Guys, this is just a quick blog post to let you know that my good friend Kevin Neeld is still offering his Ultimate Hockey Training book at the introductory price (which, unbelievably is less than 35$!). If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy before Kevin decides to bump up the price of the book.
If you ever buy strength and conditioning resources, you know that the books and DVDs that are sold usually don’t sell for less than 50-100$. Kevin set up that intro price to make sure that it could be available to anyone who wants to read it. Think about it. He refused to put more money in his pocket because he wanted as many people as possible to afford it.
Take advantage of his generosity before it’s too late!
After a long awaited launch, here it is! Kevin Neeld just released his new book Ultimate Hockey Training! This book is one like you’ve never seen before. This will raise the bar for any hockey training product forever!
He’s offering a ridiculous discount and throwing in some great free gifts from some of the world’s top experts in hockey development and performance training. When he told me he was gonna sell the book for under 30$, I thought he had brain damage! But he wants to make it affordable so anyone can buy it. You’ll have to hurry, though. This offer won’t be around for long…
Kevin isn’t just an “internet expert” that bases his recommendations on random theory or what he used to do as a player. He ACTUALLY trains hockey players for a living, and has been incredibly successful at it. Ultimate Hockey Training reveals Kevin’s entire hockey training system. I highly recommend you go pick up a copy now! At the price he’s offering the book, you would be crazy not to!
Mid-August just rolled around, which means that here at Endeavor, and for most hockey players training for the next season it’s the last stretch of the off-season. Different phases of an off-season plan focus on different goals. Early off-season usually focuses on recovery and regeneration and trying to undo most of the damage done during the season. The mid off-season, which is usually the phase most of players enjoy the most is the time to get big, fast and strong.
The late off-season phase focuses more on moving quicker (agility and transitional speed), work capacity and conditioning. The goal is to get guys in “game shape” as much as possible before they head back to camp. (On a side note, it’s interesting to see how the culture in hockey has changed in the last couple of decades, where players used to use the pre-season/training camp to “get in shape”. and now it’s the exact opposite; if you don’t show up to camp in the best shape of your life you don’t have many chances of making the team!)
What this means concretely from a program design standpoint is that:
- Your speed work is going to be comprised mostly of transitional sprints and drills
- Your conditioning volume is going to be much higher and as specific as possible to the game of hockey (energy system wise)
- The lifting part of your training is going to focus on work capacity, i.e. done mostly in circuit fashion.
So the lifting part of a lower body day (for a 4x/week program) might look something like this:
A1- KB swings 3 x 15
A2- Bunkie Side Plank (top leg only) 3 x 15sec/side
A3- 2-Way Skater 3 x (2 x 6)/side
A4- Split Squat Iso-Hold 3 x 30sec/side
A5- Stability Ball Knee Tucks 3 x 10
A6- 3-Way Split Stance Stability Ball Hold w/ Perturbation 3 x (3 x 10sec)/side
This is actually a circuit that comes from one of our late off-season program at Endeavor. The goal is really just to give an example of a lifting circuit might look like. The circuit concept would also apply for upper body days, just with different exercises.
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Kevin Neeld is definitely one of the smartest strength coaches I know; he has a lot of knowledge, he knows how to apply that knowledge and he really understands how to train athletes as he’s well aware of the demands and reality they’re facing from competing at a high level. Kevin is also an incredible person to talk to, and he is very generous of his time; he kindly accepted to contribute to my website and share his knowledge with you, my readers.
Knowing that groin injuries are growing at an alarming rate in the athletic population, especially in hockey players, I asked Kevin what 3 tips he would give to athletes trying to avoid groin injuries.
Enter Kevin:
“It’s a great topic and one that I think more athletes need to familiarize themselves with. I’ve written a lot about specific strategies on how both prevent and deal with these injuries, but over the last year I’ve discovered that there are a couple more basic messages that athletes need to understand first.
1) Take time off Most groin strains come about because of overuse, or probably more accurately, under recovery. The prevalence of groin strains amongst all athletes, but hockey players especially has drastically increased over the last 10 years. Not coincidentally, so has the emphasis on year-round sports participation and early specialization. It’s imperative that athletes play at least two sports WITH DISCTINCT OFF-SEASONS up through high school. Pairing up sports like hockey and baseball, football and lacrosse, or basketball and soccer allow athletes to benefit from the different movement strategies used in the two sports, force them to take a break from one sport while they pursue the other, and provide time for actual training (e.g. strength and conditioning) during the “third” part of the year.
Far better option for young hockey players during the summer instead of hockey summer leagues
Vladimir Issurin, world expert on block periodization and consultant to the Soviet and Israeli Olympic programs points out that we’ve replaced preparation time with competition time. No training and no rest is a recipe for groin strains.
2) Train Year-Round
This may seem counterintuitive based on the previous paragraph, but hear me out. Most groin strains come about as a result of a stiffness or an activation/strength imbalance across the hips. In the off-season, it’s important that athletes train to improve their overall athletic capacity (strength, speed, power, conditioning) to prepare for the demands of their sport. In-season athletes need to train to maintain (or continue to improve depending on the athlete) their athleticism. If athletes get weaker as the season goes on, then they will need to play at a higher percentage of their total capacity to maintain the same performance level as early in the season. Ultimately this means that athletes will have a diminished ability to perform at a high level at the end of the season, when perfect performance is most important. They also need to train in-season to REVERSE some of the undesired adaptations that result from playing their sport so much. As an example, as the season goes on some hockey players have a tendency to lose hip internal rotation ROM. An internal rotation deficit is associated with hip labral tears, and can put constant (and unnecessary) strain on the groin musculature.
The labrum is the ring of cartilage that surrounds the hip joint socket. It prevents the femural head from moving out place.
By focusing on maintaining strength and balance across the hips, we can help maximize performance and minimize injury risk.
3) Don’t be a hero in the 1st half of the season When athletes don’t prepare or prepare insufficiently for the start of a new season, it’s pretty common for a few to suffer slight groin “tweaks” during pre-season camps and early on in the season. This is simply the result of a huge increase in the volume of high velocity movement without adequate preparation. These injuries tend to go away in a couple weeks if they’re handled the right way. By “the right way” I mean by taking time off from anything that causes it pain, stretching the glutes, doing psoas activation work, and strengthening the adductors in a shortened position using exercises like the 2-Way Med Ball Crush.
Preferably done with a shirt on…
I’ve seen too many athletes, high on their own enthusiasm, fight through the pain/discomfort and keep playing. I know how difficult it is to take time away from your sport when 95% of your body feels great, but it’s a necessity. Groin “tweaks” become mild tears, which become sports hernias if unaddressed. The time to fight through pain is the playoffs, not the first half of the season. An extra week off could be the difference between your tweak healing stronger or laying the foundation for surgery in the future.”
Thanks Kevin for your words of wisdom! Make sure to check out Kevin’s website HERE.
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I came across a study yesterday (thanks to my colleague Kevin Neeld) on ice hockey and the relationship of physiological components with actual on-ice performance. Before discussing the results of the study, what I found especially interesting with this specific study is that they were interested in the actual on-ice performance during games. Most studies measuring physiological attributes (such as strength, speed, VO2 max, body fat, etc) usually relate these aspects to on-ice performance, but not very often to actual in-game performance; results will most of the time be compared to on-ice skating speed, endurance and the like.
In this study by Peyer et Al., the physiological measures were compared to in-game performance in the form of plus/minus scores. The characteristics measured were:
Age
Height
Weight
Body mass
Body fat %
VO2 Max
Repeated off-ice speed test (in the form of 12 x 110 meters sprints)
Strength tests (in the form of push ups, chin ups, leg press and bench press)
On-ice speed tests (dot-to-dot, short lightning, and lap sprint)
Plus/minus on the ice during games
A significant correlation was found between the repeated off-ice sprint test, 3 strength tests (chin ups, leg press and bench press) and the plus/minus scores. The players who performed the best on the repeated sprint test and the 3 strength tests had a better plus/minus score. What is equally interesting to me is that body fat percentage and Vo2 max, which are two highly rated and utilized tests in the hockey community, had no relevance whatsoever with actual in-game performance.
Good Predictor of Hockey Performance?
If you’ve been using a no-nonsense approach to training hockey players (prioritizing strength, using an interval-based system for conditioning, etc) you’re probably not very surprised by the results of this study. It’s interesting to me that the research world is actually coming up with concrete results that support and back some of the stuff we’ve been trying to spread in the strength and conditioning world.
It is obvious that there is a need for more research to be done on physiological components and their relation to in-game performance, as this study (like any study out there) has its flaws. The first one is the fact that the study has been done on only one college hockey team (NCAA D-1), so only 24 players were part of the study. In an ideal world we would want a bigger sample of players to contribute to the results. Also, the in-game measure that was used was the plus/minus score of each player. Although the plus/minus score gives a good idea about a player’s offensive and defensive abilities and reflects on-ice performance decently, there are other factors that affect this score. For example, the goalie’s performance can positively or negatively affect the outcome of one player’s plus/minus; if the goalie is really good and allows very few goals during games, even when he faces a lot of shots, it can positively affect a player’s plus/minus score. And the opposite is also true if the goalie is terrible and allows many goals, the plus/minus score will be affected negatively.
In conclusion, this study gives us a good lead on what might be more appropriate tests that actually co-relate to in-game performance and what physiological attributes might be more relevant for hockey players to focus on.
References
Peyer KL, Pivarnik JM, Eisenmann JC, Vorkapich M. (2011). Physiological characteristics of national collegiate athletic association division I ice hockey players and their relation to game performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(5):1183-92.
Sled drags are probably the best option for conditioning in the early off-season for hockey players. After spending 7-9 months on the ice pretty much everyday, in a hip flexed position and stressing the hip joint with the skating stride over and over, hockey players’ hips need a break.
The early off-seas0n is definitely not the time to hammer the volume on the players, not with the lifting, not with the conditioning. They need a good amount of corrective exercises and things that will help them reverse the damages a long season will put on their body. You want to follow the same mentality with the conditioning protocols. It’s definitely not the time to use shuttle runs and slideboards. And as far as the stationary bike goes, even if it’s easier on the joints, you’d still be stuck in hip flexion sitting on the bike.
Sled drags are a great option as in puts the athlete in a pretty upright position, it requires a good amount of active hip extension (reverse the tight hip flexors effect), and there is no eccentric stress, so it’s a lot easier on the joints including the hips, but also the knees and ankles.
Take it easy on your hockey players in the early stage of the off-season conditioning wise; they need some recovery from the season. So the overall conditioning volume should be pretty low, and joint-friendly and full range-of-motion modalities like the sled drag are optimal.
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If you have been following my website for a while now, you probably know that I’m a big advocate of an appropriate long term development plan for every athletes. I strongly stand against early sport specialization and I honestly think that if we would get away from that, we would have a lot less of injuries in sports and surgeries related to overuse. It is very hard to get people to understand that when you have 90% of people involved in sports training (parents, coaches and trainers) that advocate the exact opposite: if you want to get better in a certain sport, you need to play more and more and more and do it year-round as young as possible so you can develop better.
I went into great details in previous blog posts why this is a totally retarded way of thinking. By doing so, you’re not developping better athletes, you’re actually developping patterns for overuse injuries. That being said, it is our job as strength coaches to educate athletes and parents on why this is so bad and how they should go about training the right way and following a good development model for optimal development and long career as injury-free as possible.
The first step to take in that direction is obviously to have the different national sport associations to endorse a good development model and help promote that to organizations, coaches, parents and players. The big problem we have right now is that these organizations don’t get it. So when you see steps taken in the right direction, it’s really satifying to know that they start to get it and want to help change the trend that is currently poisoning most sports. Mike Boyle gave a presentation about the long term athletic development for hockey players to USA Hockey a couple of days ago. Coach Boyle is one of the smartest, most experienced strength coach out there; he has seen it all in his long career and he has probably trained more hockey players than anybody else in the world. Most athletes he trains, if not all, turn out to have long careers and very few injuries; so, there’s gotta be something he’s doing right. Here is the video of the presentation. I need to warn you that it is an hour and 20 minutes long, but make sure you listen to it; it’s all really worth it.
To me, to know that USA Hockey actually took a step in the right direction and took the time to listen what coach Boyle had to say, tells a lot about the organization and where they’re headed (they also made several changes within the organization and to their development model recently). Don’t be surprised to see more and more American hockey players emerge at the pro levels in the next decade or two.
Please, if you know anyone involved (closely or not) in sports, you need to forward this blog post or just the video to them, whether they’re parents, coaches, athletes and anyone else.
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!
I usually want to put original content on my website, but for today’s post I am just gonna simply put up 2 very interesting links you should definitely check out.
1. This is an interview my colleague Kevin Neeld did with me last week that he posted on his website. He asks me questions mainly on hockey development, but also on supplements and the personal training business versus the strength and conditioning business. When Kevin sent me his questions, I just answered them right away without asking myself any questions. But when I re-read it when it went on his website last Friday I was proud of the way it turned out; I realized that there is a lot of valuable information, especially on the development of hockey players at different levels, that is definitely worth the read. If you haven’t already checked it out, you can right now by clicking HERE.
2. The second one is a blog post written by Brian St. Pierre on conventional dairy products. I read that post just last week and to say it was an eye-opener for me would be an understatement. Brian presents some shocking facts about how dairy products are handled and produced. This is a MUST READ for anyone concerned about their nutrition. Since reading it last week, I am truly reconsidering my dairy intake on a daily basis and might just cut the majority of it from my diet sooner than later. make sure you check it out HERE.
