Hockey is an intense sport that requires strength from different muscles in dif- ferent parts of your body. While participating in a general strength training pro- gram is important for maintaining your overall strength year-round, focusing on strengthening a variety of your muscles will help you improve different skillsets, in- cluding endurance, speed, strength, agility and shot power, when hockey season approaches. In this chapter, you will discover the best workouts for developing each skillset listed above.
#1 Endurance Workout : Endurance and explosiveness are very important in hockey. During a 1 hour game, most players get at least 15-20 minutes of play time in each. Since hockey is a very active and intense sport, building your body to withstand quick and powerful movement is crucial. This workout will prepare your body to train for endurance and explosive movements on the rink.
- Foam Roller Exercise You will need a foam roller for this exercise. Start out by sitting on the roller perpendicularly. Cross one leg over your opposite knee. When you do this, you should feel an intense pressure in the glutes over your leg. Hold yourself up by placing your hands on the floor and start to roll your glute muscles up and down, deeply. This may even cause your muscles to hurt. Roll as long as you can endure it, ideally 3 to 5 minutes, and then switch your legs and re- peat the motion.
- Skater Strides Secure a resistance band around the tops of your knees and then move your legs apart from each other until you feel resistance. To perform this exercise, step out to the side as far as you can and then bring your other leg towards you. Don’t bring it so close that you lose tension in the band but close enough so that your step counts as a stride. One complete step counts as one rep. Perform two sets of 12 reps for each leg.
- One Armed Dumbbell Snatch Hold a dumbbell in one hand and stand with your feet hip width apart. Allow a natural arch in your lower back. Position yourself as if you were going to perform a deadlift. With an explosive movement, straighten your hips and knees and bring the dumbbell up to your chest. Immediately flip your wrist and extend the dumbbell over you. Return the dumbbell to your starting position by moving in reverse to complete one rep. Perform three sets of 5 reps for each arm.
- Behind Step Lunge Align your feet with your shoulders and reach your hands out in front of you.
Place one hand on top of the other. Perform a lunge as far to the left as pos- sible and lower yourself as deep into the lunge as possible. Reverse the lunge by stepping behind your right leg and position your foot to the right to com- plete one rep. Perform two sets of 8 reps for each leg.
- One Legged Squat Stand on a box that brings you about a foot from the ground. Hold two dumbbells and hold them out in front of you. Raise one leg off the box and squat down. Raise yourself back up and place your leg back on the box to complete one rep. Perform three sets of 10 reps for each leg.
- Swiss Ball Cross Chop (Always perform after one legged squat) This exercise requires the use of a Swiss ball. Hold a dumbbell in each hand and lie on the ball until your knees are bent at 90 degrees. Bend your elbows to 90 degrees and perform a crunch. Raise your arms out as your upper body raises off the ball. Return to your original position by reversing the motion to complete one rep. Perform three sets of 15 reps.
#2 Speed Work Out This exercise helps you develop quickness and agility. Place a cone on the ground and place 3 more cones 10 meters away. Make sure each of the three cones is spread of 5 meters from each. You will come back to these cones later.
Begin this exercise by performing 15 air squats (insert video here). Once you’ve completed your air squats, move your focus to the cones.
Stand in front of the cones and stay completely still near the starting cone. With an explosive start, sprint towards the top cone. Touch the cone and then sprint back to the starting cone. Next, sprint to the middle cone, touch it and re- turn to the starting cone. Finally, sprint to the last cone, touch it and return to the starting cone. Rest for two to three minutes and repeat seven times. Don’t forget to rest for at least 1 to 3 minutes between each set.
To get the most out of this drill, make sure that you keep your body low to the ground. This can help you focus on changing direction, which is another important skill to have in hockey. Try to make your stops and starts short and explosive to really sharpen your agility skills.
To modify this drill and keep it interesting, you can substitute several exercises for the air squats. You could perform sit-ups, jumping jacks, burpees, etc. in- stead. You can also modify the way you perform the cone drill. You could focus on performing tight turns in between the cones, running backwards, sideways, etc.
Perform this drill about two to three times per week to help you reach peak per- formance and maintain your quickness and agility skills.
#3 Goalie Drill – Visual Targets This drill enables goalies to learn how to get used to blocking shots from a variety of different angles. This drill/workout will require two players: 1 goalie and 1 shooter.
Spray paint different lines from different angles in front of the goal. The angles should ideally fan out around the goal and shots should be taken from different distances. The two lines that fan from the goal to the two circles in front of it should have the shortest distance. One player will take shots from various dis- tances, using the spray painted lines as their guide to judge their angles while the goalie works to block each shot.
#4 Skating Work Out - Skating Circles This skating workout focuses on developing speed and your ability to turn. Stand in one corner of the rink and start by skating quickly and intensely to the zone’s faceoff circle. Skate around the circle while doing crossover turns and then skate toward the other zone’s faceoff circle to skate around. Next, skate around the center faceoff dot and the two circles in the far zone.
- Line Skating This skating workout focuses on developing your footwork. Stand in one cor- ner of the rink and begin by skating quickly and intensely to the blue line at the boards. Stop once you reach the line. Next, skate to the opposite boards and stop. After that, skate to the red line and then skate back to the other side of the rink. Next, skate to the far blue line, then to the corner of the far zone and then return to your starting point. You can also perform this drill in reverse.
- Sled Dog Skating This skating workout focuses on developing your endurance and skating power. This workout also requires two players. One player skates the length of the rink while holding on to another player, who positions their skates in a snow-plow form. Once the skating player reaches the end of the rink, each player switches roles.
#5 Stickhandling Workout
- Head Up Drill This drill helps players learn to not look at the puck while they’re handling it. This drill requires two players or a player and a coach. Set up a line of cones and have one player skate through the cones with the puck. The other player or coach uses their own stick to keep the other player from looking down at the puck.
- Soft Hand Drill This drill helps players develop their puck-handling skills. This drill requires two players or a player and a coach and is meant to be done off-ice. Two players should stand a few feet from each other and pass a tennis ball back and forth while handling it backhand and forehand. A tennis ball is more difficult to handle than a puck and that is what makes this drill so effective.
- One Hand Drill It is not uncommon for a hockey player to have to take his or her hand off the stick during a game. Set up a line of cones along the rink. Weave in and out of the cones while moving the puck with you, using one hand only. Alternate which hand you use.
Developing Your Own Hockey Workout Depending on your current abilities and skillset, you may need to focus on training for all important areas of hockey or you may just need to focus on one or two areas that need improvement. One of the biggest benefits of creating your own plan is that you can easily work it around your schedule. In this section of this chapter, you will discover how to design your own hockey workout.
Step 1: The first step is to get all of your information organized. I recommend using a calendar that breaks your training season down. The first and most impor- tant thing to do is figure out when you’ll start and end your training.
Step 2: The second step is to have a clearly defined goal. Consider whether you can work your goal into your calendar. For example, if your goal is to improve your agility you can mark down the date of the time by which you want this to im- prove and therefore create a visual of just how long you have to prepare. If your goal is to train your leg muscles better then you know to focus more on physical strength routines and not as much actual training on your skates.
Step 3: In this step, you’ll want to plan out how and when you will train each month, detail by detail. You’ll want to include how much time you plan on spend- ing with on and off the ice, how many games you’ll be playing that year, how many times you’ll want to play for fun and how many breaks you will take. Calculate how many hours per month you will spend on training so that you can break those hours down day by day.
Step 4: In this step, it is time to break your monthly training hours into weekly hours and then into daily hours. If you want to spend 6 hours in the first week of the month on training, you could plan three one hour training sessions during the week and then a two hour casual ride over the weekend. Make sure to plan in a recovery period every two weeks in which you lower the amount of hours you bud- get to train.
Step 5: Review your custom work out plan each month. Periodic adjustments may be necessary. For example, if you reach your goal of training your leg mus- cles than you can make modifications to include more training sessions on your skates and less focus on physical strength exercises. Reviewing is very important because the more consistently you train, the more your body will change.
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