Today being the last the day of August and most of our hockey players going back to their respective team, I can definitely feel like the summer is coming to an end.  I must say that it has been an incredible summer; we had a lot of guys busting their ass in the weight room making tremendous progress during the last couple of months .  They got stronger, faster and became better athletes, and I must say that I am really proud of each and everyone of them for what they accomplished this summer.

That being said, coaching athletes for 9-12 hours a day for over 12 weeks is gonna make you a better coach and it will make you learn a lot of things.  Here is what I learned during this awesome summer of 2010:

1. There is no limit to how much you can load single-leg exercises to increase strength. I actually wrote a post about the case for single-leg training a couple weeks ago, but it never ceases to amaze me how strong you can get with single-leg lifts. This is Endeavor athlete Charlie Vasaturo doing 6 reps on a reverse lunge with a front squat grip with 255 pounds:

2.  On a related note, younger athletes can get strong pretty quickly.  You just need to make sure their form is perfect and you can start loading them up pretty good.  It is very common to have athletes under 16 get to 60lbs dumbbells for reverse lunges for multiple reps within 3 months of dedicated training.  Here is Endeavor athlete Conor Landrigan, 14 years old with 65lbs dumbbells:

3.  This is no breaking news for anyone that speed development through sprints is great to help athletes get faster.  But one thing equally important, if not more than linear speed is transitional speed.  Sports are all about quick transitions, changes of direction and reacting quickly to what’s happening on the ice/field/court.  I, myself, was focusing too much on linear speed and not enough on transitional speed.  My good friend and colleague Kevin Neeld has been doing a good job of including all sorts of start positions (2 point start, push up start, tall kneeling start, side standing start) in the sprint work we have our athletes do, as well as including different transitional drills later on as progressions.  We have seen tremendous results with our athletes using these transitional drills.  Here is an example:

4.  By now, I abandoned the idea that I would eventually be able to get rid of that french accent!  So why not just laugh about it.  Our athletes absolutely love it anyway as it can give them a good laugh.  On this video, you can hear Endeavor athlete and Colorado Avalanche prospect Colby Cohen impersonating me in the back (telling Jeff Buvinow doing the stability front plank with perturbation to squeeze his butt and keep his chest up):

2 notes on that video: First, this is a tremendous core exercise as it is very specific to the demands of contact sports like ice hockey.
Second, Colby likes to have a good time when he’s around at Endeavor, but he also means business when it’s time to work hard, especially when he hang cleans; here he is smoking 230lbs for 2 reps.

5.  Hockey players have a lot of problems with their hips, and I mean A LOT.  Whether it is sports hernia, groin strains, hip flexor strains or hip capsule problems, hockey players will have a lot of problems with their hips for 2 main reasons: First, skating is a very unnatural movement pattern for the human body and it puts a lots of stress on the hips for different reasons, mainly because your hips spend most of the time in external rotation.  Second, hockey players spend way too much time on the ice, even in the off-season where they should take some time off and focus more on training.  These 2 ingredients are a good recipe for hip injury.  That being said, hockey players need a lot of soft-tissue work (foam roller, massage, ART) done on their hips especially on their TFL (tensor fascia-latae), adductor magnus and hip external rotators (mainly piriformis).  They also need a good balance of mobility, flexilibity and strength in their hip muscles (more on that to come in an upcoming blog post).

6.  I have to give ALL the credit to Kevin Neeld for coming up with that one, but this might just be the most specific form of conditioning hockey players can do off-ice:

When you think about it, hockey is played the exact same way: holding an isometric position for a couple of seconds (while they just glide on the ice and follow the play) followed by a short burst of speed consisting of a couple quick strides. This is also one of the hardest form of conditioning you can do. Coming up with that was just a brilliant idea from Kevin!

In conclusion, summer 2010 have been amazing and made me a better and more knowledgeable coach. All of this would not have been possible without the hundreds of athletes that trained with us and were so dedicated to becoming better hockey players and athletes in general. To all of them, the best of luck for their upcoming season!