It’s that time of year! Hockey season is upon us. Many players have already started their season and, at least down here in Florida, the Labor Day Weekend tournaments are right around the corner. With the season starting, I thought it may be a good time to go over some of the adaptations you need to try to obtain during the season, paying special attention to your conditioning.

Since the beginning of time, hockey coaches have decided that they’re not going to get outworked by any team throughout the season. This often leads to a ridiculous amount of time spent on conditioning on the ice, which is already a pretty scarce and expensive resource. Bag skates, as we call them, are the source of nightmares for many youth hockey players and for good reason. They suck, they destroy movement patterns, they condition kids to skate too high in their hips, and they take away from actual development as a player.

To the average individual it makes sense though. We don’t want to get outplayed because of our conditioning levels, so let’s try to make sure we’re more conditioned than the teams we play against. That way we’ll be able to win the third period and capitalize on other teams lack of conditioning. I’ve even had coaches whose entire philosophies on coaching were based around this concept. A lot of coaches are also still under the impression that hockey is a game played 45 seconds at a time, and we’re going to go over why this is mindset is hurting the development of your players in this article.

Hockey is NOT Played 45 Seconds at a Time

You hear it ALL the time: Hockey is a sport characterized by 45 second shifts of all out effort. This thought process needs to die because in reality, it’s really not even close to true. While it is true that the average shift for those at the NHL level is 45 seconds, this only tells part of the story. What’s happening in these shifts? How often are we really skating at 100%? Are there differences between forwards and defensemen shift times, and efforts? Are PK and PP minutes different than even strength minutes? We need to take a look at actually happening on the ice to really be able to have an understanding for our conditioning needs. Keep in mind that the following information is about players at the NHL level, so don’t take this as gospel of what happens at the minor hockey level but rest assured after coaching and playing the game for over 25 years, I can say that it’s pretty similar.

Almost 20 years ago, Dr Michael Bracko studied hundreds of games over the course of the NHL season and broke down average shift lengths and effort levels. He categorized effort levels into 15 different levels and this chart to the right is what they found. Under that is a pie chart of those same effort levels to give you an illustration of the information. I’ve taken the liberty of breaking it down further to low intensity, medium intensity, backwards skating, and high intensity and that graph can be found below that graph.

If you look at the chart you’ll see that the overwhelming majority of our time on the ice is spent at low intensity skating or stationary. Let’s take a minute to break that down even further by comparing that information to the average shift time of 45 seconds:

• High Intensity Skating - 6.93 seconds

• Medium Intensity Skating - 4.68 seconds

• Low Intensity Skating - 31.01 seconds

• Backwards Skating - 2.21 seconds

Now there’s definitely differences in the going-ons of every shift, no two shifts are the same but this information was taken over the course of hundreds of games and these are the averages. THIRTY-ONE of those 45 seconds are spent at low to no intensity while only ELEVEN AND A HALF of those seconds are played at a high or medium intensity, 13.82 seconds if we just assume that all backwards skating is moderate to high intensity. So this begs the question: How the hell should we condition for hockey? We’re gonna answer that question for you!

Aerobic Training

When you think of aerobic training you probably think of running miles and marathons. Aerobic means in the presence of oxygen which by nature means it has to be longer in duration. Another name for aerobic energy system is the oxidative energy system. It’s categorized by the breaking down of fatty acids for fuel, which takes longer than the breakdown of glucose hence why it takes the body so long to utilize this system. The body actually takes a good amount of time to get oxygen to the working muscles when we’re exercising, around two minutes to be exact. Now looking at the above information about shift times and effort levels it would seem like aerobic training may be something hockey players don’t need because they’re almost never on the ice that long. However, if you guessed that you’d be wrong! Our aerobic energy systems actually lay the ground work for our recovery capabilities from game to game, from period to period and even from shift to shift. Having a higher level of aerobic fitness will lead to a more efficient recovery process, thus a faster one getting you ready for your next shift or game.

Now this doesn’t mean that we need to dedicate our time to running miles and trying for faster mile times in any way shape or form. To be honest you’d be wasting your time if that was any part of your preparation for the ice, it’s simply the wrong energy systems. BUT there’s good news and that’s something everyone learns in their Introduction to Exercise Physiology classes at university: all anaerobic training is aerobic over time. Whether we’re lifting weights or running sprints (which are anaerobic in nature or <120 seconds) we’re actually working on our aerobic energy systems as well. There’s no real need to try to increase our overall volume of aerobic work for the sport of ice hockey, however if you’re wanting to go out and run a mile feel free as it can be great restorative work and for a lot of athletes I’ve worked with it can be great for their mental health. Just don’t feel like it needs to be the real focus of any of your work.

Anaerobic Training

If you’ve spent any amount of time around a coach who wants to sound smart you’ve probably heard this term before. For the most part everything we do in physical preparation for sport can be broken down to aerobic and anaerobic training. Anaerobic training simply means without oxygen, and this training is done inside of roughly 2 minutes. Within our anaerobic energy system there are two different systems:

• ATP-PC System

  • Also known as the alactic energy system. ATP-PC stands for Adenosine Triphosphate-Creatine Phosphate. This energy system is utilized for 1-10 seconds using ATP that has been created from glucose molecules, and used for short and powerful bursts. Sprinting and weight training are typically alactic in nature.

• Lactic System

  • This system is our long term anaerobic energy system. Running 300 meters, pushing a sled, repeated effort weight training, etc are some examples of when our bodies use the lactic system. It’s called the lactic system because your body actually utilizes the lactic acid you produce as a byproduct of exercise via the Cori Cycle for some of the energy production.

Now none of these energy systems operate independently of each other. There’s not really an on/off switch where at exactly 4 seconds we switch from using ATP to using ATP + CP for energy. There’s a ton of overlap and this chart above is designed to give you a better understanding of how all of that works. Just try to remember that anaerobic training is typically less than 2 minutes long.

Let’s Talk Hockey

Ok, so now we know that hockey has always been thought of as 45 second sprints followed by passive recovery (sitting on the bench) so it would make sense that the conditioning for the sport is done in timeframes that would utilize the lactic anaerobic energy system. This kind of conditioning usually looks like this:

• 300 yard shuttles

• Herbies

• Suicides

• Essentially anything that falls into the 30-60+ second timeframe

In reality this is an exercise in futility. These types of conditioning destroy movement patterns and attack the wrong energy systems for the demands of the sport. You ever seen a kid during a bag skate? They’re too tall, their stride is short and their changes of direction are slow and out of position. Bag skates destroy skating skill sets and don’t even give us the proper adaptations for the ice. Conditioning in the sport of hockey needs to be revamped and changed to match the demands of the sport and we’re going to talk about that in the next section. The NHL actually stopped using the Wingate Bike Test during the NHL Combine and have now moved towards a series of short sprints to make it more applicable to the sport of hockey.

If we look at the data compiled by Dr Brocko we can see this gap between what coaches think, and the reality of the demands of the sport is pretty big. Roughly 13 seconds of the total shift are spent at medium or high intensity skating, and only about 7 of those seconds are spent at high intensity (high intensity skating or battling for the puck/positioning). But we’re conditioning for 45-60 seconds at a time, do you see the problem? Hockey players don’t need to be conditioned to be able to sprint for 45 seconds at a time, they need to be conditioned to sprint for around 7 seconds at a time over and over again. If you look back to the Energy Systems chart above, you’ll see that the differences in what energy is utilized, and which energy systems are “activated” are pretty different between the 7 seconds and the 45 seconds. So this begs the question: why on Earth are we conditioning the way we are? The answer is that not nearly enough coaches understand the reality of the sport, and they fall back to what they’ve always done.

So How Should We Condition Then?

Looking at the demands of the sport it would seem that we should sprint for 7 seconds at a time right? I mean that’s the average time spent at high intensity per shift and that would be pretty damn specific to the demands of the sport. Yes and no, there’s a lot of ways that we can condition for the sport but in my experience the best way to condition for the sport of ice hockey is to just play the sport of hockey. In the gym we can do all kinds of manipulating of loads, times, effort levels, speed, etc. The one thing we can’t replicate? A skating stride. “BuT sLiDeBoArDs!” Yes I know slide boards exist, and they’re a good way to add variety to your training, however most of your athletes fail to stay in position and will often kick their inside leg as opposed to loading their outside leg which leads to messing with moving patterns. We don’t want that!

As a coach I’m sure you may spend time creating practice plans that work on all of the aspects of the game that your team is struggling with. But what if I told you that you can build this conditioning into those drills? No more wasting 10 minutes at the end of practice without pucks, no more monotony of the bag skate, and your kids can look forward to coming to practice with the understanding that they don’t need to leave anything in the tank for conditioning at the end of practice. You’ll get substantially more out of them! When I was playing junior I played for a guy by the name of Chad MacLeod. We bagged EVERY SINGLE PRACTICE. This guy had a “nobody is gonna out condition us” kind of mentality. You know what that made all of us do? We pulled back in practice knowing that we needed something left in the tank for the inevitable bag skate. We all probably skated 75-80% as opposed to going all out in drills. Building the conditioning into drills in practice, setting tempos inside the drills themselves will have such amazing carryover to the game, and it’ll get your athletes in more positions of learning and even get them more puck touches. That’s a win.

If you dedicate 8-10 minutes at the end of practice for conditioning you’re wasting roughly 560 minutes of ice time over the course of a season. That’s nine hours and 20 minutes. Down here in Florida, that’s roughly $4,000 worth of ice time. You think that time could be better spent developing a skillset, or possibly working on systems? After all minor hockey is about development, not winning every weekend.

Off the ice favor short sprints WITH changes of direction, pushing or pulling a sled, and even using the training effects of weight lifting will allow your athletes to work on hockey specific energy systems development. It can look like this:

• 60 yard shuttles

• 10-20 yard sprints

• Heavy sled pushes for 10-15 yards

• Moderate volume lower extremity weight training

• 5-10 second bike sprint intervals (I HAAAAATE the bike, but for some reason hockey has a love for the bike)

Hockey isn’t played for 45 seconds at a time, and when we can understand and own this, you’ll have A LOT more success on the field of play!