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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Becoming a Successful Leader

My friend Mike Potenza was kind enough to invite me out to San Jose last week to help out with the San Jose Sharks prospect camp. Throughout the week, I had the opportunity to interact with the entire coaching/scouting staff, the athletic training staff, a few of the Sharks players (that were around for the Summer), ~45 domestic and international elite level prospects, Mike and his supporting interns/volunteers, and John Pallof (one of the smartest people in human performance that I’ve ever met). Needless to say, it was an eye opening experience.

More than anything else, there was ONE common theme for this camp:

To build a successful organization (or team), EVERYONE has to be a leader.

The Sharks went as far as to bring their guys to a US Air Force base to do team building exercises with Sargeant Mike Malloy. This incredibly important aspect of athletic development is largely overlooked in most sport and training settings.

In youth athletics, being a leader is typically equated with being a star. It’s unfortunate that this is the message our athletes get, as it certainly discourages uniform team-wide leadership.

Many people recognize leadership as meaning:

-Holding yourself accountable for your actions
-Putting your best effort forward, even when no one is watching!
-Never giving up until the job is done (e.g. never acquiescing to the mental torture fatigue instills)

Being a leader also means being a good teammate, which EVERYONE can do.

If one of your teammates is struggling, it’s YOUR job to pick them up. In other words, it’s easy to criticize/complain about a teammate being too slow, not passing to you, taking a bad shot, etc. It’s only moderately more difficult to pull that teammate aside and talk to them in a civil manner. I say moderately more difficult because it actually takes less energy and you can squash problems immediately instead of letting them fester. On the contrary, criticizing tends to spawn infectious negativity that creates a culture of unresolved condemnation. Simply, we need to spend less time pushing each other away, and more time pulling each other along.

It’s unlikely that every player on a team will like every other player’s personality. We’re all different. However, often times building a successful organization comes down to the players’ ability to look past “dislike”, and to consistently empower struggling teammates in pursuit of a strengthened common purpose or goal.

The message sent to the Sharks’ prospects was to always hold a hand out for your teammates. Let them know you’re always there to help, to genuinely look out for each other. Think about how this changes the “pressure” put on individual players when they know they are truly part of a unit, a team.

This message starts from the top down. As presidents, coaches, and trainers, we need to let our players know that we’re in it for the same reason they are. No egos. No malice. No “politics”. Just development.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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