Month: July 2010

Hockey Conditioning-The Fun Stuff

A while back I wrote about about some unique hockey conditioning tools I’ve started using at Endeavor. If you missed the article, you can check it out here: A New Look at Hockey Conditioning.

The idea is that SOME aspect of your hockey training needs to incorporate periods of static holds to build up localized fatigue resistance in the deep hip and knee bends required for effective skating. Because the game of hockey alternates periods of static positions and explosive movements, it’d be ideal to incorporate this in your training. I originally got this idea of alternating static holds with explosive movements from Brijesh Patel (currently at Quinnipiac University). He had some of his athletes holding a squat position and alternating vertical jumps. I thought it was brilliant. A little more specific to hockey, if you have a slideboard, you can do this by alternating periods of either a squat hold or a split squat hold with slideboarding. Check out the video below.

In this video, the hockey players are doing a 10s split squat hold on one side, then 5 slideboards, then a 10s split squat hold on the other side, then 5 slideboards, three times through. You’ll probably notice that the slideboarding itself becomes increasingly less explosive as they go on. I expect that as they fatigue, which they did quickly since this was the first time they’ve done this. The goal is to increasingly emphasize quickness as they adapt to this type of training. This type of “conditioning’ will go a long way toward improving your performance on common tests like the Wingate Test. Plus…look how much fun they’re having in the video.

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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Core Exercise to Improve Hockey Shooting

The other day I posted a video of a Falling Side Lunge Sprint Start, which was the end of my lateral sprint start progression. The video below is one of the final stages of our horizontal power progression. This progression is designed to help hockey players use their hips to create and control rotational power.

I learned this exercise from Mike Potenza in a series of videos he posted at HockeySC.com. As a quick plug, if you still haven’t checked out the site, you need to. The quality of information continues to grow (and will); I’ve personally learned a great deal from people like Mike Potenza, Mike Boyle, Sean Skahan, Cal Dietz, Matt Nichol, Maria Mountain, and Devan McConnell and I know you will too.

Check out the Side Standing Med Ball Scoop with Partner Toss video:

As the bearded hockey player learns to catch, recoil, and accelerate the ball forward, you can throw the ball a little harder to increase the decelrative stress. Ideally, the player should keep their arms straigtht and the ball should br thrown toward their back hip in the same line that they’ll need to coil back in. In otherwords, don’t throw it at them; throw it almost in a parallel line to their orientation. Make sure the player is rotating their hips fully around on each throw.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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Hockey Speed Training: Lateral Start Progression

Most of our off-season hockey training programs have progressed to the final phase. With that, our speed training has reached the point where we’re merging away from static sprint starts and incorporating multi-directional dynamic starts.

We generally run a linear and lateral sprint progression in parallel throughout the off-season, meaning one speed day has a more linear start focus, and the other has a more lateral focus. This is another idea I borrowed from Mike Boyle, and it’s been great for “tissue unloading” (so we aren’t hammering the same structures over and over) and for reinforced teaching. At the end of our lateral start progression (before we move into strictly dynamic starts) we use a falling side lunge start. Check out the video below.

The idea is to force the athlete to decelerate then explode into a lateral movement. This follows several weeks of teaching our athletes how to rapidly move out of a lunge position into a sprint position. If you’re interested in more hockey speed training information, I break down exactly how I design/implement speed training for hockey players in Breakaway Hockey Speed.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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Grooving New Movement Patterns

Over the last several years, I’ve become a strong believer in developing individual-specific ideal movement patterns both to improve performance and to minimize injury risk. I have to put the “individual-specific” disclaimer in there to highlight the fact that everyone’s joint anatomy is a little different and you can’t always expect the exact same movement patterns from every player.

With that said, a lot of the hockey players we see need work in a few movements. Three big ones are:

-Pelvic stability during lateral miniband walks
-Scapular stability during pressing movements
-Knee/hip control during double and single leg landings

Grooving new movement patterns generally follows this progression:

1) The athlete needs to understands EXACTLY what you want them to do and can picture themselves doing it the right way in their heads.
2) Once they have that, focused coaching/cuing is necessary to get them to FEEL themselves doing it the right way.
3) The volume of the movement needs to be steadily increased to help reinforce the correct performance of the movement

One of the biggest problems I see in the proper execution of this progression is that, especially in youth team settings when proper movement technique learning is most important, massive amounts of volume are loaded on top of an improper movement base.

I think of grooving new movement patterns like starting a new river. Picture drawing a line in the sand with your pointer finger about a foot long. Imagine what would happen if you slowly poured water in one end of that line. After some water was absorbed the sand, the rest would trickle along the rest of the line to the other end, bringing some sand from the border with it, and ultimately making the line a little wider, deeper, and longer. If you kept doing this over and over, you’d get a strongly grooved water pathway.

Now, play that tape back in reverse. Imagine you just drew the line in the sand with your finger. Instead of slowly pouring water in, somebody’s kid runs over and dumps an entire bucket of water on the end of the line.

Can you picture the explosive ruining of your line-signifying movement pattern?

As you’ve heard me say before, it comes down to QUALITY being a prerequisite to QUANTITY. I’ve heard the idea that it takes 10,000 repetitions before something is “perfected” and can be performed without much thought, but those 10,000 repetitions need to be performed at a HIGH quality, and doing them all in one day won’t get you very far.  Sometimes less is more. “Do less.”

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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“Love the Suck”

This is a saying that I heard Sargeant Mike Malloy say again and again at the Sharks Prospect Camp. It’s as comical as it is powerful.

“Love the Suck”

As a team, regardless of the sport or industry, you’re going to face adversity. It’s inevitable. Contrary to common practice, what you do with that adversity is a CHOICE. As a team, you can choose to crumble. As a team, you can choose to unite and rise against.

As an individual, you can choose to be sucked in to the negativity of a few players or you can choose to lead your team away from it.

Some seasons are going to have more suck than others. If you choose to revel in it, the rougher it gets, the tougher you get.

Love the suck is about bathing in adversity, soaking it up, and becoming stronger willed because of it.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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