Although an imminent lockout will probably delay the NHL season for a couple months (dammit!), hockey seasons at the amateur level are still getting under way all around the country.

The beginning of the new season also means performance testing for a lot of those teams at the youth level.  Performance testings have been around for a long time as a way to monitor progress, and (whether it’s right or not) to compare kids to each other.  The goal is to monitor the progress throughout the season, but also to monitor the progress the kids made during the off-season, assuming they have been tested on those same performance tests at the end of the previous season.

If you look a little more in depth at what “monitoring progress” means, we want to ask ourselves the question: what are we measuring in the first place?  Performance is way too vague of a term in this situation to limit the answer to that.

This could be looked at from 2 different perspectives (and I’ll explain what I mean a little later).

The first perspective we can take is the one of the performance enhancement coach, which is the most obvious one for most of you reading this post.  In this situation, what we measure is different factors, or qualities that affect performance.  This is where we need to get more specific because this is ultimately what will dictate the actual tests that we’ll use.  For example, one could decide that strength, power, anaerobic power, lactic power, and aerobic capacity are the most appropriate performance qualities to measure with a given team in a given sport.

Based on those specific qualities you’ll then want to choose tests that will give you data that will appropriately represent the qualities you are measuring.  Once you have your system in place (performance qualities, and specific tests to use), the next step is to perform those tests on the players, and establish what intervals you want to test your athletes at.  For example, you might want to test your athletes at the beginning of the season, mid-season, and at the end of the season every year.  That would give you a good idea of the in-season, as well as off-season progress for all of the players.

After running players through the performance tests, the next logical step is to put together a periodization plan, as well as designing specific training programs to improve those qualities, since they are the ones you judged relevant to your sport.  It’s a lot of work, and there are hundreds of ways to go about this when you take into consideration all the different periodization models, and training methods out there.

Periodization can look a little confusing at times…

It’s by trial and error that you’ll find out what works well for your athletes, what needs to be adjusted, and what needs to be eliminated from the program.  As you get more experienced, you’ll refine your approach; that might mean changing the qualities to develop, the performance tests to use, the periodization model you’re using, the training methods, the exercises, etc, etc, etc.

This approach seems pretty simple.  And as Dan John would put it: simple doesn’t mean easy.  What I mean is that all you’re trying to do is improve specific, measurable performance qualities in your athletes.  It’s a simple, but not necessarily easy.

The man. The legend.

Now let’s take it from that other perspective I was talking about earlier.  This is often going to be the perspective of a coach.

You want fast, strong, powerful, and well conditioned players, but ultimately you want players who perform well on the ice!  And this is when performance enhancement becomes a little more tricky.  There are other factors who come into play when we talk about on-ice, or on-field performance.  Your skill level, the players you play with, the role your coach gives you on the team, and the psychological factor are all important factors that directly impact the game.

So what exactly is performance enhancement?  Is it improving specific qualities in the hope that everything will fall in place once the athlete steps on the ice, or the field? Or is it simply improving performance (goals, assist, touchdown passes, etc) in a sport-specific context?

In the end, this is what matters.

Realistically developing specific qualities will contribute to develop a better athlete that has more chance to perform well in a sport-specific context, that’s a no-brainer.

But what if you have a player who keeps getting stronger, and more powerful in the weight room, but doesn’t seem to be improving on the ice.  What can you do as a performance enhancement coach?  Is there something you can do to help your athlete?  Can we bridge the gap?

Honestly, I don’t know what the answer is…My will to help my athletes make me not want to stop there and say: “oh well he needs to work on his skills (or his mental skills, or whatever); he got stronger, I did my job.”  Ultimately I want all of my athletes to do well in their sport before anything else; I could care less that he can deadlift 450, if he’s a healthy scratch for a half of the season.

I just know that there is more to developing an athlete than just developing his physical qualities.  And I don’t want to sit there and wait to see what happens.

I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback on the subject.  Please leave a comment below!

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.