TRICKS ON HOW to GAIN MUSCLE & STRENGTH

Video: Advanced Hockey Shooting Techniques

Below you will learn more about how to train for hockey and why hockey training is different than training for anything else. You can also check out our weekly hockey training articles or our hockey training videos as well.

Why Hockey Training is Different
Below I will demonstrate the different details involved in hockey training program design and why a separate, more specialized approach is required outside of the normal bodybuilding training philosophies that most people use.

It’s not a bad thing to do bodybuilding workouts, some training is better than no training, but that approach to training is a far cry from what would be an optimal routine for a hockey player.

The majority of the time these “average” workout plans are used by hockey players for one of the following reasons:

They saw it in a magazine
It’s what their friends are doing
They wanted a beach body
They’re trying to design their own training programs and have limited knowledge in strength and conditioning
They have a personal trainer designing their training programs who has limited knowledge in strength and conditioning
All of the above reasons are the most common I come across when consulting with a new athlete.

Now reasons one through four all make logical sense right? A hockey player is expected to be a hockey player. He is on the ice because he is an incredible athlete and he is looking to improve his game even further so he can make the jump to the juniors, semi-pro’s or even the pro leagues.

How does he do this? He hits the gym of course.

But with his primary focus being an athlete plus the fact that he may not be trying to make a career out of strength and conditioning, he doesn’t have time to review and research every aspect of periodization, strength qualities, strength curves, biomechanics, recovery, physiology, biochemistry, nutrition, supplementation, program design structure, proper muscular balance among many other things.

It is simply way too much to ask of an athlete to train himself (at least properly anyways), he can try, but it will be a defeating technique.

Believe it or not, just because you are a certified personal trainer it doesn’t mean that you know jack about training or the human body.

Everybody reading this, provided they are over 18, can become a personal trainer in a weekend if they want to. Yeah you read that right, a weekend. So when choosing a trainer in your area, choose wisely and ask for credentials, testimonials, pictures and who they have worked with or been mentored by. They should also be able to show you your ideal periodization for the year and explain why.

With that out of the way I can now discuss why hockey training is different from the average approach and what you should be looking for in a hockey performance training system.

Each of these topics could stand alone as full books on their own as there is so much to discuss in their implications to hockey performance. But for the sake of keeping this article just an article, I will touch on the important but easy to comprehend factors behind them.

Structural Balance:
Structural balance is an absolute key component to achieving maximum speed, agility, strength, prevention of injury and power output. By structural balance, I simply mean you must have proper muscular and strength balance in three categories:

A) From your upper body to your lower body
B) From your left side to your right side
C) Between smaller muscle making up larger muscle groups in a localized area. For example, your hamstrings. Your hamstrings are made up of several different muscle and the strength balance between them plays a role in skating performance

When one side performs better than the other, your risk of injury drastically increases as you are putting the body in an awkward position during movement and if one side can output a force greater than your other side, this can very quickly lead to strains and pulls.

There are many structural imbalances hockey players naturally create simply by playing the game. Hockey players are notorious for having strong glutes and weak hamstrings, being imbalanced in their upper body based on which side they shoot with, and also having a poor balance in the quadriceps, mainly a weak VMO. These are just a few examples, and among them, everybody is different.

So incorporating proper program design to address these issues is absolutely vital. You are only as strong as your weakest link, if an imbalance is present, it will hold back your entire bodies performance. So something as simple as correcting an imbalance in your quadriceps could result in much faster skating on the ice. Or correcting weak lats would have a profound impact on your shot power.

Hockey players perform very repetitive motions using the same muscles over and over again. Re-correcting this in the weight room is one of the top priorities for hockey performance training.

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