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I posted a thing the other day – we were talking about stamina training during the in season. And how during the off season we will do shuttle runs, change of direction, vertical agility, not smashing into your butterfly and causing a bunch of wear and tear on your hips. But things that sort of are very multi-directional, both north south east west, but also up down. Because we need to build that stamina the way that you need it on the ice. And a lot of you aren’t on the ice as much during the off season as you are, and some of you not at all, as you are during the season.
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So, a common mistake is people actually stop stamina training altogether, or they keep trying to do the same kind of stamina training they did in the off season. Which is gonna add a lot of wear and tear to your hips, which already are taking the brunt of it on the ice. So, we don’t need to do that.
It’s a time when we want to build our stamina, especially if we’re not on the ice that much. If you’re on the ice five times a week and you’re playing games and your practicing hard, don’t worry about stamina at all. But some of you are like, “Hey, my team has one practice a week and we play one game and that’s it,” that’s not gonna be enough training to keep you fit for the season, so you need to do extra stamina training, probably two stamina sessions if you’re on the ice two times.
Those stamina sessions, we want them to still be high intensity. And I don’t mean high intensity like going for a five mile run or a steady long duration. It’s gonna be short duration, repeated bursts.
Then you’re gonna do something that isn’t too much wear and tear on your body. So, if you’re a runner, like a natural runner, you can do it running. Some of your just are not made to run. That’s why you’re hockey players, because you sucked at any running sport, but skating, you’re pretty good.
I don’t mind the elliptical actually because it’s no impact and it actually gets you into a little bit of hip extension, so a lot of us spend time sitting in school or work, and then we get on the ice and we’re in our ready position on our hip, we go home, we sit on the sofa. Our hips are always chronically flexed. Even like when I sleep, I pull my knees up to sleep.
So, probably 12 hours at least a day my hips are in a flexed position, and your body doesn’t know, “Oh, that’s not good to have my hip muscles shortened in the front.” It just knows, “We don’t actually need all this length because we hardly ever use it.” So, elliptical, that’s nice because it’s sort of a functional, rhythmic exercise but it gets you into some hip extension.
I don’t mind StairMaster. I actually don’t even mind the bicycle, although the problem with the bicycle is it gets you in that hip flex position again. So, I don’t love it. If you did it once a week during the in season. We try not to use it at all in the off season unless there’s an injury or there’s something specific we’re trying to work on. But yeah, once a week in the in season, yeah, I don’t mind, and then do something else. But trying to do something to get your hips into a little bit extension.
Over in the Shutout Academy, some people even just do stair step in their house. Again, we want to try to make it so that it’s less wear and tear on your joints if possible.
Then the other thing somebody asked about was speed training. They said, “Well, if I’m doing stamina twice a week and then I have to do speed and then do my lift, this is gonna be, I just don’t have time to do it.” And it’s totally true.
What we do over in the Shutout Academy is we work our speed, we integrate it into our full body strength so that again, the in season training is made just to keep you sharp.
Some people are like, “I hate the word maintenance. We don’t do anything for maintenance. We’re always trying to get better.” Yes, we’re always trying to get better, but not at the cost of taking away from your performance on the ice.
So, if we really wanted to make you stronger in the in season, we’d have you in the gym three or four days a week doing heavy lifting, like off season type volume. We don’t want to do that in season, so we cut the volume way back and we just work on building, keeping that max strength, working on that rate of force production, which is power. So we integrate some of our speed and agility into those sort of compound sets or super sets that we use over in the Shutout Academy.
That’s how we tie it all in, and we still keep the workouts pretty short. They only take maybe around 40 minutes to get through.
So, that’s how you’re gonna do that so that you shouldn’t be heading to the gym five days a week during your season, unless you don’t practice or play games.
Also, if you’re on a team where you’re just not really playing in that many games yet, then make sure you’re keeping up with your stamina outside. And it sucks, because I know you gotta go to the games and you gotta sit on the bench and you have to be there, but you need to make up for it because then what’s gonna happen is if you’re like, “Oh yeah, well, we had a practice and a game. I’m good,” or whatever. When your opportunity comes, you’re gonna run out of gas and you’re not gonna play your best, and then you might lose that opportunity, and then you’ll be awfully sour because you’ll think, “Why didn’t I just do my stamina training so that I could really shine when I got my chance?”
So, that’s all I have for you today. I just wanted to pop on, talk a little bit about how we do stamina and how we do speed training because your in season training should be very different from your off season training. So, if you’re trying to do the same things you did in the off season, or if you’re not training at all, that’s another uh-oh, whoopsie. We want to fix that.
See you. Cheers.