What percentage of performance is mental? I was first posed this question while taking a class at the University of Delaware on the mental aspects of peak performance. Every one of my classmates responded somewhere between 50-90%. Since that time, I’ve asked dozens of people the same question, and the responses almost invariably fall within that same range.
Now, what percentage of your preparation is targeted toward improving mental performance? This is an interesting follow up question. Given the almost unanimous agreement that mental performance dictates at least half of an athletes overall performance, it’d be reasonable to assume that a proportionate amount of time should be dedicated to improving this quality. If you’re like the overwhelming majority of athletes, you likely don’t spend any (or exceptionally minimal) time focusing on mental performance.
Confidence, specifically, is a huge part of mental performance. It provides players with the gumption to make the best play, even if it’s not the safest. It gives players the upper hand when battling for pucks. Confidence is often referred to by hockey players as “swag”, and, not coincidentally, is one of the things that players, parents and coaches report observing the most noticeable improvements in after players have dedicated their off-season to training hard.
Improved confidence and mental toughness is frequently a haphazard byproduct of organized training programs. This is the case for two major reasons:
Athletes gain confidence from feeling like they’re doing more to pursue their goals or improve their performance than the athlete they’re battling against.
Athletes gain confidence by experiencing success in challenging situations.
Naturally, there are ways to augment the degree to which confidence is improved through training, one of which I’ll get to shortly. What gets overlooked in this discussion is that confidence is often relative to the environment. As a quick example, it’s easy for a player to express high levels of confidence in a battle against a passive or less confident opponent. It’s much more difficult against another player that is expressing a high level of “swag”. Said another way, there is a degree to which intimidation affects confidence. Put yourself in this scenario:
You’re completely gassed. It’s the middle of the third period in a championship game and your legs are failing you. They feel heavy, sluggish, and seem to start burning almost immediately. You’re focused, determined, and attempting to play aggressively, but your tank is on empty. You fight through the end of a shift, the whistle blows, and you lean your stick down on your thighs to support your weight and catch your breath. You take a few breaths and peer upward, only to see…
You see an opponent. Standing up tall. Proud. Seemingly un-phased by the intensity and duration of the game. Ready to go. You feel disheartened. How is this possible? How can he/she not be tired?
The reality is that fatigue has many roots, including those of mental origin. When was the last time you saw anyone look tired while celebrating a championship? Never. The losing team, though, portrays a different story. In the above example, the confident opponent could have felt exactly like the completely tanked player. Physically shot. Mentally shot. But they stood up tall, and when the other player looked up, they saw an opponent that appeared invincible. Interestingly, holding your body in a more “confident” position also has positive benefits to your own psychology, and can have an energizing effect. The old adage “fake it till you make it” seems appropriate here.
This scenario demonstrates an opportunity that every hockey player will experience in almost every game they play, and is the reason I find myself saying
Don’t let them see you tired!
to all of our athletes at Endeavor. It’s okay to be tired, but not defeated. Choose to present yourself with confidence. Stand up tall. Proud. Develop this habit on and off the ice. It will have a positive effect on your own performance, and will make you a more intimidating player to play against. It will create the illusion of invincibility.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!
This Week in Hockey Strength and Conditioning
What a week! This week we kicked off our off-season training for some of the Team Comcast youth hockey organization at our mini-facility in their rink in Pennsauken and we had several more players trickle back in to Endeavor to start preparing for next year. On top of that, yesterday I threw the gear on for the first time in too long and skated with David Lasnier a few of the junior players that we train. It felt good to get back out there!
It’s been a while since my last Hockey Strength and Conditioning Update, so hopefully you’ve been keeping up with everything. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve added an article series and several other articles pertaining to off-ice hockey training and hockey nutrition. If you missed them, check out them out at the links below:
In the future, I plan on writing more on hockey-specific skills and what structural or functional limitations may prevent a player (or goalie) from expressing/fulfilling their full potential. If you have any areas you’d like me to cover specifically, please let me know in the comments section below.
Great stuff all around from these guys. I was interested to see that Potenza programs his slideboard intervals by touches instead of time, and alters the board length to achieve a different training effect, two things that I haven’t done much of at Endeavor. It’s always good to get a fresh perspective on things.
Mike’s video is a great follow-up to an article on the benefits of stiffness that his assistant Eric wrote for the site a couple weeks ago. Sean provides a great t-spine mobility exercises, which is a restriction we see in the majority of our players.
Sean does a great job of explaining his rationale for training a largely overlooked muscle group. Although it’s been for different reasons, I’ve been asking similar questions as I’ve noticed that some of our players tend to lose big toe contact/pressure with certain movements. Quick Side Note: We have our players do a number of lifts without shoes on, and this is one of the reasons why. It allows us to get a better idea of how they load through their ankles and feet and how their ground-based compensations may be feeding other things we see higher up in the chain. Darryl and Carrie explain how and why they use a piece of equipment for “on-ice resistance training”. I’ve been aware of this piece for a while, but haven’t used it because of the setting I’m in. After watching the videos I’m extremely interested.
The podcast is quickly becoming one of my favorite features of the Hockey Strength and Conditioning community. If you haven’t been listening to these, definitely check them out!
That’s a wrap for today. As always, if you aren’t a member yet, I encourage you to try out Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. It’ll only cost $1, and if it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Hockey Nutrition: Grocery Shopping
A couple days ago, I provided a 4-step plan to help hockey players put on muscle mass and gain weight over the off-season. If you missed it, you can check it out here: A 4-Step Plan for Off-Season Weight Gain
Eating effectively starts with shopping effectively. Quite simply, if you don’t have the right ingredients to eat well, it’s impossible to do so. Below is a sample grocery shopping list taken directly out of Ultimate Hockey Nutrition. For a limited time, you can get direct access to this incredible resource here: Ultimate Hockey Nutrition.
Sample High Performance Grocery List *All sources preferably grass-fed, pastured, and/or organic
As you may be thinking, it’s not necessary to buy each of these items with each trip. I recommend printing this list, doing a quick inventory of what you already have, and then making a list of a couple things from each category to pick up your next grocery trip. If you’re reading this and you don’t do the shopping, pass this on to whoever does. If you can make dietary changes so that 80%+ of your diet comes from the foods listed above, it will have a powerful impact on your performance and health.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
P.S. I’m not sure how long this link will stay active, so if you recognize the profound effect nutrition can have on your performance, pick up your copy today! Get it here: Ultimate Hockey Nutrition
Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Unconventional Approaches to First Step Quickness
Over the last few years, we’ve trained, and (more importantly) developed some RIDICULOUSLY fast skaters at Endeavor Sports Performance. Hockey has always been dominated by fast, or maybe more appropriately, explosive skaters, but this is especially true in today’s game. Not lost on the majority of players, parents, and coaches, by far the most common training goal we here is “my coach told me I need to get faster”, or “I need to improve my first few steps”.
Hearing this over and over has almost become a joke, as if the reaction would be:
“David. Throw out all the programs we wrote to make our players slower. This one needs to IMPROVE his speed!”
The reality is that almost every player (with the exception being SOME at the pro level) has a window to make speed improvements, and the younger the player (or the less training experience) the larger that window is. Further, every player that is really serious about competing at the next level should train to improve their speed, regardless of whether that is a strong point of theirs at the current level. Recognizing the importance of speed training in the short- and long-term success of hockey players was what provoked me to write Breakaway Hockey Speed (which you can get for free by clicking on that link), and why speed training was such a large component of my new book Ultimate Hockey Training.
First step quickness, or acceleration, is highly dependent upon the player’s ability to generate high levels of force and build momentum. While speed in this sense can ultimately be thought of as power or rate of force development, the expression of these qualities on the ice will have foundations in a number of other areas. First step quickness is developed through:
Proper body and skate positions
Optimal skating technique, including full follow through in the ankle (“toe flick” should be present in forward, crossover, and backward strides)
Strong lower body and hips
Powerful lower body and hips
Stable core for optimal platform for lower body force development and force transfer between the upper and lower body
Off-Ice Explosiveness (This is an advanced exercise and not appropriate…at all…for beginners)
On-Ice Explosiveness (This is an advanced 1-on-1 move and highly appropriate for everyone)
In other words, training for speed involves more than speed training. It takes a comprehensive training approach to really maximize a player’s speed potential. Conveniently, training these other physical qualities (speed, power, strength, core stability, conditioning, etc.) also improves every other aspect of on-ice performance. It’s a win-win, and why it drives me crazy to see so many players entering “speed and conditioning programs” that completely neglect the very direct transfer that strength training has to on-ice speed improvements.
That said, all of these things improve first step quickness CAPACITY, which coincides with, but is not exactly the same as first step quickness EXPRESSION. Simply, capacity is what a player COULD do; expression is what a player does. For any given level of capacity, there is a range of expression. Ultimately, a player would want to maximize their capacity AND their expression. This difference helps explain why some players may train hard, but not see much in the way of on-ice gains (they could also be training with a terrible program), and why some players may be quick in practices, but not in games. At a minimum, understanding other areas to improve first step quickness EXPRESSION expands the areas players have to grow, which ultimately expands their potential.
With that in mind, the Top 5 things players can do to improve the expression of first step quickness on the ice are:
1) Know where your teammates AND opponents are at all times. First step quickness, technically, isn’t always starting from a stand still. Often times players are gliding in one direction and need to accelerate quickly to create space between them and an opponent. Players at all levels get into trouble when they hold on to the puck too long, which is often used as a strategy to buy time to find an open teammate. If you scan the ice constantly to get an idea of where the other players are, and where they’re gravitating to, you’ll be able to find open ice AND open teammates much faster. In other words, you’ll learn where players on both teams are, and just as importantly, where they aren’t. The ability to find and/or create time and space is incredibly valuable as players advance to higher levels. It will slow the game down and allow you to make better decisions with and without the puck.
2) Accelerate when receiving the puck in open ice It’s not always appropriate to skate at full speed when you get the puck, but many players receive a pass and their feet stop completely for a couple seconds. Remember, there are players on the other team that want the puck you have, and they’re likely closing in on you from multiple directions. Closely related to the first point, if you’ve scanned the ice before you receive the puck, you have an idea of where some open ice may be. Receive the puck in stride and immediately take a couple strides to help create separation between you and the opponent. This will help you create time and space, and because you also know where other opponents and teammates are, ultimately allow you to make a better decision with the puck.
3) Consciously focus on accelerating quickly Many players can make a pretty significant jump in their ability to express their first step quickness capacity by consciously focusing on accelerating quickly through their first few steps. As players spend more time on the ice, the expression of many skills becomes automatic. This is, in fact, a desirable adaptation. However, in the case of first step quickness, many players aren’t quick in certain situations because they’ve made a poor habit automatic. By spending some time in practices and games consciously focusing on being explosive with starts and speed changes (this applies to #2 above), players can re-groove a more optimal habit. This can often be achieved over the course of a few weeks, at which point players can merge this behavior back to a more subconscious level, allowing them to be more responsive to other external stimuli.
4) Learn to under handle the puck We recently got a question on the Hockey Strength and Conditioning forums about how to become faster WITH the puck. The truth is that handling a puck will absolutely slow a player down because it disrupts the synchrony of upper and lower body movement necessary to maximize speed. That said, if a player is fast without the puck, they shouldn’t be slow with the puck. The puck doesn’t need to be glued to your stick. Learn to under handle it. Push it in open ice. Place it in areas of the ice where you know you can beat your opponent to it. If you’re taking a defenseman wide, you can put it under their stick, then lift their stick with yours, and cut them off with your body. There are dozens of examples of how to under handle the puck, but it’s an important skill to have. For every toe drag, where a player makes a move with relatively consistent contact with the puck, there are dozens and dozens examples of moves or situations where players break contact to put the puck in a safe area to make a play. It happens fast, but Gaudreau does this a few different times in the video above.
5) Study the habits of your opponents This is a huge idea that many players do subconsciously, but most don’t do at all. Do players on the other team tend to hold their stick to the side of their body or in front? Does the fast forward on the other team stop when he forechecks or circle around? Does the goalie have a tendency to cheat toward playing the puck behind the net with dump-ins? Does the defenseman on the other team crossover a lot while skating backwards? Picking up on these tendencies can help you exploit what may be a suboptimal habit of an opponent to create more time and space with the puck. Using the last point as an example, if a defenseman has a tendency to crossover a lot while skating backwards, it’s likely that a shoulder/head fake toward the inside will cause them to crossover in this direction, which provides a nice window to push the puck to the outside (under handling it), and beat them wide. Coming back to the original idea of differentiating between speed capacity and expression, in this scenario your speed capacity hasn’t changed at all, but your speed expression, dictated by your ability to create time and space, and in this case beat the defenseman, has change significantly.
Conclusion
The best advice I can give any player is to become a student of the game. Off-ice training can have a huge impact on a player’s career by improving the player’s physical capacity and therefore capacity to perform various skills on the ice. However, there is still additional room for growth by learning to anticipate the movement of all players on the ice, create time and space, and exploit the tendencies of your opponents. Improving these abilities will essentially improve the expression of playing ability, for any level of capacity.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
P.S. If you want an off-ice system to help improve on-ice speed, check this out: Ultimate Hockey Training
Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Youth Hockey Training Blueprint: Part 3
This is the 3rd and final segment of our “Youth Hockey Training Blueprint” series. Make sure you check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already!
Building the Training Session
The primary training purposes at each level can also be used to construct a training session template. Templates are helpful in dictating the flow of the training session. It is often the case that the facility is (or should be) set up so that athletes move from one area to the other. Especially with relatively large groups and overlapping training schedules, it’s important that suboptimal space is used efficiently. Using a training template that is designed using a logical progression through physical qualities (e.g. power before conditioning) and driving the flow through the session is a great starting place. It also provides a means of replacing exercises if equipment is not available. For example, if “C1” on a program is a suspended row, and the suspended row handles are unavailable, you can return back to the template, which would read either “Upper Body Pull” or “Horizontal Pull” and swap it out for a similar exercise. Similarly, understanding the intended physical quality or pattern will help make it that much easier for a coach to instantaneously regress or progress an exercise based on an individual player’s needs.
In our case, we utilized the following templates:
GROUP A (’02’00)
Template
Dynamic Warm-Up
Sprint
Jump
Basic Movement
Reactive Game
Basic Core
Stretch
GROUP B (’99-’97)
Template
Foam Roll
Static Stretch
Dynamic Warm-Up
LB Push
Pair UB Pull
Pair Glute
LB Pull
Pair UB Push
Pair Core
GROUP C (16U-18U)
Template
Foam Roll
Static Stretch
Dynamic Warm-Up
Olympic Lift (Day 1)/Jump (Day 2)
Pair Mobility
Pair Glute
LB Push (Day 1)/Olympic Lift (Day 2)
Pair UB Pull
Pair Core
LB Pull
Pair UB Push
Pair Core
In each case, the template can be justified by or directly related to the primary purposes for the given group.
Periodization Models
In the purest sense, training periodization refers to the purposeful alteration of the imposed stresses to the body. Periodization is necessary to optimize both development and recovery. While there are several periodization models out there, most have been designed in the interest of helping extremely well-trained “elite” athletes continue to break plateaus. In other words, they’re largely irrelevant when it comes to training youth hockey players with minimal training backgrounds. In general, the periodization model we follow can be described as “emphasized concurrent” as multiple physical qualities are trained simultaneously, with either linear or undulating progressions depending on the level. Describing the program as fitting a particular model can be misleading as the program may seemingly focus on only one quality (e.g. strength), but in reality considers the other qualities emphasized on the ice (e.g. speed, conditioning, etc.). If you’re not familiar with the terminology, don’t let it confuse you. The important considerations are:
Group A: This group essentially has no formal training background. Volume increases in power and strength exercises will progress slowly, but for the most part progression will come in the form of selecting more advanced exercises and gaining proficiency in basic patterns via repetition.
Group B: This group is learning new resistance training exercises, so will initially benefit from increased repetition from week to week (linear progression). Once basic exercises are mastered, altering the set and rep schemes on a week-to-week basis (undulating progression) may be a more suitable means of optimizing development in hypertrophy and strength.
Group C: This group should have the basics mastered and is adequately prepared for an undulating progression system.
In both Group B and Group C, each 4-week phase alternates between having a slightly greater volume (e.g. accumulation phase) and intensity emphasis (e.g. intensification phase).
Conclusion
An underlying goal of training at each level is to prepare the player to meet the expectations at the next level. Younger players need to master the process and body weight exercises before moving on to external resistance. The middle group needs internalize the importance of warming up and develop proficiency at the basic lifts before progressing to more advanced exercises. The older group will be well-prepared for the rigors of a long junior season and/or the expectations of a collegiate strength and conditioning program after spending a year or two following a comprehensive program that includes a significant amount of practice in more advanced exercises (e.g. single-leg variations, Olympic lifts, etc.).
At all levels, it’s important to recognize the stresses the players face while playing. In most cases, the physical qualities that are emphasized most on the ice do not need to be a large emphasis off the ice. In fact, typically specific precautions need to be taken to facilitate recovery from these stresses and restore structural balance. This is especially true as players progress through the levels and accumulate more wear and tear. More than anything else, it’s important that players are taught PROPER movement and positioning. Remember, it’s important to move well before moving quickly or often.
If you’re looking for other quality off-ice hockey training information (tips through articles, sample training programs used by NHL players, unique exercise videos, comprehensive webinars, and an open forum to have training experts answer your personal questions) from some of the world’s leaders in off-ice hockey development, check out HockeyStrengthandConditioning.com! You can get instant access to all of the information for 7-days for only $1!
P.S.2. As always, I appreciate you forwarding this along to anyone you think will benefit from the info! You can use the social media dropdown menu at the top right hand corner to share it via Twitter and Facebook!
Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!
Use CODE: "Neeld15" to save 15%