Tag: hockey training program

5-Day Body Weight Muscle Building Challenge

Last week I assessed one of the junior players I’ve trained for the last 4 years at Endeavor. He came in to get his assessment taken care of, but then pointed out that he basically had a week before 3-days of tryouts and will be leaving immediately after to go to Mexico for a week, for what I can only assume will be a week of structured training and protein shakes.

Not a bad way to kick off the off-season!

The tryout doesn’t mean much for this player as he was on the team last year and isn’t at risk for not making the team, so going in a little (a lot) sore isn’t an issue. With that in mind, and in recognition of the reality that he’ll be spending the following week relaxing, I put together a simple body weight workout for him to do at home everyday to jumpstart the muscle building process, and develop a little work capacity. I don’t typically do things like this because we have much more equipment and opportunity for more specific training methods at our facility, but I wanted to share this with you because I think it’s a fun way to challenge yourself at home without much equipment, which suits the needs of most youth players well. In order to do it as it stands, you should be able to do 8-12 chin-ups in a row with perfect form and 15-20 push-ups. If you can’t, cut the chin-up and push-up numbers in half and start there.

The Muscle Building Challenge

Split Squat Hold: 4 x Failure w/ 1:1 Work:Rest Ratio Between Legs and Sets (Document your times)
Squat 5 x 50 w/ 1:1 Work:Rest Ratio (Document times)
50 Chin-Up Challenge (As Fast as possible; document your time)
100 Push-Up Challenge (As Fast as possible; document your time)

The goal is to perform this circuit everyday for 5 days. If you’re looking for a fun way to jumpstart your off-season training and haven’t been able to get into a training facility yet, give this a shot, and share your times with us either below or at the Ultimate Hockey Training Facebook Page!

If you’re looking for more information on hockey-specific training programs, be sure to check out Ultimate Hockey Training, which covers year-round training principles for players at all ages!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Fundamental Lower Body Movement Patterns

In this week’s “Thursday Throwback”, I wanted to share another article from 2009 that highlights the progressive differences in fundamental lower body movement patterns and how force production from the involved musculature shifts as body angles change. This idea has been described using different terminology over the last several years, including Mike Boyle’s classification as exercises being more “knee-dominant” or “hip-dominant” or what I describe in Ultimate Hockey Training, simply, as lower body pushing or pulling patterns. Terminology aside, it’s important to recognize how subtle changes in body angle changed the emphasized musculature so that you can choose exercises based on the specific result you want. If you have any comments/questions, please post them below. Enjoy!

Fundamental Lower Body Movement Patterns

This Summer I started working with a ton of new athletes at Endeavor Sports Performance. These athletes had been training, but not with me.

Part of building a solid training base is learning the three fundamental lower body movement patterns:

Stiff-Legged Deadlift
The stiff-legged deadlift (SLDL) is largely a hip-dominant movement. You’ll maintain a slight knee bend, but the entire movement involves tilting the pelvis forward, then using your glutes and hamstrings to pull yourself back upright. The emphasis is almost entirely on the glutes and hamstrings.

Deadlift
The deadlift pattern is similar to the stiff-legged version in that it involves tilting the pelvis forward as far as possible, but is different from the SLDL in that it involves a deeper bend of the knees. A bend of the knees means more force production from the quadriceps.

Squat
You’re probably picking up on the trend here. The squat pattern uses slightly less forward tilting of the hips and slightly more knee bend, which involves more force production from the quads relative to the SLDL and deadlift patterns.

These differences in loading emphasis are pretty clearly illustrated by noting the maximal forward hip/torso angle in the “down” position of these exercises. During the SLDL, the torso is almost parallel to the ground. During the deadlift, the torso is slightly above parallel. During the squat, the torso is slightly more vertical than the deadlift. And during a front squat pattern, the torso is almost completely vertical.

It generally takes less than a month for the majority of my athletes to master these movements. Then it’s time to “load the hell out of them” and get them strong!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Powerful Nutrition Strategy

Nutrition can have a powerful effect on an athlete’s performance. Not only does it strongly influence body composition, but food can both facilitate and combat inflammation, strengthen or weaken immune systems, and enhance or impair sleep (as a few examples).

Today’s “Thursday Throwback” features a very simple, but incredibly powerful nutrition strategy from my friend Brian St. Pierre. While this was originally posted in 2009, I still believe this is the first change you NEED to make!

Last summer I was fortunate to work alongside Brian St. Pierre. He is a brilliant nutritionist that continues to get phenomenal results with his clients. Brian really knows his stuff when it comes to altering individual diets to help people shed fat, build muscle, recover faster from workouts, and improve their overall health.

In today’s post, Brian shares with us a nutrition tip that will have a large impact on your health and performance.

Brian’s Nutrition Tip:

“Eat Real Food!”

“It may seem trivial or vague, but if you sat back and really took stock of the food in your home, you would probably be shocked to realize just how much of it qualifies as a food product, not actual food. Increasing the amount of real food, defined below, and decreasing the amount of food products you consume is the easiest thing you can do to improve your nutrition and health. It doesn’t require counting calories, worrying about nutrient timing, calculating macronutrient percentages, or any of that, and it will have a far greater impact on your health.”

Real Food Conditions:

If you couldn’t hunt, fish, pluck, grow, or ferment/culture the food, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
If it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it probably isn’t food today.
If it comes in a box or a plastic wrapper, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.
If it contains lots of industrial vegetable oil (canola, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, sunflower, etc) and/or added sugar/high fructose corn syrup, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.

If your response to this is “I knew that already”, you should probably ask yourself “Am I doing this?” Most people know what they should be doing; few are actually doing it. If you know anyone else that you feel would benefit from this information, please pass it on to them.

Brian wrote what I still firmly believe is the best nutrition resource for hockey players, parents, and coaches available today. Not only does it cover the “why” of specific nutrition and supplementation strategies, it covers the “how”, which makes every strategy incredibly easy to implement. Check it out here: Ultimate Hockey Nutrition.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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3 Strategies to Maximize Recovery

Today’s “Throwback Thursday” post covers three powerful strategies to maximize recovery. Interestingly, I wrote another post on this exact topic recently that almost identically mirrors my thought process from 2009. In other words, over 4 years after this post was written, what I view as three of the most powerful recovery strategies has not changed at all! You can check out the more recent post here: 3 Powerful Recovery Strategies for Athletes

You may be surprised by how simple these are. It’s not a matter of cracking some magic code; it’s a matter of taking care of the things you already know are important.

1) Drink PLENTY of water. Maintaining proper hydration has positive implications on both mental and physical performance.Bluntly, it means you’ll be smarter and feel better if you drink enough water. Plenty is not 6-8 cups a day. That’s BARELY adequate for completely sedentary people on low caloric diets; you should be drinking AT LEAST double that.If you’re like most people, you’re not even close.It’s never too late to start. Increase your water intake significantly.You’ll likely be making many more trips to the bathroom than you’re used to, but that will cut back within a couple weeks when your body gets used to being fueled properly.

2) Sleep! Everyone’s sleep needs are different, but in general, most people should be getting 7-9 hours of QUALITY sleep.As in wake up in a pool of drool sleep.Wake up with no feeling in your arm because you didn’t move all night sleep.DEEP, QUALITY sleep.If you get 7 and you consistently wake up feeling tired, you need more sleep to recover from the stresses you’re experiencing (through training or other aspects of your life). Remember that this should be consistent from night to night.Your body doesn’t adjust well to 5 days of a lack of rest during the week, and then two days of excessive sleep on the weekend.Make it a priority to get a good night’s sleep every night.

3) Proper Nutrition. This comes in two parts: General Nutrition, and training-specific nutrition.With regards to general nutrition, it’s important that you eat adequate calories from QUALITY sources.This includes as many servings of vegetables as you can tolerate throughout the day, fats from olive oil, nuts, and cold-water fish (e.g. salmon), and carbohydrates from whole grain/high fiber sources.As a reminder, your carbohydrate intake should be determined by your activity level.The more medium-high intensity activity you do, the more carbohydrates you need.Training-specific nutrition is pretty straight forward.Consuming a liquid source of simple carbohydrates and rapidly digesting protein (e.g. whey protein) immediately after your training helps replenish glycogen (read: carbohydrate) stores within the body and stimulate protein synthesis (read: rebuilding).It shouldn’t be hard to see why this would be advantageous.There’s now research to support consuming these “shakes” immediately before and/or during your training, so the nutrients are readily available as your body begins to break down.Think of it as “on the fly” recovery.Personally, I usually make a half shake and sip it while I train, then make another half shake and drink it immediately after. For the complete nutrition guide, check out John Berardi’s Precision Nutrition program.

Following these three simple (well, at least they’re simple conceptually…maybe not so simple to implement) strategies will help you maximize your rate of recovery, allowing you to get the most out of your training.

Keep training SMART!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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“…a must-have for coaches and strength professionals at all levels of hockey.”

The Truth About Deep Squatting!

This “Thursday Throwback” features an article I wrote over 4 years ago that overviews what may prevent someone from squatting deeply, and an assessment you can use to check your squat depth. Over the last several years, I’ve read a ton of research on hip anatomy and progressive structural changes. In the end, it seems that structural limitations are becoming more of the norm than the exception and it is incredibly important that coaches AND athletes/lifters recognize that what was previously considered a full squat may not apply to everyone/you. Symptoms of squatting past your range can manifest in many ways, but two of the more common ones are low back pain and anterior hip pain. I’ve also seen pretty significant discomfort in the piriformis, adductor complex, and TFL as a result of this pattern.

Check out the post below, as well as the article I link to, and please feel free to post any comments or questions you have below. This is an important topic that affects just about everyone that trains (or moves)!

The Truth About Deep Squatting

About a month ago, my article “Battling Anatomy: Implications for Effective Squatting“, was published at SBCoachesCollege.com, a website I couldn’t say enough good things about.

The other day I received an excellent question from Jason Price, Founder and CEO of Athletes Equation.

“Hello Kevin,
I read you article on SB Coaches College today and really found it informative and enjoyed it very much. I did have a few questions after reading that I was hoping you could provide me with some further information or clarification. What I have noticed with many of the youth athletes that I am training is that their hip mobility is terrible. I too have utilized the “touch and go” method to control how much depth they can attain until they have improved their mobility. I have found this to be a fantastic method for most athletes. But, I was thinking after reading your article about athletes which are dependent of being in the deep squat position in their sport. I train several weightlifters and one of them still suffers from a very similar condition as the individual in your videos. I am wondering what suggestions you would have for me in coaching this individual. In the sport of weightlifting as I am sure you are aware you must get into the deep squat position to effectively clean and snatch significant weight. My athlete does not have the significant discrepancy one side to the other. But, he does have the tuck under at the bottom of the deep squat position. So how can I effectively train him to receive the barbell deep in the squat with this technical flaw without placing him in this potentially hazardous position? Should he not squat deep? Do you know of any methods outside of orthopedic evaluation for anatomical abnormalities?

Again, fantastic article i really enjoyed it and felt you gave many of the readers an alternative viewpoint as to why some of these technical breakdowns happen. I appreciate your time and any response.”

My immediate thought is to first consider that everyone is not built for deep squatting. Despite the increasing usage of pictures of babies in a deep squat position as evidence for this ability, the hip joint and associated ligaments change as a natural/circumstantial part of development, that may result in a range of motion (ROM) limitation in some people. Having said that, it’s always better to assess than guess.

With regards to the lifter in the article video, the side-to-side discrepancy simply indicates that only one of his hips, the right one, lacks full ROM. In his case, I was able to recommend he see a hip specialist because he had multiple signs of CAM impingement. Notably, he lacked internal rotation ROM on the right side compared to the left and flexion/adduction on the right side was extremely painful.

Getting more to your question about the bilateral hip tuck, the first thing you could try is to coach him to push his knees out while he’s going down and to keep his knees out while driving up. This opens up the hips to allow for maximal hip flexion while avoiding bony contact between the trochanters of the femur and the “spines” of the hip bone. Mark Rippetoe wrote a great article called “You Don’t Know Squat without an “Active Hip”” about this topic.

If that doesn’t clear things up, there is a pretty straight forward assessment you can use to see whether this is a soft tissue restriction or a joint anatomy restriction. A few months ago I had the pleasure of talking to Shirley Sahrmann about this issue. She recommended using quadruped rocking to assess their ROM.

Quadruped rocking involves putting the lifter in a quadruped position, with their knees under their hips, top of their feet flat against the floor, and hands under their shoulders. The lifter should set up in a neutral lumbar spine position, then use their arms to push their hips back (pushing into hip flexion) so as to sit on their heels, while MAINTAINING the neutral lumbar position. Note the angle that the hips begin to tuck. Stop them there, have them return to the starting position and try again. Dr. Sahrmann basically said that 8-10 repetitions of this should improve their hip ROM. If it doesn’t, their hip joint anatomy doesn’t allow for it and never will. Any attempt to push beyond this point will lead to lumbar flexion, and invariably some sort of back pain.

I’ve found this assessment to be incredibly useful. In less than 30 seconds I’m able to see what kind of hip flexion ROM someone has. If their hips start to tuck at 90 degrees every time, and it doesn’t improve with more repetitions, I know that’s the extent of their ROM and stop them at that point during all exercises (squats, lunges, etc.). Depending on the severity of the restriction, this may also mean that they can’t perform a deadlift off the floor, in which case I’d move them to a rack pull from a height slightly above their end range.

Ask your athlete where they feel the restriction while quadruped rocking. If they feel like they’re tight on the back side, some mobility work may clear that up, but it’s also likely that quadruped rocking will clear that up. If they feel restricted in the front or any type of grinding in or around their “groin” area, it’s likely a hip joint limitation. I don’t recommend forcing lifters through positions their hip joints don’t allow for. That is, unless they’re looking for low back pain and a hip labral tear. Hope this helps.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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“…a must-have for coaches and strength professionals at all levels of hockey.”