Month: May 2011

This Week at Hockey Strength and Conditioning

I hope you had a great week. We’re wrapping up another busy week at Endeavor. The hip assessments have spawned some interesting results that you’ll be interested to hear about in the future. Of the 20 guys I’ve tested, 1/4 have a structural abnormality that will absolutely need to be accounted for in their training, and the test is really easy to perform.

If you’re looking for an informative way to spend a few hours this weekend, we’ve posted a ton of stuff at Hockey Strength and Conditioning over the last few days. Check out what you’ve been missing!

Sean Skahan posted Phase 3 of his ACL rehab program. As Sean continues to post these progressions, it’s interesting to note that these don’t look like rehab prescriptions for a broken player. They look like a quality training program with some small pieces missing to account for the player’s injury. Hopefully this will continue to shed some light on the physical and mental efficacy of training around a player’s injury, and not just shutting the player down completely for the skeptics out there. Check out the program at the link below:

Click Here to Read >> ACL Rehab Phase 3 from Sean Skahan

My favorite Canadian David Lasnier had another terrific article posted on off-season hockey training. David has been on fire over the last month, as he’s had articles featured at StrengthCoach.com, SportsRehabExpert.com, and HockeyStrengthandConditioning.com (not bad for a guy who speaks English as a second language). All he needs now is to do a webinar for Anthony Renna’s LesWebinarsDeStrengthandConditioning.com and he’ll have officially “made it”! This article breaks down the complexities of off-season periodization into an easy to understand format that can be applied easily. This is the exact model we use to train our hockey players in the off-season at Endeavor Sports Performance.

Click Here for David’s Autograph>> Hockey Off-Season Periodization from David Lasnier

Mike Potenza posted an article outlining his philosophy on training throughout the playoffs. Whether you’re inclined to agree to disagree with his philosophy, I think he does a great job of pointing out that the NHL playoffs are far from short-lived. Those preaching to pack-in the training and basically do nothing at all may lose sight of the fact that, ideally, the team would be in the playoffs for about 3 months. Three-months of no training is sure to exacerbate hockey-related imbalances and detrain important physical capacities. Certain qualities (e.g. speed, conditioning) can be maintained well through on-ice work if it’s of sufficient intensity and duration. Other qualities will surely degrade (e.g. strength, power, structural balance). For some players, their confidence and overall durability are tied to certain physical qualities (e.g. strength), so it’s important not to overlook this when making decisions about late season and playoff training strategies.

Click Here to Read >> Playoff Training Model from Mike Potenza

Mike also added two videos on foam rolling and static stretching pairs, one for the upper body and one for the lower body (4 each). If you only have 5-10 minutes to get this work in, these series are good ones to follow.

Click Here to Watch >> Roller/Static Stretch Combos from Mike Potenza

Lastly, that Neeld guy slipped one past the guards and added an article on rotator cuff training for hockey players. This article highlights the most overlooked function of the rotator cuff and presents a few exercises to train it that you may not be expecting. In the interest of “prehab”, these exercises have extra value in that they aren’t isolative in training focus. In other words, they aren’t just “rotator cuff” exercises; they create a training effect for multi-directional core strength and stability, posture/movement pattern reinforcement and lower body strength (one of them).

Click Here to Read >> A New Look at Rotator Cuff Training

As always, the forums has been packed with some great discussions over the last couple days. When you sign into the site, be sure to check that out. Even in short threads, guys are posting videos and links to other resources that you won’t want to miss. If you aren’t a member yet, shell out the $1 to test drive Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. If it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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Hockey Research: Shot Accuracy, Joint Pain, and Atherosclerosis

Monday’s post presented research that represents what I believe is the first attempt to analyze a connection between various testing measures and actual in-game performance. If you missed it, check it out here: Breakthrough Hockey Training Research

Sticking with the research theme, I came across a few other studies that may interest you.

Whole-body predictors of wrist shot accuracy in ice hockey: a kinematic analysis

Of the three studies I’ll mention today, this is probably the most interesting to those with a primarily hockey background. This study sought to objectify which kinematics (movement patterns) lead to more accurate shooting. They found that shooting accuracy was predicted by coordinated strategies of the lower limbs, torso, and upper limbs. A more generic statement couldn’t be made. That said, they point out that a more in-depth analysis of their data suggests that a more stable base of support, improved ability to decelerate generated momentum, and proper positioning will all improve shot accuracy. For those of us on the performance training side of things, this reinforces the notion that hip stability, core linkage between the lower and upper halves, and proper movement patterns will transfer to improved performance on the ice in both general athleticism (speed, power, etc.) AND more skill-driven abilities.

Significant accuracy predictors were identified in the lower limbs, torso and upper limbs. Interpretation of the kinematics suggests that characteristics such as a better stability of the base of support, momentum cancellation, proper trunk orientation and a more dynamic control of the lead arm throughout the wrist shot movement are presented as predictors for the accuracy outcome.

Single leg stability. Proper hip hinge. Lethal shot.

Prevalence of joint-related pain in the extremities and spine in five groups of top athletes

This study looked at self-reported site-specific pain frequency in 75 male college athletes in a number of different sports compared to “non-athlete” controls. Pain location was identified as cervical, thoracic or lumbar spine, and other major joints such as shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees and ankles. The results from this study were pretty “vanilla”, but I thought it was interesting that hockey players were amongst the most frequent complainers of pain in the cervical region. The neck is a bit of a taboo region from a training standpoint and pain in this area is a red flag to refer out to someone with higher qualifications, but i think many of the non-contact cervical issues hockey players face could be eliminated by restoring extension and acceptably symmetrical rotation range of motion in the thoracic region, and cuing a neutral cervical position in all exercises (and in life in general for that matter). A little bit of education on proper spinal alignment can go a long way for more intuitive and dedicated players. In support of this, the authors noted that pain in one area of the spine was correlated with pain in other spinal regions. This is just more evidence of how the body functions as an integrated unit, and why isolated training approaches simply won’t cut it.

A good set of hands can of hands can go a long way in relieving tension in the cervical spine

Changes in Homocysteine and 8-iso-PGF(2a) Levels in Football and Hockey Players After a Match

This study was designed to assess levels of serum homocysteine and 8-iso-PGF(2a), two markers of atheromatosis (a deposition of lipids on the arterial wall), following football and hockey games. Interestingly, they found that these markers were significantly increased following a game in both sports in college-aged athletes. This is unchartered waters for me so my interpretation of these results can only be so analytical, but the authors suggest paying attention to folate, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12 balance during the 24-hours following the event. To me, this further highlights the importance of hockey players putting a little more effort into purposeful eating. It’s hard to truly assess whether any athlete is experiencing an activity-related deficiency if their starting point is sub-optimal.

This is broccoli. It’s what scientists call a “vegetable”

Let me know what you think of these studies. Post your comments below!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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Breakthrough Hockey Training Research

Last week I came across a recent research article that I think is a real breakthrough in the hockey training world. Before I get to that, I want to quickly touch on the importance (or lack thereof) of testing.

First, let’s distinguish between assessing (screening for ROM, structural, or movement impairments), and testing (assessing performance). I think assessing has a place in many training settings, especially with older athletes who have accumulated more soft-tissue trauma and have more firmly rooted, but still reversible movement impairments. I think assessing a 12-year old with no training background is unnecessary and that time could probably be better spent teaching the kid how to move well. Groove and improve!

With regards to testing, I think using performance on tests as a comparative tool amongst players is a ridiculous notion. I’ve always said that if Sidney Crosby had a 15″ vertical jump (which is brutal for a player at that level), he’d still be one of the best players in the NHL. The off-ice performance testing shouldn’t determine the selection of players.

Think these guys have the best bench press on their team?

Simply, players should be evaluated on their on-ice ability. That said, using testing as a way for tracking and documenting a player’s off-ice development isn’t a bad idea. In fact, in the case of more elite players (more specifically, those with an “older” training age), it will help document the effectiveness of the program. In the case of players with a younger training (because any form of training will work for these players), showing objective progress will help them buy in to the importance of training, which is also worthwhile.

The big caveat with testing is that there has never been any real evidence that higher levels of off-ice athleticism lead to improved on-ice performance. In other words, we know that someone fast off the ice is likely to be fast on the ice (if they learn to skate well), but will that mean that they score more goals, have more assists, have a better +/- or are better than their peers at any other game-specific marker of performance? Intuitively I think we can all appreciate the importance of making improvements in athleticism (speed, strength, power, etc.). In fact, I make a living training hockey players to do just that. IMPROVEMENTS will lead to improved performance, but ABSOLUTES have never been linked to better performance.

“You can’t score goals in the weight room.”

That’s a running joke with me and a few of the players at Endeavor Sports Performance. While there is some truth to that, a new research article demonstrates, for the first time, that there is a connection between off-ice and on-ice performance.

Peyer et al. (2011) measured the Michigan State University Men’s Hockey Team’s (NCAA D1):

Age
Height
Body Mass
Body Fat %
Fat Free Mass
VO2 Max
Maximal Lactate Level
Max Heart Rate
Repeat Sprint Test Ability
Max Push-Ups
Max Chin-Ups
Max Leg Press Reps with 400lbs
Max Bench Press Reps with 155lbs
On-Ice Dot-to-Dot Sprint Time (Offensive face-off dot to far same side, but opposing end face-off dot)
On-Ice 1-Lap Sprint Time
On-Ice Lightening Drill Time (Start at blueline->redline->back to blueline->far blue line->back to redline-> finish at far blue line)
Plus/Minus throughout Season

Plus/Minus was used as the primary indicator of hockey performance because of it’s ability to effectively incorporate both offensive and defensive efforts. An argument can be made that a similar analysis should be performed with other performance measures, but we’ll leave that for future research. All things considered, plus/minus is the best single choice available.

Quick Editors Note: This study was conducted on MSU’s hockey team the year they won the National Championship. This may or may not mean anything to you, but I think it’s important to point out that this wasn’t performed on a team that got walked on through the year. This was an incredible group of players.

The Results

Notable findings included:

There were no significant differences in any of the measures between forwards and defensemen except for VO2Max, with the forwards having higher values.
Plus/Minus was ONLY significantly correlated with four of the other tests: Repeat Sprint Ability (12 x 110-m sprint every 45 s, off-ice), Chin-Ups, Leg Press, and Bench Press.
Interestingly, when forwards were dissected out and reanalyzed, only Chin-Up performance was significantly correlated with Plus/Minus (r=0.728, p=0.007)
When defensemen were segregated, body mass (r=0.651, p=0.041), fat free mass (r=0.682, p=0.030), and bench press (r=0.720, p=0.029) were all significantly correlated with Plus/Minus.
When the values significantly correlated with Plus/Minus were further analyzed using a step-wise regression technique, chin-up and repeat sprint performance were the best predictors of Plus/Minus (explaining 49% of the variance)

Interpreting the Findings

It’s not surprising to see that forwards had higher VO2Max values than defensemen. This is likely a combination of both an adaptation to the position and a natural selection precluding the athletes to start. In other words, players that have difficulty keeping up with the pace of forward play may be moved back to play defense at young ages and just stay there. This is NOT evidence that forwards need to do more aerobic training. Quite the contrary. The evidence is clear in that anaerobic interval training increases V02Max equally as well as aerobic training, and with hockey players interval training is much more sport-relevant. This is also reflected in the correlation between repeat sprint performance and plus/minus. Hockey players need to be fast, consistently.

While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the tests chosen, the authors explained that the tests were included as part of the team’s yearly testing and many are included in NHL testing procedures. This doesn’t make it right, but it allows me to understand why they chose the tests they did. That said, it was interesting to see that strength (lower body and upper body) and repeat-sprint ability were the two qualities most predictive of plus-minus. This should come as no surprise to most of you, but it certainly has some important implications. The authors summed up a major conclusion brilliantly:

“Aerobic fitness and body composition do not appear to be significant predictors of player performance as measured by the +/- system or coach evaluation. To maximize the efficiency of preseason testing, coaches may rely on strength (chin-ups, leg press, and bench press) and repeat sprint tests while decreasing the number of aerobic capacity and body composition analyses to minimize player burden…”

Hopefully this will provide further evidence for some of the coaches that have hesitated to take out their continuous run and VO2 tests that there are better ways of assessing a player’s conditioning.

One of the other interesting findings is that the coaches of this team independently ranked the players in order of ability. The authors took the top 6 (5F, 1D) and bottom 6 (3F, 3D) and found that the only variable that differed significantly between them was plus/minus. That is not surprising. You’d assume your best players have a better plus/minus than your worst. However, the authors noted that the top 6 players exhibited a trend toward being younger, heavier, faster in the repeat-sprint test, and stronger in their lower body. While you can’t draw massive conclusions from trends taken from a breakdown of a single team, I think this alludes to the importance of developing lower body mass and strength. This seems like a relatively intuitive concept, but the reality is that most high school players default to the “my legs are big enough” excuse for not lifting legs and focus primarily on their mirror muscles.

The big take home from this is that a hockey player’s training program CANNOT neglect strength work, and that interval-based work is more appropriate for conditioning purposes. It appears that strength and repeat-speed (e.g. hockey conditioning) are most predictive of on-ice success. That…and a clean sheet of ice:

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

Reference:

Peyer, K., Pivarnik, J., Eisenmann, J., & Vorkapich, M. (2011). Physiological Characteristics of National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Ice Hockey Players and Their Relation to Game Performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(5), 1183-1192.

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This Week at Hockey Strength and Conditioning

I’m wrapping up another busy week at Endeavor and it looks like things are only going to get busier in the next few weeks. This week I started running some hip evaluations on all of our older players and “red flagged” younger players. I’ll talk about this in more detail in the future, as I think it’s an important screening tool in preventing unnecessary, but common hockey injuries like adductor and hip flexor strains.

Luckily, I’ve been able to make some time at nights to catch some of the playoffs. Great hockey so far.

This week at Hockey Strength and Conditioning Jaime Rodriguez wrote a terrific article breaking down the importance of the Olympic lifts and how to teach them. Jaime was with Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning for a while, but now is the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the AHL’s Worcester Sharks. He’s got a ton of coaching experience, so it’s good to hear how he uses/teaches Olympic lifts, which are tough for some athletes to grasp. Olympic lift variations are staples in our off-season hockey training programs so it’s a very time-relevant post.

Check out the article here >> The Hang Clean Breakdown and Other Olympic Lifts from Jaime Rodriguez

I also added the 2nd phase of our 4-Day/Week Early Off-Season Training Program at Endeavor Sports Performance. The program serves to continue making progress in reversing the deleterious adaptations of a long season, but has a greater emphasis on improving muscle strength and hypertrophy than the previous phase. Check it out at the link below.

Click here to see the program >> Early Off-Season Training Program (4x/week)

As always, there are a couple good discussions on the forum that you’ll want to check out too!

That’s all for today! If you aren’t a member yet, shell out the $1 to test drive Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. If it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

Exercise Adaptations for Hockey Players

A few years back I heard Mike Boyle describe the primary goals of a strength and conditioning program as:

Prevent injuries to the athletes during the training process
Minimize injury risk during sports practice and competition
Improve performance

This list is presented in order of importance and represents a philosophy that I’ve completely adopted at Endeavor Sports Performance. While a quality training program will almost completely negate training-related injuries and can drastically reduce sport-related injuries, sometimes injuries still happen. Sometimes players take contact while in an awkward position, which can cause injuries like MCL/ACL tears and shoulder separations. While beefing up the musculature in this area can help optimize joint integrity, the truth is that if enough force is applied at the right angle, an injury will still result. That said, injuries don’t need to shut down your training and development. Monday’s post talked about what hockey players can do to keep making progress despite having an injury. If you missed it, you can check it out here: Training Around an Injury.

Today I want to focus on the first point from Boyle’s list, or more specifically, two recent changes we’ve made at Endeavor to keep in line with this philosophy. Naturally, getting hurt while training is a worst case scenario. This is especially true at higher levels of competition (Major Junior, NCAA D1, Pro) where players have career changing exposure opportunities and/or money at stake. At these levels, it’s extremely important to keep the risk:reward ratio of various training strategies in mind. Is it worth the associated spinal compression and overall physiological stress to get an NHL player’s front squat from 325lbs to 335lbs? Will that make him a better player on the ice? What if he tweaks something in the process? What if something he does during training causes him to miss a week of games (~2 games). If this player makes $2.4 million/year (average NHL salary), two missed games is over $58,500 in lost revenue. While I don’t want to get into the argument about whether professional athlete’s salaries are appropriate, I think it’s important to understand whats at stake for these players.

Severe injuries (herniated discs, ACL tears, separated shoulders, etc.) are worst case scenarios, but they’re also easy to spot. Less obvious, but also undesirable, are minor aches, pains, tweaks, etc. that further tissue stress accumulation in undesirable patterns. If athletes feel something weird while they’re doing an exercise, they’re likely in the wrong place and some accommodation needs to be made. In this regard, we’ve had several players over the last two months tell us that:

Doing back leg raised split squats feels uncomfortable on their ankle (in both possible foot positions)
Doing band-resisted push-ups hurts their wrists

If some cases, discomfort is indicative of a lack of ROM at the relevant joint and that needs to be addressed. However, in these cases it’s more likely the discomfort was due to

Height variations of the players and relatively constant bench heights
Excessive wrist extension stress imparted by the bands

In other words, the exercise is the problem, not the player. To address this, we made a couple simple changes to make the exercise more comfortable for our players.

Back Leg Raised Split Squats with Roller

The roller is curved, which allows for better contact with the lower leg/foot. By holding it down with minibands, we don’t need another coach/player to hold it, and it allows for some slight forward/backward movement, which accommodates the athletes weight shift during the exercise.

Band-Resisted Push-Ups with Dumbbells

By wrapping the bands around the dumbbells, the stress on the wrist is removed completely, but the resistance to the torso is maintained. One consideration with this variation is that the dumbbells are raised off the ground, so the potential range of motion for the player will increase. This may or may not be desirable, but is important to keep in mind as some coaching cues may change.

The good thing about these adjustments is that they’ve removed discomfort as a limiting factor for progress (and a thought in our players’ minds). Every coach is going to have a different training approach:

But I think ultimately we all need to share a common philosophy in that our goal is always to put our players/athletes in the best position to succeed. This philosophy transcends all aspects of athletic development, from education to program design to exercise modifications to coaching strategies.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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