Feature Story

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Train fast for a fast game

By Jack Blatherwick

Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

Picture the Detroit Red Wings. It’s the model that should be permanently stamped in your mind as you work out this summer. As we get into August, if your workouts — on-ice or off — don’t remind you of the Red Wings, they’re not the best you can do with your time and energy.

Speed, quickness, agility — combined with skill. These are make-or-break requirements for success in hockey and many other sports. Every coach would say they want to condition their team to play at high speed with quality skills the entire game — not just for a period or two.

When we get to the time in practice when the coach says, “OK, line up on the goal line, we’re skating” — when we get to what is called the “conditioning part of practice in any sport” — why do we condition for slowness?

Increasing “hockey endurance” should never involve slowness because there is no part of any game that can be won with slowness. There should not be one skating drill in hockey — not one sprint in football, soccer or basketball — that trains habits of slowness and poor fundamental technique.

Never sacrifice quality to gain endurance. Remember the pace of the Stanley Cup Finals if you want to move up the ladder in this game. Copy that in your training program.

Definition of “hockey endurance:” the ability to finish each game with the same high speed and quality skills you bring to the start of the game. And, I’ll add to this definition … if you don’t bring speed and quality skills to the start of the game, join me in the bleachers.

Forget the words “aerobic” and “anaerobic.” They’re distractions. They encourage training “gurus” to recommend separating your workouts into compartments — strength workouts separated at all times from speed and skill — aerobic workouts at a different time than anaerobic training.

For a game that requires all of this at the same time, this is as foolish as isolating each individual muscle, thinking that strong muscles will turn you into a great athlete like Michael Jordan, Randy Moss or Alex Ovechkin.

Developing athleticism requires training that looks and feels athletic — fast, explosive, coordinated, rhythmical movement — poetry in motion. And endurance means keeping up that fast, poetic movement for as long as it takes.

Consider just one piece of the poetry — skating. If you are unable to keep your knees bent at the end of a game or shift, it doesn’t matter if an expert with impressive language defines the problem as aerobic, anaerobic, strength endurance, or skating skill. The lingo isn’t important. At that moment, you are just as poor a skater as a beginner who has never learned correct technique.

The 1980 Olympic hockey team had, as its basic conditioning philosophy, that each practice would require faster-than-comfortable execution of skills. Short practices at the start, but by the end of the training season, these practices required “overspeed” tempo for the length of a game.

Forget Hollywood’s over-emphasis on the endless stops-and-starts that coach Brooks would pull out of his hat when he got mad — when he thought the team needed a lesson in discipline. Those lapses were outside his true plan for conditioning.

The goal was to play hockey in the high-speed comfort zone that the Soviets developed with each of their practices. As a player — a veteran of two Olympic teams — Brooks had experienced the discomfort of playing the Soviets on their terms. It was much too fast for teams that hadn’t practiced for months at an “overspeed” pace.

Here’s why the traditional approach doesn’t work. When all-out skating drills last more than 20 seconds, the remainder of the drill is an effective practice for slowness. The neuromuscular memory bank isn’t smart enough to determine which movements it is supposed to remember and which it should forget. Repetitions are recorded and will be repeated, whether or not this is your intention.

Using the traditional approach, endurance is gained certainly, but it means you have extended your ability to skate with poor mechanics. You are practicing slow strides, inadequate knee bend and extension, exaggerated flexion at the hips into an inefficient “pike” position, overuse of arms and other muscles that are not part of an efficient skating stride.

Hockey isn’t alone in this ridiculous tradition. Go to any high school practice field in the next few days and watch the illogical way football and soccer coaches approach their goal. They want their teams to execute at the highest possible speed, but when they get to the “conditioning” portion of practice, they condition for slowness. Sprints should always be done for the purpose of increasing speed.

“Two-a-day” marathon practices in heat and humidity are not only dangerous — young athletes die each year from this misguided tradition — but there will be repetition after repetition after repetition of neuromuscular patterns of slowness. Then athletes go out for a bite to eat and return for more repetition at a sluggish pace. The players who are in the worst shape practice at a snail’s pace if they don’t collapse from heat stroke.

Stop this nonsense. If you want fast, skillful execution, your entire practice has to be high quality skills executed at the fastest possible tempo. When it is no longer physically possible to keep up the quality, practice is over. Do something else. Lift weights in an air-conditioned room. Watch films. Go swimming.

Do anything else — but never practice poor skill execution at a slow speed.

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