be an issue for a majority of hockey players; they pretty much all have some kind of restriction around the ankle joint, some being worse than others. Hip range of motion seems to be another issue with a lot of hockey players. I don’t know that many hockey players with great hip mobility. This can lead to lower back pain over time or other types of hip injuries. On that note, this is something I’ve noticed a lot with older players. The number of hip injuries, especially sports hernias, players who compete at higher level suffer is ridiculous. And it is growing at an alarming rate. Even at the professional level, I think I’ve seen at least 5-6 players on the Flyers’ roster in the NHL being out with a hip or groin injury at some point during the season. This is almost 25% of the whole roster suffering from a hip injury during ONE season! There are probably a whole lot of different reasons to explain that, but I’m pretty sure that the insane amount of time players spend on the ice year round has something to do with it. If you’ve been playing hockey year round from a very young age, playing in summer leagues, showcases, festivals, camps, etc all the time and never taking time off the ice, there are very good chances that when you get to a higher level (College or Professional) your hips are gonna be pretty banged up.

KN: That’s a message that I’ve been trying to get players/parents to understand with little luck. Unfortunately it seems like players need to be hurt before they get the message.

I know you get a lot of questions from hockey players on supplements. What supplements do you think are worthwhile for hockey players to invest in? Does this change throughout the year?

The first supplement I recommend to hockey players is always one that will take care of the recovery around the training window. A lot of athletes want to try all kinds of supplements to help them perform better. The thing is, if you want to perform better you first need to recover better, and that is why taking some kind of recovery drink is so important. A supplement that will combine fast digesting carbs (read: sugars) and protein is the way to go. You can use a supplement that will combine both (e.g. Biotest’s Surge Recovery) or use them separately (Whey protein + Gatorade). The goal is to get around 1:2 – 1:4 grams of protein to carbs ratio.

Another supplement that I feel is important is fish oil omega 3s. There is constantly new research coming out everyday supporting the benefits of supplementing with fish oil, since almost nobody eats fatty fish like salmon on a regular basis. Fish oil will improve your cardiovascular health, decrease your risk of many types of cancer, decrease overall inflammation in your body, help you decrease body fat, and help you gain muscle. The list goes on and on. Let’s just put it this way: fish oil will make you more awesome.

I would say these 2 are definitely the most important ones for hockey players to improve performance, recovery and general health. I would also add to that 2 others that might extremely beneficial. The first one is some kind of greens supplement for those who don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. The reason I mention this one is that even if I encourage every athlete out there to eat as many fruits and vegetable as possible, the truth is that I know that most of them don’t eat enough. This is where a greens supplement can help. And the last one, and certainly not least, would be one I’d recommend especially during the fall and winter months: vitamin D. Vitamin D is synthesized by our skin from sun-light and that is how we get the most of our daily requirements in vitamin D. The problem is if you’re not living in Florida, you probably don’t get enough sun light during the winter days. And recent research support the supplementation of vitamin D, as deficiencies in D could be associated with increased risk of different types of cancer, chronic fatigue, depression, hypertension and diabetes. So from a health perspective for athletes, it makes sense to supplement with vitamin D.

KN: Since you’ve been with us through the Endeavor Fitness to Endeavor Sports Performance transformation and worked in personal training settings before, I have to ask: Personal Training vs. Strength and Conditioning. What are the major differences in your mind and which do you prefer?

I have to say that I choose Strength and Conditioning hands down. I have worked as a personal trainer in a commercial gym for 3 years and I can’t say that I hated it as I gained a lot of experience, met a lot of interesting people and made some great friends along the way. I don’t want to bash personal trainers as I feel there are many good ones out there. Unfortunately, it’s not the majority. But at the gym I was working at, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by many good ones that are really smart and constantly wanted to learn and get better at what they’re doing. The main differences between the two are the clientele you work with and the atmosphere. The clientele is very different simply because of the general athleticism and the great body control and awareness that athletes from all ages have versus untrained adults that have little to no athletic background and are, in general, not very coordinated. It makes it so much easier to teach a reverse lunge to someone that has body control and awareness. So you can spend less time explaining, get more things done, progress faster and use more advanced training protocols.

The other thing is the atmosphere, and it is probably the single most important reason that causes me to love strength and conditioning A LOT more. You get to work in an environment where you don’t hear crappy music all day long on commercial radio stations in a gym filled with useless machines and no room to move, and where female clients are not afraid to use dumbbells heavier than 10 pounds because they’re afraid they’re gonna get jacked within a week….Oh and I almost forgot, a place where you don’t have 99% of the members performing silly bodypart splits and aerobic training. But there are also similarities in working with general members and athletes; both populations are human beings with different personalities. And even if athletes are generally more motivated, you always deal with highly motivated people and some lazy ass people too, whether you’re a strength coach or a personal trainer. Both clientele need goals to reach; both need to know exactly what they’re training for if they want to succeed. If they don’t (or if they don’t see the progress) in the long run, they will lose their focus and their motivation.

KN: David, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to share this with us.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you check out David Lasnier’s blog!

Last week was tough. The Blackhawks winning the Stanley Cup marks the end of one of the most exciting years of hockey in my lifetime, and the end of my 3-month Flyers playoff beard. Maybe that’s not a bad thing since I was accused of looking over 10 years older. Although…at least I wasn’t being carded for rated-R movies!

Wow.

The off-season is here. Within the next few weeks, almost all kids will be out of school and the Summer will officially be upon us. That means most of the players, if they haven’t yet, will be receiving invitations to tryouts for any of the seemingly never-ending list of “select teams”.

I could rant forever about how most of these will get you no exposure at all and are geared toward sucking as many kids as possible into an overpriced tryout…but I’ll spare you. In my lifetime, I’ve seen many qualified players get dismissed from these teams. They usually don’t take it well. Players start comparing themselves to the players that made it, wondering why they aren’t good enough and what they’re doing wrong. As with any tryout, kids that make it gain confidence and feel like they have a future in hockey. Players that get cut start to question whether or not they’ll ever realize their dreams. It’s unfortunate.

At Endeavor last week, I overheard two of our hockey players talking between sets about these select teams. One said, “I got cut every year and was told I’d never play at a high level.” The other responded, “I never even got the tryout invitation!”

The funny thing is, BOTH of these players are top NHL prospects. Yep. They weren’t quite regional select team material, but the NHL will give them a shot. Seems a little backwards.

Two Hockey Development Truths:

1) Every player develops at different rates. Many stars at the peewee level plateau shortly after and/or quit.

2) Even exceptionally great coaches make mistakes.

One of the players I mentioned above said, “I should probably thank them. Getting cut pissed me off so much it motivated me to prove them wrong.” This is the EXACT attitude you should have if you get cut from a team. Make them regret overlooking you. Put the work in to develop your skills and athleticism.

Hockey players need to stop waiting to be discovered and start making themselves impossible to ignore.

Countless players have been late bloomers and went on to have extremely successful careers. You can too.

-Kevin Neeld

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