Off-Season Hockey Training

If you missed, Monday’s post, check it out before reading this one.

The idea that being on the ice year-round could actually impair your development shocks a lot of people. For whatever reason, it’s been DRILLED into our minds that we need to skate, hard, year-round. This mentality has really exploded over the last 10-15 years. It’s no coincidence that we hip flexor and adductor (“groin”) strains, and sports hernias are at an all-time high now at the more elite levels of hockey.

Let me clear things up about what hockey players should be doing in their off-season to maximize their development.

Should Hockey Players Skate in the Off-Season?

Many hockey players make the fatal mistake of spending the entire off-season on the ice. Most players are on the ice for 4+ hours per week during the increasingly long season. It is ABSOLUTELY crucial that they start their off-season by taking a break and doing some things to reverse the physical adaptations that result from so much skating (e.g. foam rolling and stretching the glutes and hip flexors). After a month or so of NO ice time, players can skate within this context:

1) Power Skating Instruction: Avoid the coaches that just run you through drills and watch. Find a coach that will actually teach you technique and actively help you improve your mechanics. There should also be a focus on edge control, not just overspeed work.

2) Skill Instruction: While I don’t think it’s completely necessary to be on the ice to do this, many players can make huge improvements in their hands in an off-season by spending some time practicing handling a puck on all sides of their body and with specific footwork/bursts of speed (which is why skating instruction is so crucial!).

3) Specific Summer Leagues: Many players feel stale if they don’t play some sort of game for 6 months. If you can find a decent league (competition equal to or better than what you’re used to) that plays a 6-10 game schedule toward the end of the Summer, then hop right in. Playing in a showcase tournament or two throughout the Summer isn’t going to kill you, but you should not be playing tournaments ALL off-season!

The mistake players (and parents) make is that they finish their season, then immediately register for spring and summer league and as many clinics as they can. It’s too much. Think QUALITY here, not quantity.

The adverse effects of this are becoming increasingly clear: As the year-round hockey craze infects younger players, we see high level hockey injuries spreading to all age levels. There is NO reason why peewees and bantams should have chronic groin and hip flexor pain! I’m not preaching here. I made all the mistakes myself, and I have the double hernia surgery and inevitable hip arthritis to prove it!

Off-Season Training

Following a structured, well-designed training program during the off-season can completely transform a player’s career, especially at the youth levels. There is a critical time period during development when the body is highly “malleable”. If you create the right training stimulus, your body is primed for a long career of explosive movement. Unfortunately, creating the wrong training stimulus will prime your body to stay slow and weak.

A good off-season hockey training program serves three major purposes:

1) Improve performance
2) Decrease injury risk
3) Improve stress handling capacity

Players should leave the Summer faster, stronger, and better conditioned than they’ve ever been in the past and eager to get on the ice. THAT is how every player should enter the season!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. Last week I was fortunate to speak with Jim Snider, the Wisconsin Hockey Strength and Conditioning Coach, for a few minutes. To my surprise, he mentioned he’s been using a lot of the hip mobility drills in my Off-Ice Performance Training Course! He mentioned, and I agree, that hockey players should use those specific exercises to help maintain the range of motion around their hips they need to be successful on the ice and to decrease their injury risk. If you haven’t yet, check it out now!

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Off-Season Hockey Leads You to Surgery?

This was a post from Endeavor’s website that got such a great response that I wanted to share it with you.

As you know, I’ve recently teamed up with Michael Boyle (Boston University), Sean Skahan (Anaheim Ducks) and Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks) to launch an incredible hockey training website: HockeyStrengthandConditioning.com.

On the site, U of Minnesota Strength Coach Cal Dietz shared an interesting article with us. The article outlined research with groundbreaking results. If you value your hockey career, you’ll read carefully!

This article outlined a study that took MRI’s of the hips of 39 NHL and NCAA Division I hockey players. Of the 39 players, twenty-one (54%) had labral tears, twelve (31%) had muscle strains, and 2 (5%) had tendinosis (degeneration of the tendon) of the hips. Overall, 70% of the players had irregular findings on their MRIs. Interestingly, the majority of these players were considered “healthy” at the time of the study, meaning they were okay to play.

As shocking as these results may appear, I wasn’t at all surprised. Similar results have been found in the shoulders of baseball players, and hockey players completely abuse their hips. Most players spend no time doing the stretches they need to (because they’re either too lazy or don’t know which ones they should do), have poor motor control of muscles around the hips (which tears up the joint and labrum!), and spend WAY too much time on the ice.

A couple weeks ago, I was on the phone with Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks); he mentioned that in over 90% of cases, the players he sees that have sports hernias do little to nothing in terms of training. Everyone at the collegiate and professional strength and conditioning levels understand that good training can improve a player’s performance, lengthen their career, and keep them out of the surgeon’s office. Hopefully youth players and parents will get the message.

To your continued health and success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. If you’re looking for a step-by-step training system to use this off-season, check out my Off-Ice Performance Training course. I continue to get incredible feedback about the exercises and progressions in the course, from NCAA D1 Strength and Conditioning Coaches down through parents of youth players (e.g. peewees). Download your copy today!

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Preventing Ankle Sprains Part 2

On Wednesday, we had a great post from David Lasnier. If you missed it, you should definitely check it out. Link below:

3 Tips to Prevent Ankle Sprains

As a refresher, David’s three tips were:

1) Keep your hips inside of your outside foot

The first tip David made about keeping your hips inside of your outside foot when you transition is a huge point that all athletes should learn. Think of it as keep your center of gravity within your base of support. EVERY rolled ankle I’ve seen during a cutting maneuver is because of a failure to control hip position. For the hockey crowd, this is also the #1 reason people fall over the edge of a slideboard. It’s important that athletes are taught to load their hips during transitional movements. Not only will this decrease their risk of ankle sprains, it will also make them more efficient and explosive.

2) Strengthen your gluteus medius

As David noted, having sufficient strength in your hip abductors (muscles on the outside of your butt) will help you control your hips during ALL movements (linear, lateral, and transitional). Having sufficient strength in these muscles also helps minimize your risk to several knee injuries. If this muscle group isn’t strong enough and if the strength isn’t trained in proper movement patterns, your knees will cave in during landings and transitional movements. If nothing else, it will be excessive stress on various structures throughout your knee (e.g. lateral meniscus). Maintaining sufficient hip abductor strength is essential for all athletes.

3) Get rid of Nike Shox and other high-heeled shoes

My friend Eric Cressey once joked that everytime someone bought Nike Shox, a baby seal was clubbed. Of course, that’s ridiculous. We now know that TWO baby seals are clubbed for each Nike Shox purchase. Three reasons why:

1) They put you into a significant amount of ankle plantarflexion. Over time, you could LOSE dorsiflexion range of motion, which has significance for a ton of athletic movement patterns, including sprinting, lunging, and squatting.

2) Related to David’s point, they make your foot-to-ground contact less stable and therefore increase the risk of you rolling an ankle. Related to my above point, the ankle joint is significantly less stable in plantarflexion than dorsiflexion. This simply gives your ankle an easier path to roll when cutting.

3) If I told you to squat as much weight as you could and gave you the choice to do it while standing on an Olympic lifting platform or on couch cushions, what would you choose? Humor me. You’d choose the olympic platform (I hope). The couch cusions would make your surface less stable and would dampen the force you produce downward. Both of these things result in a decreased ability to express force production (e.g. make you weaker). David and I like Nike Frees. If you’re doing a lot of running, it may be worth picking up a pair of shoes with slightly more cushioning, but NOT a huge heel lift!

To your continued health and success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. My very good friend and old teammate Pete Gross is running in the Boston Marathon this year. As you may know, most competitors need to raise some cash in order to run. Pete was an outstanding hockey player and one of the best captains I’ve ever played for. If you’re feeling giving and can spare a few bucks to help out a member of our hockey world, I’d consider it a personal favor if you donated to Pete’s cause here: www.firstgiving.com/petergross. Thanks!

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3 Tips to Prevent Ankle Sprains

Since I was away this weekend, I asked David Lasnier to put together another post for us. He has three great tips for you on how to prevent ankle sprains while performing movements that involve cuts or sharp direction changes. This is really one of those areas where a lot of people get hurt WHILE training, which is generally unacceptable. The first point in particular is a simple coaching cue that we use A LOT at Endeavor that athletes understand and can almost instantly reduce their risk of ankle sprains.

3 Tips to Prevent Ankle Sprains by David Lasnier

Ankle sprains are unfortunately a very frequent injury in a number of sports. There might be a variety of reasons why they happen. I am not here to tell you I can prevent every ankle sprain from happening or that I can explain the origin of each and every one of these injuries. However I can give you 3 tips that you can start applying today to lower the risk of that injury happening to you.

1) Keep your hips inside of your outside foot. When making a cut on the field or on the court, you are generally loading your outside leg before pushing off that same leg in a different direction. Doing so, you want to make sure that your bodyweight doesn’t travel outside your support leg. That means you want to stay low and you want your outside hip to stay inside of your outside ankle. The picture below shows how you want to keep your base of support (your hips) inside your ankle.

Hockey Training-Agility Cut Good

When your hips do travel over your ankle, it shifts your weight to the outside of your foot and increases the chance of your ankle going into inversion (rolling your ankle). The majority of ankle sprains happen with inversion at the ankle.

Hockey Training-Agility Cut Bad

2) Strengthen your gluteus medius. Your gluteus medius is one of the most important hip abductor muscles and in most people it is fairly weak. You may think: what the hell does my gluteus medius have to do with changes of direction in sports? When you plant your foot in the ground to make a cut, the momentum continues to make your body travel in the same direction you were going. So, at some point you need to decelerate your bodyweight first, in order to transition that speed and momentum in a different direction. The gluteus medius, along with the other abductors at the hips, are going to be responsible for decelerating your body and prevent your hips and upper body from travelling past your ankles. If your gluteus medius is not strong enough to prevent that deceleration, your hips have more of a chance of going past your ankle and therefore, your ankle going into inversion. One of the best exercises to strengthen your gluteus medius is the lateral mini-band walk, which we use quite a lot at Endeavor.

Hockey Training-Lateral MiniBand Walk

3) Get rid of those Nike Shox (or any other high heel sneakers you’re wearing). With these kinds of sneakers, your heels are elevated over an inch off the ground. What happens when you plant your foot in the ground for a cut and the momentum of your body continues to travel in the same direction when your heel is elevated more than an inch in a sneaker? The momentum will make your foot move in your sneaker and off that high sole, which is going to take your ankle into inversion and increase the risk of sprain. Your best bets include: Nike Frees, Vibram 5 fingers or any cross-trainer shoes with a thin sole.

Hopefully if you’re not already applying these tips, you will start today. These 3 simple tips will greatly decrease your risk of ankle sprain.

David Lasnier

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Developing Proper Breathing Patterns

A couple months ago I came across Carson Boddicker’s site and was blown away. He’s a really bright coach and has a lot of unique ideas about training athletes. I asked him to write something for you on the importance of developing proper breathing patterns, which is probably the most overlooked aspects of sports performance training and can have a huge impact on your health and performance.

Enter Carson:

Breathing is a critical piece of the movement equation and is one that has been almost ignored until recently. Many people simply breathe, and call it “good” if they do not suffocate, unfortunately this is far too simplistic as there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to breathe.

Unfortunately, we know that the majority of people fall toward the “wrong” way and incorrect breathing patterns lead to a gamut of movement dysfunctions. Improper breathing can lead to dysfunction as high as the TMJ (though some osteopathic physicians see proper breathing as having a mobilizing effect on the skull) and as low as the hips. In between, breathing plays a powerful role in cervical posture, carpal function, shoulder health, thoracic spine mobility, and lumbo-pelvic-hip stability via intra-abdominal pressure mechanisms. Better control at the pelvis, leads to more favorable mechanics of the joints above and below, making breathing a powerful ally in preventing lower extremity injury common in hockey players like sports hernia and athletic pubalgia. Restoration of proper breathing patterns can reduce tone in the majority of cervical muscles, aid in the reduction of forward head posture, and reduce tone of the hip flexors.

The biochemical effects of hyperventilation have powerful effects on fascial constriction and there are primary and/or accessory muscles in each and every fascial line presented by Thomas Myers. As we understand from the concept of tensegrity, it then stands to reason that breathing limitations alter all fascial lines, and ultimately lead to movement dysfunction. One could go as far as to say that due to the relationship between the obliques and intercostals of the lateral line, improper breathing can result in reduced function of the “anterior X” that controls and produces torque, and subsequently running, walking, and skating mechanics can be altered. An inability to check torques appropriately though the LPH complex is yet another risk factor for hockey related hip and groin dysfunction.

Proper breathing certainly provides great benefit to the athlete, is inimitable, and is of huge benefit to a vast array of movement dysfunction. Thus, there is little question that breathing must be a core competency. As the great neurologist Karel Lewit said, “If breathing is not normalized, no other movement pattern can be.”

So how does one go about normalizing breathing patterns as Dr. Lewit suggests?

First, before we go about correcting anything, we need to understand if something needs to be corrected at all.

Proper breathing involves the diaphragm contracting to compress the abdominal cavity, making more space for the lungs to expand. The best way to assess this is simply have the athlete in a seated position, palpate the lower ribs, the sides of the abdomen, and the iliac crest, and have him breath. Ideally, the athlete will expand his ribs into your hand with minimal elevation of the ribcage until late in the breathing cycle if at all. If he is unable to do so in seated, I suggest regression to supine positions (like in the first exercise below.

Once the player’s breathing proficiencies are identified, proper correction can commence.

I typically begin my athletes’ training at level where they first demonstrated poor patterns. If patterns look good in supine, but not prone, I will start them in prone. If they look fine in prone, but not seated, then training begins in seated positions, etc. Below are a few of my favorite breathing exercises.

Supine breathing is a great first step for many and can be progressed quickly. Ideally the bottom hand will rise vertically, and the top hand will demonstrate minimal movement.

Once the supine breathing is well patterned, I often progress to prone prayer position to work on facilitating posterior and lateral ribcage expansion. According to physical therapist Diane Lee, she finds posterio-lateral expansion to be most restricted in those with lumbo-pelvic-hip dysfunction like SIJ pain, groin strains, and sports hernia. It is one of the harder positions to master, so providing some feedback by springing on the posterior rib cage at the end of expiration and cuing the athlete to “breathe into my hands” often help solidify patterns.

While there are some exercises designed simply to focus upon breathing and breathing only, it is critical to be able to breathe effectively thorough an abdominal brace, so I challenge athletes in a number of positions and exercises that are traditionally seen as “rotational stability” and “anterior core” exercises. One of my current favorites is the breathing bench dog with hip flexion as it provides a great rotational stability demand, is lower level, and the contraction of the psoas develops a strong fixed point for diaphragmatic contraction.

Remember as with all we do as coaches, we should be constantly assessing and thinking about ways to help our athletes succeed. Understanding, coaching, and integrating breathing pattern work is no exception.

Best regards,
Carson Boddicker
www.BoddickerPerformance.com

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