During the competitive hockey season, players aim to keep their body as healthy as possible to meet the demand of their busy practice and game schedule. Staying healthy and injury-free can be difficult if the player doesn’t prioritize basic long-term strategies to support a healthy lifestyle. Components include quality sleeping habits, proper nutritional support and a positive mental state. Once these big rock habits are formed, the player can focus on managing more specific qualities that are related to hockey.
Hockey is a fast sport that has many opportunities for players to become injured. Typically these common risks are mitigated with proper equipment and provisions authorized by USA Hockey. However, there will always be a risk to play the sport, which includes injuries that are unavoidable. For the nagging injuries that are not provoked by contact, players can train their bodies to be more resilient to handle the physical demands of the sport.
Training resiliency starts with players creating greater movement literacy. This training will expose the athlete to various movements in which he or she can condition tissues to various positions. Once an athlete has been exposed to various movement patterns, the athlete can improve movement capacity, which is the ability to handle more work in the various movement patterns that were learned. Once you’ve increased your movement literacy and your ability to do work, you want to provide the proper stimulus to keep enough variability in the system to continue to get stronger.
During the offseason, people tell their athletes to play other sports. The exposure to different sports allows the body to have greater movement variability or movement context to potentially utilize at a future time. Being able to handle greater movement variability allows the body to tolerate biomechanical faults when you fall victim to fatigue.
Fatigue is a game changer when it comes to these nagging injuries. When fatigue sets in, your body finds compensatory strategies to complete the desired task, which potentially puts you at a greater risk of injury. Once the body utilizes a compensatory pattern, the load can become too demanding to the foreign tissues involved in the pattern utilized. Once the load-bearing capacity of the tissues is maxed, the damage occurs.
This topic can seem complex, but keep things simple. During the offseason, expose yourself to a wide variety of movements and build a strong work capacity to become more resilient. Once you have done both, then you can start to train specific hockey qualities that improve your game. If hockey is the only signal that your body is conditioning year round, you run the risk of not getting enough movement variability, which can hurt you in the long run.
To train for hockey year round, it’s important to be exposed to many movements that challenge you to learn new ways to move your body. If you provide your body with enough variability, your body will constantly create new motor programs, which ultimately create greater movement literacy. Hockey-specific training can be performed year round but with extreme caution and in small doses during the offseason.
KEYS TO CONSIDER THIS OFFSEASON
- Increase your movement literacy by exposing yourself to new movements
- Build a strong work capacity to set the strength foundation
- Condition the ranges utilized in the sport-specific positions closer to the start of the season
