As I mentioned last week, my friend and colleague Kevin Neeld is releasing is Ultimate Hockey Training book this upcoming Wednesday!  This will be a book on hockey training like you’ve never seen before.  Most of the hockey products out there are pretty outdated as the majority of them were written or produced in the late 80′s-early 90′s and the information contained in them is flat-out outdated.

Kevin worked really hard (trust me, I know; we share the same office) to put together the most recent information available, combined with his many years of experience training hockey players to bring you the most comprehensive hockey product to date.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the information contained in this book will completely blow your mind away!  One of the things Kevin covers in great details in his book is hockey-specific conditioning.  To give you a sneak-peak, Kevin put together a free hockey conditioning webinar that describes:

I just wanted to write a quick post today to let you know that my friend and colleague from Endeavor, Kevin Neeld just posted a free webinar on transitional speed for hockey players.  Kevin will be releasing his long awaited book, Ultimate Hockey Training next week, and he put up a webinar about speed training for hockey for you to watch completely free.  This video will be leading up to his book launch next week.  In the webinar Kevin discusses:

• · Why most hockey players are doing the right speed training for the wrong sport
• · Why hockey players shouldn’t do “agility” training ever again
• · How to progress speed training exercises to make them more hockey-specific
• · How speed training fits into a complete training program

You can check out this FREE webinar by clicking on the link below:

Transitional Speed Training for Hockey

I’m working with Kevin on a day-to-day basis, and I can tell you he put an incomparable amount of work in the writting and publishing of his book.  The results will speak for themselves when you see the book when it comes out next week.  It is something like I’ve never seen before when it comes to hockey training.  It will definitely raise the bar in terms of hockey products out there.  I’ll just put it this way: the information you’ll find in that book will blow your mind away!

In the meantime, Kevin is offering you a free webinar that will get you thinking about the speed and agility work you do with your hockey players.  Definitely a must watch!  Here’s the link again:

Transitional Speed Training for Hockey

Stay tuned!  I will have more cool stuff on hockey training from Kevin next week!

This week I’m on vacation and will give you links to stuff you should definitely read!  There has been some great material on the internet the last couple of weeks, and I think you shouldn’t miss out on it.  So without further ado, there it is:

Lose Tension to Get Quick – Kelly Baggett.  To be quick, the focus is often on stiffness and rate of force development, but in this blog post featured on Eric Cressey’s website, Kelly touches an important, yet almost always forgotten point, on the importance of being able to relax to be able to get quicker.  Confused? Read Kelly’s post!

In-Season Hockey Training – Kevin Neeld.  My friend and colleague Kevin Neeld wrote a great piece about in-season training for hockey players.  Now is a great time for everyone involved in hockey to read this post because hockey players across the country are starting training camps and getting ready for the next season.  Kevin addresses what should be the focus of an in-season program.

Getting Into Your Toes – Charlie Weingroff.  Yet another brilliant post from Charlie on the importance of the foot/toes complex.  It is a very overlooked area of the body among the strength and conditioning crew.  In this one, he talks about foot and toes position during various exercises, namely exercises that are performed in the 1/2 kneeling position.

Inverted Face Pulls – Ben Bruno.  Just another creative exercise from Ben Bruno.  Ben has been posting many new innovative exercises through his blog and his YouTube channel.  He deserves some recognition for that! Aaand he’s been linking to my blog for a long time now, so I kinda owe him too!

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’m on vacation this week (don’t worry I didn’t bring my lap top to the beach, I just wrote these posts last week!), so I will keep the posts short, but hopefully you can still something out of them!

About two weeks ago my colleague Kevin Neeld posted a video on how to assess for femoral anteversion and retroversion.  The video why this type of assessment might be very important, especially for hockey players.  Kevin also explains in detail how to assess range of motion at the hips.  If you haven’t seen it on his website already, make sure you watch the video below!

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This is an analogy that I stole from my colleague and friend Kevin Neeld (who’s breathing over my shoulder while I write this).  I think it clearly illustrates the message I’ve been trying to spread for as long as this blog has been going on. I’ll explain in more details after…

As requested by Kevin, a (recent) picture to give him credit for the analogy

Think of injury threshold as a bucket.  All the undesired stress and faulty movement patterns or positions you impose on your body are drops of water in the bucket.  As you accumulate these “bad” things it adds drops of water, and the bucket keeps filling up.  Sure, doing one thing wrong (e.g. deadlifting with a rounded back) might not hurt you by doing it once (water won’t spill). You might not even get injured by doing it 100 times, but it keeps adding drops of water in the bucket, and that bucket just keeps filling up, and eventually the water will spill.  This is how most injuries happen: it’s an accumulation of stresses and faulty movements that will eventually lead you to threshold.

Somebody’s filling up his bucket…

This is why I find very stupid the argument “but I’ve done this or that for 5 years; it works and I never got injured”.  My first response to that would be “you didn’t get injured…yet”.  Everything might feel alright…until it doesn’t.

Training athletes everyday, I realize the importance of this concept and need to do everything in my power to avoid the water spilling out of the bucket with all of them.  This is why I’m very picky with what my athletes do inside and outside the gym.  I wanna make sure they do everything possible to stay healthy in the long run.

The first step is to try to remove everything from their training that might contribute to filling the bucket.  Whether it is avoiding Olympic lifts with my baseball pitchers because the lifts are very stressful on their elbows and wrists, or making sure my athletes move well from their hips and don’t move excessively at the lumbar spine, it is my job to avoid those additional drops of water in the bucket.  Also, strategies such as foam rolling, corrective exercises and the like can play a big part in actually removing drops from the bucket.

One thing that is equally important to understand is that some sporting movements such as the skating stride (that is pretty unnatural for the hips) in ice hockey and the pitching motion (that puts tremendous stress on the shoulder) in baseball are contributing to adding drops in the bucket.  This is why it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to do everything possible to limit additional unnecessary drops in the bucket, as well as contributing to take some water out with said modalities for the long term health of our athletes.

What are you doing to avoid the spill?

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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.

For those who missed part 1, make sure to read it HERE first.  I highlighted how easy social network tools like Facebook and Twitter have made our pursuit of continuing education in the fitness and strength and conditioning industry.  You just have to “friend” or “like” the smart people in the industry that put quality information out here to easily access their material through your News Feed page.

In last week’s post I mentioned that this post would be to give an list of good people to follow and “friend” on Facebook and Twitter to get access to good material.  So without further ado, here it is:

“Friend” on Facebook:

Alan Aragon, nutrition
Anthony Renna, from StrengthCoach.com and StrengthandConditioningWebinars.com
Ben Bruno (also on Twitter @benbruno1), from Mike Boyle S&C
Bret Contreras (also on Twitter @ bretcontreras), writer for T-Nation
Brian Grasso, from S&C coach and IYCA founder
Brian St. Pierre (also on Twitter @BSPNutrition), nutrition
Brijesh Patel, S&C coach at Qunnipiac
Chad Waterbury, writer for T-Nation
Charlie Weingroff, S&C coach and PT
Craig Liebenson, chiropractor and ART specialist
Dana Cavalea (also on Twitter @danacavalea), New York Yankees S&C coach
Dan John, renowned coach
Dave Ruel, nutrition
David Tate, from EliteFTS.com
Endeavor Fit
Indy Fast, Bill Hartman & Mike Robertson’s facility
James Smith, from Diesel Crew
Jim Wendler, from EliteFTS.com
Joe Dowdell (also on Twitter @joedowdellnyc), Peak Performance owner and celebrity trainer
Joseph Heiler, PT and founder of SportRehabExpert.com
Juan Carlos Santana, renowned S&C coach
Kelly Baggett, speed and power training expert
Kevin Larrabee, from Mike Boyle S&C and the Fitcast
Kevin Neeld (also on Twitter @KevinNeeld)
Lee Taft, speed training expert
Leigh Peele (also on Twitter @LeighPeele), nutrition
Mark Young (also on Twitter @MarkYoungTrain), research expert
Matt Siniscalchi, S&C coach and speed training expert
Mike Reinolds (also on Twitter @mikereinoldblog), PT for the Boston Red Sox
Mike Robertson (@RobTrainSystems)
Nate Green (also on Twitter @nategreen03), from Precision Nutrition
Patrick Ward (also on Twitter @OSPpatrick), manual therapist and PT
Perry Nickelston (also on Twitter @laserdr), manual therapist and FMS, SFMA specialist
Sam Leahy, former intern from Cressey Performance and Mike Boyle S&C
Sean Hyson, Men’s Fitness editor
Sean Skahan (also on Twitter @SeanSkahan), Anaheim Ducks S&C coach
Sue Falsone (also on Twitter @suefalsone), PT at Athlete’s Performance
Tony Gentilcore (also on Twitter @tonygentilcore1), from Cressey Performance

Follow on Twitter:

Jaime Rodriguez (@Jrodstrength), S&C coach
Gray Coook (@graycookPT), PT and book author
John Romaniello, fat loss expert
Todd Durkin, pro athlete trainer and business owner
Diesel Crew (@dieselstrength)
Mike Roussell, nutrition
Jeff Cubos, chiropractic sports specialist and hockey expert
Anatomy Trains, Thomas Myers’ great work on fascia and the human body
Charles Poliquin, world famous S&C coach
Eric Cressey, world famous S&C coach
Mike Boyle (@mikeboyle1959), world famous S&C coach

Obviously there are probably 100s of professionals out there that haven’t listed or that I don’t know about, but this what I have on my Facebook and Twitter pages for now!  And with the decent list I just gave you, you have a good place to start!

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After my blog post from last week on the Bench Press Alternatives for Bum Shoulders, I thought it might be a good idea to do the same kind of post on the knees.  Let’s face it, the knee is probably one of the most troublesome joints in the body, especially amongst athletes.  Before we delve into the squat and lunge alternatives for your bum knees, I’ll mention the same thing I mentioned in my bench press post; before getting started with any of these exercises, if you have pain, you need to consult a qualified professional and get assessed.  You need to clear out any underlying issues that might aggravate your problem before getting started.  And also makes sure when you try one of these exercises that you can perform them totally pain-free, because as you probably know by now, pain equals irritation, and irritation equals your knee not getting better.  Now that we got the boring stuff out of the way, let’s move on to the good stuff!

- Sled Drags and Prowler Push. The sled drag might be one of the most knee-friendly alternatives to heavy squat and lunges.  Most knee pains occur at a significant amount of knee flexion (read: when the knee is bent close to 90°).  Sled drags and Prowler pushes (with a high grip) involve a lot less knee flexion than any squat variation.  The other advantage the Sled drag and Prowler push have is that they don’t have an eccentric action; it’s mostly concentric actions as you keep moving forward and driving your feet into the ground.  You really have no forces to decelerate.  For some people with knee pain, eccentric contractions may be more painful.  And even if it’s not the case, it still put less stress on your joints.

- Deadlift variations. Posterior chain exercises can usually be done pain-free because they involve less knee flexion and they put most of the stress on the posterior chain (hamstring, glutes, lumbar erectors).  If you’re going to use deadlift variations, depending on how bad your knees hurt, you might want to start with more straight-legs variations.  The first one to try is definitely the SLDL (Stiff-Leg Deadlift) because it involves almost no knee flexion at all:

Then you can move to Rack Pulls, which involve a little more knee flexion (depending on where you set up the pins):

And if your knees allow more flexion without pain, you can try and pull from the floor, either with a straight bar or with a trap bar:

- Box Squat. This is an option for when your knees start to feel better.  The box squat is a great option because, even if it’s technically a quad dominant exercise (also means more stressful on the knees), the goal is to sit as far back as possible on the box.  The result is that it shifts your weight posteriorly to make it less knee dominant.  Charlie Weingroff went into great detail in his DVDs Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training about how the box squat keeps you more in a vertical shin position, and therefore it puts less stress on your knees.  Everybody that has been dealing with some sort of knee pain and want to reintroduce the squat in their training should re-learn to squat with (at least somewhat of) a vertical shin:

- Split Squat Isometric Holds. These are not much of a typical strength training option, but it can be a great addition to your training for different reasons; single-leg endurance, conditioning purposes, etc.  So if you can tolerate some knee flexion, holding an isometric position for time usually doesn’t irritate the knees.

Split Squat Holds can be very versatile, and if you get creative like Kevin Neeld (seriously, he’s sooo smart) you can use them this way:

Having pain and injuries is probably the most frustrating thing in the world for athletes and weekend warriors alike.  The last thing you want is be reminded constantly of the things you can’t do; that’s why it’s important to find alternatives and focus on what the athlete actually CAN do! As my colleague Eric Cressey puts it: ” you want to feel like an athlete, not like a patient”.

My colleague Kevin Neeld was having a phone conversation with a fellow strength and conditioning coach on the phone yesterday, and since we share the same office I couldn’t help but hear everything he was saying.

Sharing an office with Kevin is sooooo much fun

He was talking about the way we do things at Endeavor and how it might be different for other coaches in different settings.  That got me thinking on how important it is to take your setting into consideration with the way you do assessments, write programs, coach your athletes, etc.

At Endeavor, we are training mostly hockey players, which means that we are super busy during the summer months (May through August) which is the hockey off-season and the rest of the year during the hockey season things are slower and we train some athletes from other sports that are in their off-season (mostly baseball, soccer and lacrosse).  The athletes we train from those other sports also happen to be much younger than the college/pro hockey players we train in the summer; most of them are 16 and under.  We do mostly small group training and the time we spend with our athletes every week is not a lot.  In that type of setting, we do things differently than we would with a professional team or in a college setting for example.

Doesn’t exactly look like Endeavor!

It might come as a big surprise to many that we currently don’t have an assessment or testing protocol with our new athletes.  Some may argue that testing and assessing every new athlete that walks through your door is of utmost importance, and they might be right.  But again it comes down to the fact that you need to do what’s best in your own situation.  With the little time we see our athletes, we can’t afford to waste our time with things that are not going to be top priorities.  And the truth is that we used to have an assessment protocol which was basically the FMS (functional movement screen) and some goniometer measurements, but we realized after using that protocol for a while that it didn’t change the way we were writing programs anyway.

Hurdle step test from the FMS

So why do it in the first place?  Even athletes playing the same sports will need to be trained pretty much the same way, but I will admit that there might be some individual differences between athletes playing the same sport.  But the thing that we found out is that we can always identify the problems just by observing our athletes move during the warm up and the rest of the training.  If you’ve been around long enough, major dysfunctions are easily identifiable and adjustments on the programs can be made on the fly.  We also have a high number of younger athletes, and they definitely don’t present with as many restrictions (if any) as some of the older athletes will.  We’ve been quite successful with that approach, both from a time management and injury prevention standpoint.

A similar situation presents itself with performance testing; most of our athletes (for the older ones at least) get tested by their own team at the end of the season and at the beginning of training camp.  So where’s the need for performance testing really when they provide us with all the data they/we need anyway twice a year, sometimes more.

There are many factors that will determine how you implement your system and the way you work with your athletes.  These include, but are not limited to:

- Number of athletes per group

- Sports the athletes play (do all athlete within a group play the same sport?)

- Age of the athletes and training experience

- Number of coach-to-athlete ratio

- Time available with athletes every session and every week

- Equipment available

- Setting of your facility (how your facility is divided and if you can keep an eye on everyone all the time)

- Experience

- Etc.

As you can see it leaves a lot of possibilities depending on many different factors.  You can’t judge what someone does until you’ve seen what their situation is.  Every good strength coach or trainer out there does things differently because they are in a different setting.  Eric Cressey assesses and writes an individual program for every client and athlete that trains at his facility.  Mike Boyle, who’s an equally good and successful coach doesn’t assess anyone and have all his athletes from the same sport on the same program.  Who’s right and who’s wrong? Again, I think they’re both right because they do what’s best for their own situation.

All in all, it’s very important to be able to adapt.  In my opinion, it might be what distinguishes the great coaches for the good ones.  Analyze, apply and adjust things in order to be as efficient as possible in your situation and to get the best results possible for your athletes.