Separating Fact From Fiction – What It Actually Takes to Develop Elite Hockey Players

Developing the strength and conditioning programs with the attempt to create highly skilled and effective hockey players is actually a lot harder and more limited than it might seem. Before we deep dive into what you CAN do, let’s address the elephant in the room when it comes to what strength and conditioning can and cannot do

Hockey is a Highly Skilled Sport Requiring Unique Abilities – Understanding the Limitations of Strength and Conditioning For Hockey Players

Not many of the important skills in hockey are part of our innate movement patterns – running, jumping, throwing etc are all patterns we’re designed to learn and do well as human beings, and are present in most field and popular sports, but hockey relies on none of them. We’re not designed to propel ourselves on ice as quickly as possible, stop on a dime, or be great at manipulating a 6oz piece of hardened rubber at the end of a curved stick – there just weren’t too many times in our evolutionary past that our survival depended on those skills.

If you’ve been around sports long enough, you’ll probably have seen someone labelled a “natural athlete” they seem to jump from sport to sport and excel at the lower levels almost instantaneously. Usually these athletes have solid foundational patterns, they run, throw, catch, rotate, and change direction on a level surface very efficiently, and are able to transfer these patterns to different sports almost seamlessly, but what happens when you put these so called natural athletes on the ice for the first time? More often than not you get a scene from straight from Bambi; the “natural athlete” simply doesn’t have the specific skills needed to balance and propel themselves in a totally unfamiliar environment. Simply being strong and powerful is not enough to be a good skater or puck handler

All skills exist on a continuum from gross motor skills to fine motor skills, a fine motor skill would be threading a needle, where as a gross motor skill would be something like a broad jump. In skating specifically, the ability to produce a large amount of force in a skating stride that includes the stride turnover would be considered a gross motor skill, where as the small movements of the muscles of the foot and ankle that stabilize the blade in the ice and allow that power to be transferred into propulsive force would considered a fine motor skill, as would the shifts in balance to create a smooth single-footed outside edge stop, or a quick change in blade angle to create a sharp turn.

An example of this concept applied to stick skills would be the ubiquitous term “soft hands” but to look at it more empirically, it’s usually referring to someone with excellent fine motor skill who is able to make difficult puck movement skills look otherwise effortless. The fine motor skills are the small adjustments in shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow the player to direct the puck in a quick and precise manner, absorb the impact of hard passes, and even control the speed of their own stick handling. In relation to the shot, the fine motor skill component would be the timing of the release: reading the flex and the kick point of the stick to plan the optimal period of loading and direction of release; however, the actual loading of the stick into the ice, the violent rotation of the torso shoulders, forearms and wrists to create a powerful shot would fall further towards the gross motor pattern end of the spectrum.

So where are we going with all this? It is important to note that strength and conditioning programs will predominantly improve the speed and power of gross motor patterns, chances are you as an athlete already have the strength to make the fine movements that manage the puck required to make any type of deft Datsyuk-ian style deke, but perhaps not the skill; however, if you want to perform that same deke with a defender draped across your back and rifle an 85mph snapshot over the goalie’s shoulder, you’re going to need some serious strength and power to go with all that finesse and skill. This also marks the importance of skill development – if you suck at hockey, you will still suck at hockey no matter how much strength, power, or mobility you add to your repertoire. No amount of strength training or conditioning will give you soft hands or better touch – that has to be developed with a stick in your hand. All that being said, especially when it comes to skating, weaknesses or mobility/stability issues often become the bottleneck for skill development – athletes simply lack the ability to move powerfully in the manner required to execute the proper edge control, quick stops and starts, or powerful stride finishes just to name a few. Fixing these movement errors can make a night and day difference in the way an athlete performs on the ice and in their skill sessions. All other things equal, stronger, more powerful, highly mobile, and highly stable athletes acquire skills at a faster rate than those who lack these abilities.

If you’ve been following this series you’re going to notice a recurring theme among all the articles, this is because although the demands of different sports can vary wildly, the basics of human physiology remain the same. Repeatedly you’re going to see the following things repeated:

• You train the athlete first, and the sport second
• Changes in movement quality and sport specific mobility are the fastest routes to improvement in measurable sport performance
• Strength is the foundation of all other athletic abilities

These themes are so important that we will be covering them in sport specific manner, using anecdotes and hockey specific examples, but you will definitely notice some crossover from articles written on other sports as well. The following is taken directly from the “Your Strength and Conditioning Program is Useless and Your Coach has no Idea What They’re Doing” modified to use only hockey specific examples and comparisons to other sports for clarity

So now that we are getting into what we CAN do from a strength and conditioning side, here is the hierarchy (order of importance) for speed and power improvement for hockey players:

1. Movement Competency – AKA “Do you actually know how to shoot a puck, do you have an efficient stride, Do you joints actually move though the range they are supposed to?” The more complex the movement, the more the technique involved will influence the outcome, take for instance the ability to sprint vs the ability to skate at maximal speed. Running and sprinting are both inherently natural motions for the human body – we’re designed to do them, and although there are certainly techniques for maximizing their potential, if you ask a 10 year old to “run as fast as you can” you’re probably going to see them start in a forward lean, and start to straighten up as they approach top speed, start seeing the arm swing increase, and probably very little up and down movement at the hips. Coaching these 10 year olds on their torso position, relaxing their shoulders etc isn’t likely to make monumental and immediately measurable improvements in their sprint times. The hockey stride isn’t an inherently natural movement for the human body, and involves a significant amount of technique – this is why a good power skating coach should be able to increase the speed and power output of a young hockey player even though they have will have gained very little in the way of strength or the ability to produce more more force at a given time interval. The gains in speed came from using the strength they already had in a more mechanically efficient manner. Another common situation is when coaches bang their heads against the wall trying to teach an athlete a certain skill but will fail no matter what cues they try to implement – this is often due to the athlete not having the physical capacity to produce the desired outcome (aka their body simply can’t do what you’re asking it to do – yet). I have yet to have a hockey player come in and NOT say they need to improve their first three strides, but if the player lacks the ankle mobility and stability, no amount of coaching or sport specific drills will ever get them into the forward angle required to maximize the power of those initial strides. The ankle and foot itself must be addressed before the coaching will be effective. The ankle and foot are so important in hockey that it will be addressed in its own subsection later in this article. Programming for mobility and movement competency is athlete specific, each athlete has their own set of physiological strengths and weaknesses, and the most energy and effort should be directed towards improving the athlete’s specific shortcomings vs a generic hockey mobility program or even worse “just go do some yoga”.
2. Strength = The Ability to Produce Force with No Time Constraints – this is our first introduction to the force/velocity curve. The most important thing to remember about the force velocity curve is that the shorter amount of time you have, the lower percentage of your strength you can display. Say we load up a leg press with an immovable amount of weight, put a device on the foot plate to measure the amount of force you can produce, and after 6 seconds of pushing as hard as you can you maxed out at 100lbs. So if given an unlimited amount of time we know you can produce 100lbs of force, but at the 0.4 second time interval you produced 40lbs of force, and at 0.2 second time interval you produced 20lbs of force. For hockey  we’re most interested in improving the force produced at around 0.2s for the first three strides, and 0.4s for the stride at maximal speed; the fastest way we can improve these numbers is simply to increase the total amount of force you can produce. If we strengthen you to the point where you can produce 200lbs of force and all of a sudden you’re producing 80lbs of force at 0.4s and 40lbs at 0.2s you just got faster and more powerful. This effect continues to work until you are VERY strong – levels that almost no one except the most genetically gifted of athletes will reach in their high school or early pro years.
3. Improving the ability to absorb force, and use more advantageous joint angles. AKA how much time do you waste absorbing the force of contact with other players when they are trying to separate you from the puck or jockey for position? Is it too easy for someone to change your centre of gravity (centre of mass) to the point where you must waste time recovering balance before moving in the direction you want to go?  If you can absorb force faster, you can stay in a higher joint angle, take less steps/strides to recover position, and will be in a better position to both impose your will on other players and change direction faster. This ability is directly tied to your overall ability to produce force, so training for it without attempting to also get stronger is assinine; however, it is a separate skill, and you can learn to absorb force faster with specific training.
4. Rate of Force Development and Elastic Utilization Ratio AKA how quickly can you redirect the force you absorb and apply the force you can create? This is your ability to create an explosive first three strides, to stop on a dime, and instantaneously change direction. It’s your ability to create an explosive rotation into a one timed shot after a pre-swing. It’s your ability to release a snap shot in the blink of an eye. What rate of force development drills aim to do is close the gap between the total amount of force you can produce, and the force you can produce in a given time interval. So if we were to use our hypothetical example from before, the person who produced 200lbs of force and 80lbs at 0.4s and 40lbs at 0.2s can actually do these drills so that they could produce 90lbs at 0.4s and 50lbs at 0.2s while still only being able to produce 200lbs total force. Despite what most people think, the effect size here is pretty small, it doesn’t mean it’s worthless, but it’s pointless to focus on these drills at the expense of the other more effective training methods. These methods max out pretty quickly, meaning that once you’ve made that small change in the rate of force development, you are once again limited by the total amount of force you can produce
5. Power Endurance AKA how long can you sustain an effort at or near the top of your most explosive efforts? How quickly can you repeat a series of explosive efforts and have them be as explosive or near as explosive as the first round? This is essentially the conditioning component of hockey training. It is important to note that conditioning cannot in all but the most untrained/novice athletes make you faster or more explosive, it’s role in speed and power development is simply to prevent/delay LOSS of power and current abilities due to fatigue accrued over the game. Simply put, if you put your focus here before developing everything above it, all you’ve done is take a mediocre level of performance and made sure that athlete stay as close to their initial level of mediocrity as they fatigue. It is also last on the list because it is the easiest to develop, and takes the least amount of time invested in the yearly plan, and the training interferes with the development of other more important abilities. So due to it’s relatively short training window and interference effect, training vigorously for a conditioning and power endurance effect is usually reserved for the last 6-8 weeks before a season starts

The reason most “hockey conditioning camps” drive me and anyone who actually understands how to develop speed and power crazy is that they predominantly focus on rate of force development drills (think medicine balls and agility ladders etc) and power endurance (conditioning drills, repeat sprints, bag skates) without any of the prerequisite work to make those drills effective. “Coaches” who do this do it simply because they either A – don’t know any better or B – do know better but know that it’s more practical and profitable to run hockey players through a bunch of agility ladders and medicine ball drills knowing growing athletes will naturally get bigger and stronger, and can then take the credit for it with their “strength and conditioning” program.

So What Really Separates Hockey From Other Anaerobic Power Sports?

Despite what many will say, the lower body strength and power training of a football receiver, and an elite soccer player is not that much different. Both athletes are required to perform all out sprints and changes of direction on exactly the same surface; it is their conditioning requirements that differ greatly. Hockey players play on a completely difference surface, with a totally different propulsion method, which makes for some truly unique strength and conditioning considerations. The main differences between hockey players and field sport athletes are:

• The Demands of The Foot and Ankle
  • Not only is the foot asked to balance on 3mm piece of steel vs a shoe or cleat, but the ankle joint is what truly separates the average from the elite skater
• The Time the Athlete Spends Producing Force During Each Stride
  • In field sports where athletes are at full-on sprints, ground contact time, or the amount of time that the athlete has to act upon the ground and subsequently have the ground act upon them is 0.2s or less, in hockey the contact with the ice per stride at full speed is around 0.4s, this has large implications for how strong an athlete needs to be to in order to be fast
• The Proportion of Force Generated in Lateral Directions vs Straight Forward
  • The hamstrings are arguably the most important sprinting muscle, and undoubtedly the most important muscle at full speed, but for hockey they mainly act as knee stabilizers and to remove the blade from the ice, this will influence the way hamstrings are trained, the amount of stimulus we direct towards quads and glutes, and the planes of motions that are emphasized in training
• Using a Stick as an Implement to Propel an Object
  • Small but powerful movements of the wrist are incredibly important for an athlete’s ability to fire a snapshot and wrist shot with both a quick release and high velocity. Hockey demands that both wrist extension (knuckles moving towards back of forearm) and wrist flexion (palms moving towards front of forearm) be trained in dynamic fashion
  • Violent rotation of the torso is required for full range slapshots, one-timers, and classic wrist shots

The Demands of the Foot and Ankle

When you think of the most distinguishing feature of hockey vs most other sports it’s without a doubt that hockey is played on ice: this makes a large difference for many things, but none more so than the role of the foot and ankle complex. It’s no secret that many of the world’s elite skaters often don’t tie up the top one or two eyelets of their skates to get more range at the ankle. If you live in BC, you’ve been treated to Quinn Hughes rookie and sophomore seasons, and most likely marvelled at his almost unparalleled skating ability, especially his ability to make quick moves and changes of direction in seemingly impossibly tight areas. If you have a keen eye, pay close attention to the angles he can crank his ankles into – the extreme angles he can hold an edge, the range he can move across the back and front of his blade. His ability to exert both power and control in these extreme positions takes both a high level of strength, mobility, and fine motor skill in the foot and ankle complex.

Simply put the ability of your ankle to dorsiflex (move your toes towards your shin) is directly related to ability to shift your weight forward and affects your starting position, starting speed, and ability to quickly stop and start, and create extremely tight turns. The ability of your foot to plantar flex (point your toes) directly affects your stride length and ability finish with a powerful calf kick. Your ability to evert (turn the bottom of the foot towards your body line) and invert (the ability to turn the bottom of your foot to face away from you) are directly tied to how far over you can get onto your edges without blowing a tire or wasting valuable time by excessively widening your stance and overusing your outside foot. While you are in these extreme positions, your underfoot muscles are managing and applying pressure to deal with ice irregularities and drive the edge into ice more firmly to maintain control of these extreme ranges required to be a truly elite skater.

The fortunate thing is that these qualities are all trainable, and we can give athletes the raw materials to skate at an elite level.

To improve dorsiflexion and plantar flexion range (how much total ankle range you can use) and plantar flexion strength (how powerfully you can come out of the ankle flexed position) nothing beats calf raise variations, to improve range and stability they should be done is a slow lowering and paused at the bottom position, once you have sufficient strength and range, you can start to perform them more explosively to improve the power output at the end of your strides and improve stride turn over time

For inversion, eversion, and dorsiflexion strength, the 3 way banded ankle drill can really work wonders, and you can even add compression to the ankle if you have really tight tissues that need to be released in order to access your full range. You can do this by wrapping a long band around a solid object, and resisting all the motions that the ankle goes through except plantar flexion (you’ll need more than a single band to train the stronger muscles of the calf). You can do these drills seated or standing. The three way ankle drill works well for inversion and eversion, but eventually you’ll find that dorsiflexion requires a stronger stimulus than inversion and eversion – at this point you can train dorsiflexion with a kettlebell over your toe box and lift it towards your shin using only your ankle to continue progressing.

For the underfoot muscles, multi-position eyes closed single leg balance drills are a great place to start as they really start to develop the awareness of weight shift across the foot using the nerves in the feet as opposed to using your visual systems, as the visual systems would be better spent tracking the puck, the play, and planning your next moves. These drills are done by holding single leg skater squat positions at multiple heights with your eyes closed and trying to maintain balance. We have an entire article focused on vision and its role in the gym and in sport here if you’d like more info. Once you have developed awareness, you can start to destabilize the system using drills like the hip airplane, and really develop strength via ankle swaps and drop catches like the ones described in the next paragraph, or moving some of your smaller leg movements like split squats to supporting only the heel and ball of the foot for a period of time (4-6 weeks) – a great time to really focus on these are in season when the athletes total ability to handle load is reduced, so these act as self limiter while still allowing many important adaptations to happen to the underfoot muscles.

Ankle swaps are performed by standing on one leg with the hip and knee locked out, and passing a kettlebell from hand to hand, the key here is to swap slowly and not to bend the elbow as you pass the kettlebell back and forth. It’s very easy to hide balance issues by quickly swinging the kettlebell back and forth, and bending the elbow allows the muscles of the arm to contribute to the stability of the implement – we want the majority of the stabilization to be done at the foot/ankle

Drop catches can be applied intelligently to just about any lower body single leg movement to improve the reactive ability of the foot to stabilize the body and extra load. For example, if you are using a single leg Romanian deadlift, the drop catch version would involve starting at the top locked out position, and dropping the weight, and catching it at given heights. Usually we recommend three catch heights: end range, mid range, and a short 4-6″ range at the top to make a complete drop catch rep. These are usually done with sub maximal weights and rapid drops and catches.

The Time the Athlete Has to Produce Force Each Stride

We’ve pretty much covered this one, but, because the athlete has more time per stride to produce force than a full on sprint, this actually slightly biases the full speed hockey stride towards the strength end of the force/velocity curve than the absolute speed end. For example, picking up the heaviest rock you possibly can has no relationship to time, and your success is entirely dependent on how much strength you possess, velocity is irrelevant. On the opposite end of the spectrum, your ability to swat a fly out of mid air (taking accuracy out of the equation) is predicated on your ability to move with absolute speed; pretty much all adult humans without the presence of disease have the strength to actually kill the fly. Most athletic movements lie somewhere between these two extremes, requiring both strength and speed to be successful.

Because of the relatively longer time to produce force, the hockey stride’s success and speed is actually slightly more predicated on strength, and therefore if trying to improve an athlete’s speed, strengthening relevant patterns and musculature will have a higher return than focusing on power output drills, especially in athletes who have not reached already extremely high levels of strength. This is almost in direct contrast to what you will see in most “Strength and Conditioning” camps aimed at youth hockey players, where agility ladders and medicine balls reign supreme. We’ve touched on why this happens in our “Your Strength and Conditioning Program is Useless and Your Coach has no Idea What They’re Doing” but as I’ve said multiple times before, if you are focusing on power output drills with weak hockey players, you’re wasting your time.

The Proportion of Force Generated in Lateral Directions vs Straight Forward

Even to move forward, hockey is more of a lateral sport when compared to most field sports; therefore, a higher proportion of the lower body training should be dedicated to gaining strength and mobility in the lateral and semi-lateral planes. When using exercises that work on the hips to create strength, multiple stance widths should be present in the program (ex. Sumo deadlift, mid-stance good morning, Trap bar Deadlift). These should also be trained dynamically with drills like: Slide Lunges, multi-planar lunges (45 degree, reverse, lateral etc), Copenhagen and banded adduction drills to improve stride recovery speed – doing banded adductions on a 45 degree plane with a knee drive to finish the rep can also train the hip flexors to improve stride recovery speed and power.

Using a Stick as an Implement to Propel an Object

When training a hockey athlete’s torso to create a ton of power in a slapshot or one-time situation, the torso must not only be able to stabilize the spine, but also be able to create the forceful rotation that must occur, and it is important that the drills are trained in that order. In the early offseason, or whenever you start training an athlete, the first drills based at improving the torso function should be aimed at static drills that help the athlete stabilize the spine in multiple planes and force directions. Drills like dead bugs, pallof press variations, side planks and plank variations with moving limbs and implements etc all need to be done well before adding in flexion (sit-up motion) and rotation drills. Once the athlete has demonstrated they can create stability and rigidity in static (drills where the spine stays stable, but other things are moving around it) then you can move on to creating stronger rotation. Drills like Russian twists, cable or banded twists, wood chops etc should all come before using violent drills like rotational medicine ball throws and slams, or high velocity band work, although again beyond the scope of this article, proper care taken when choosing the load for these exercises or technique will be compromised, and you can actually make an athlete worse/slower. When in doubt, go lighter, move faster.

The forearm musculature must also be trained in a dynamic fashion. Just improving grip strength isn’t enough for athletes that need to load a carbon fibre stick and release that stored energy into a hardened piece of rubber. Drills like rolling grip trainers, forward and reverse curls with different implements are a necessary adjunct to the standard grip strength increases you’ll see simply by training with loaded implements. These wrist contractions can also be speed up through the use of drop catches and timed banded drills that force the athlete to move as quickly and violently as possible.

Now that you have the hierarchy of speed and power development, and know the areas that need to specifically focused vs other anaerobic power sports, you need to create sport specific power endurance, and you have to organize the athlete’s training so that you minimize the interference effect of conditioning on the development of speed and power. Although that’s a little beyond the scope of this article, as a general rule, try to separate strength, speed, and skill work from conditioning work by at least 6 hours as often as possible, and strength/speed/skill work should generally come before conditioning if you must complete the sessions on the same day. Even though conditioning is the easiest training effect to achieve on it’s own, it actually comes at the highest cost to the athlete’s ability to perform other important work, which is why extremely intense conditioning should be limited to certain points in the year, and only maintained or even allowed to slightly detrain in others – Conditioning and organizing an athlete’s schedule is something we will cover in an article in the future!

In sum, satisfy all the mobility requirements to meet hockey demands, focus on getting strong, learn to absorb and produce force quickly, focus on the ankle and the hips in multiple planes of motion, train the forearms dynamically, and finally train the body to sustain those efforts at the highest intensity possible for as long as possible, and you’ll start developing some pretty effective hockey players.