Feature Story

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Weight room is just a piece of the puzzle

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

Last week I referred to “beach balls” and was thoroughly corrected. They’re physio-balls or Swiss-balls, and it’s blasphemous to call ‘em “beach balls.”

This week I’m at it again — adding the weight room to the list, and I have no doubt that feathers will be ruffled further. But it’s true: the place of the weight room in the development of hockey talent is overrated.

Please understand, the weight room and the use of physio-balls and balance boards can contribute much to the development process, but strength training is just one piece of the puzzle — a small piece, but very important. VERY IMPORTANT.

There. I’m on record. Strength training is important. So are stickhandling skills, skating, shooting, vision, multi-tasking, rink sense, competitiveness and toughness — speed, quickness, agility, coordination, endurance, core stability, and dynamic balance.

The issue is … PRIORITIES.

This is where you can’t trust the outside experts. The guys who never saw a hockey game until after the snow was shoveled and outside rinks were flooded. Guys with initials after their names and Latin words for our body parts.

Priorities. That’s where the experts needed guidance from hockey folks, and it never happened in our country. Hockey people never sat down and drew a picture of the final product. They never told the experts what they were supposed to develop when they worked with our kids.

Priorities are pretty simple, really. We’d like kids to grow up with skating skills like Gaborik, Kariya and Natalie Darwitz. Poise, vision and rink sense like Crosby, Gretzky, Broten and Jenny Potter. A passion for scoring like Ovechkin, Ciccarreli and Hayley Wickenheiser. A shot like Kovalchuk, Iginla, Heatley and Reed Larson. Stick skills like Martin St. Louis, Sean Skinner and Krissy Wendell.

It’s like owning an assembly plant in Detroit — having a thousand people on the line, each one a true expert at his/her own little piece of the puzzle. But until someone draws a picture of the final product — a car, a truck or a van — there is no guidance for the experts on the line, and their effort is wasted.

This is where we are in hockey: experts — each of them terrific at what they do — but very few of them who understand how different hockey is from other sports. Maybe they never saw Lefleur and Orr skate — Hull and Hull shoot or Sean Skinner handle a puck. Maybe they didn’t know how much time has to be spent on the pond to develop that Gretzky-like rink sense.

Skinner, for those who’ve never seen him in person, has no peer with a stick and a puck, and once you’ve seen him demonstrate, you’d know that practicing his stickhandling routines would make anyone a better hockey player. Priorities? This is one.

Shooting? Watch the great Russian players get shots off from awkward positions — not coasting toward the net until they feel comfortable, but shooting before others would, or could. This is what they practiced as kids, so this is what they do better than others. Priorities? This has to be right up near the top of the list.

Skating fundamentals, agility, quickness and balance — perhaps the highest priority.

Once you start making the list, hockey skills and athleticism are obviously at the very top. Therefore, we should have asked the endurance experts, “Can we gain endurance as a byproduct when we practice these other priorities?”

The answer is “yes.” However, we let the assembly line workers decide the outcome, and they told our kids to jog around the lake for endurance. Time wasted if we had known we could combine workouts.

Can you gain core strength and stability as a byproduct of your training for quickness, agility, and explosive leg power? Are core muscles challenged by playing sports like soccer, football, basketball, hockey, tennis, racquetball, and squash? The answer is “yes.”

But we let experts talk us into isolating core muscles in a gym. Actually, many NHL players do this — and they should — because they stopped training for athleticism once they made it to the NHL. They stopped playing games they participated in as kids, and their workouts were limited to a weight room and a bike.

How can we gain strength at any age — in or out of the weight room — and at the same time, increase explosive leg power for skating? This is what the experts should have been sent off to investigate.

Hockey skills combined with athleticism. These are the essential physical qualities to play at a higher level. To picture what this looks like without the cover of hockey equipment, watch Randy Moss or Adrian Peterson on the football field. Picture Michael Jordan or Alan Iverson in basketball. That’s the combination of skills/athleticism you should train for — and you have to do it on skates!!!

That’s a full-time commitment, so you can’t afford to waste time. Prioritize your efforts. Combine your workouts. This is the key to using the experts for what they do best.

Jack Blatherwick, Ph.D., is a physiologist for the Washington Capitals.