By Jack Blatherwick
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

I watched a great soccer practice last fall, one that would make every athlete better. But then, as in every team sport, the coach decided to finish with endurance training, and the last 20 minutes were spent getting worse – aerobic distance training at the expense of all the neuromuscular qualities we’d like to maintain for an entire game.

These were excellent young players who appeared to be passionately engaged and focused on improvement. For the first 70 minutes, everything they did emphasized high-speed athleticism and execution of skills with read-react decisions. This is also what it takes to play hockey at the highest level.

But, as these elite young athletes started out on their 20-minute jog around the lake, they lost interest completely. There would be no more fun, creative decisions – no quick read-and-react skills. In fact, there would be nothing quick at all. Slow feet were repeated over and over for 20 minutes.

In hockey, this also means repetition of poor knee bend and weak extension. No agility or speed. No skill improvement. No passion. Repetition develops a neuromuscular comfort zone, bound to be repeated in games when we’re not thinking.

High-speed athleticism, quality execution of skills and read-react decisions at the fastest possible pace: This is what it takes to develop as a player in soccer or hockey, so this should be the definition of hockey endurance. But our coaching brains shut down when we start to ‘condition’ the team. From then on, we practice slowness and brain-dead repetition of poor quality skating skills.

Why? It’s the way things were done when coaches were players. There is no better reason, just tradition. ‘Conditioning’ should be defined as Pavlov defined it – repetitions of the desired end-product.

Spending an entire practice executing skills at the highest possible pace will prepare a team for the fierce tempo of a championship game. The traditional approach is counterproductive, because the neuromuscular system records every repetition, even those slow, unskillful ones we’d like to forget.

Visit Jack’s website at www.overspeed.info.