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Facility Pictures
- Pictures from our 'Park' facility. 99 Industrial Court B. Efficient, well-equipped, intense.
Dryland Training
04/04/2011
06/29/2010
06/19/2010
Developing A Better Hockey Player
In Part I of this series, we talked about metabolic energy pathways. You can be strong as an ox, or run marathons every afternoon off-ice, but until you can meet the actual chemical demands of the game, you're not going to perform better.
Anaerobic work (very high-intensity exercise lasting 5 seconds to 2 minutes, or so) can be done using hockey-specific movements; it will also work using movements that aren't found in hockey. It's best to combine both. For instance:
Sled pushing drills are certainly anaerobic, if short distances and heavy loads are used. Movement originates with hip drive, just like a hockey stride; you start with the valsalva manoeuvre (holding your breath briefly) just like a fast acceleration on the ice; you must achieve forward lean to go anywhere.
Likewise, pushups and pullups, while not following the same movement patterns as found in hockey, can be combined to achieve a metabolic-enhancing effect. Try this: do 5 pullups and 10 pushups and 15 squats. Go through that circuit as many times as possible in 5 minutes. Anaerobic after the first few seconds.
Running 5k? Well.... most hockey players don't have a running stride that duplicates a skating stride (if you can hear your feet slap the pavement when you run, you're not benefitting.) Movement pattern: non-sport-specific. The energy demands of a 5k, though high, rely primarily on the aerobic metabolism of fats and the breakdown of muscle proteins. These simply aren't available during a 2-minute shift.
Anaerobic endurance is trainable: you can buffer lactic acid accumulation better. You can learn to block out its effects for prolonged periods. You can learn to mentally deal with fatigue. You can become comfortable with uncomfortable.
If your two-hour "bag skate" isn't helping you develop the stamina necessary for hockey....why are you doing it? Smart training means efficient training: doing the stuff that's going to help you most. Getting a bigger bang for your training buck (and time, and energy....)
All summer, we'll post workouts on our Catalyst Hockey site. Every day, for free. These are not the exact workouts done in our Summer Dryland group, but they're a good representation. While they're not tailored specifically to anyone, the way we operate with our 1-on-1 clients, they will develop a broad physical fitness. Over the last 3 seasons, since we've started implementing this philosophy, we've received emails from OHL teams asking, "how are you guys doing it?" We've had rookies finish #1 for fitness at their team's main camp. They're stronger, faster, more powerful... and they're training less than most of their peers. It's not magic, just science.
Our dryland camps start June 29. Different camps for Bantam and Midget/Junior, as well as a new female-only camp (already close to a sellout!)
9am - Bantam Group (Industrial Park location)
All groups : $329 (includes two-month gym membership, homework, food plan, twice-weekly 90-minute coached sessions, and a level of fitness you've never before experienced.) Register quickly - these groups regularly fill up!
06/17/2010
Training Energy Systems For Hockey
Got a 500lbs squat? Run the mile in 4:40? Impressive. But unless you can use those tools on the ice, they're just window dressing.
Thirty seconds into his shift, Danny was already sucking wind. His heart was pounding, and it wasn't just the adrenaline: the Spring tryout had him jacked up, sure, but he was struggling to keep up. Just two months ago, he was breezing past these same guys in tournaments; now, when it counted most, he didn't have anything in the tank. No legs. Zero wheels. But why? He'd been running every day since the end of the season. He'd been doing 'bag skates' twice per week. He'd been doing workouts at the Y every single day - sure, he'd skipped "legs day" a couple of times, but none of his buddies wanted to go, either.....
Danny's "cardio" is fine. At a low threshold (when he's just warming up, or skating around) his breathing is easy. Put him in an intense 30-second shift, though, and he's dead in 10 seconds. Even though he passed the 2-mile-run test easily (11:04,) he's unable to use energy quickly. In fact, his body is trying to slow him down; to push him into an aerobic mode so that it can stay in its comfort zone.
You break down energy in several different ways; the most prevalent metabolic pathways are shown below:
What's clear from the graph, though not expressed outright: training one system limits your capacity in another. If you totalled the area beneath the three curves individually, you'd notice that they're all the same surface area: that means, you only have so much energy available to you at a given time. Training to use that energy aerobically (low heart rate, sustained output for a long period) means that you're limiting your ability to move in shorter, harder bursts. You're actually training yourself to be less intense; to move slower, and with less power!
Think those daily 5k runs are 'building a base?' upon which you'll magically gain anaerobic capacity? Different skill altogether, unfortunately. While there's some overlap between energy systems, you should spend the majority of your training time in the system on which you'll most depend - that should be obvious, right?
There are those who believe that more is better; that a two-minute workout can't possibly be intense enough to help you play hockey better. Those folks have never had a hard penalty kill. They've never faced elimination in the early Spring. YOU - the player - know how hard 30 seconds can be. Train to match that demand.
Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at the methodology of developing better energy systems for hockey.
06/10/2010
Summer Program Registration
Bantam: 9am Tues, Thurs mornings at the Industrial Park - includes 8-week gym membership - register HERE
Midget / Junior: 10:30am Tues, Thurs mornings at the Industrial Park - includes 8-week gym membership - register HERE
Womens' - Specific: 1pm Tues, Thurs afternoons at the Industrial Park - includes 8-week gym membership - register HERE
04/20/2010
08/27/2009
08/14/2009
WOD 091409
Warmup: 500m Row for time.
08/13/2009
Is CrossFit for Hockey Players?
CrossFit is constantly varied functional movement, executed at high intensity. Hockey is constantly varied functional movement - limited to skating, passing, shooting, and checking - executed at high intensity.
By definition, there's practical application for CrossFit in your hockey training program. CrossFit emphasizes large, compound lifts like deadlifts, squats, and cleans; CrossFit emphasizes high-intensity intervals; CrossFit emphasizes short anaerobic bursts instead of long-distance low-threshold running.
Especially in the early offseason, when the goal of dryland training is to deliver all-over, well-rounded conditioning, CrossFit is a great fit.
Your goal in the offseason, especially at the beginning, is to build a base of fitness - strength, speed, power, and anaerobic endurance - upon which you can construct hockey-specific skills. This is not an 'aerobic base' - a common misperception - but a base for work capacity. The more efficient you are at performing work (force x distance,) and the faster you can recover from repeated bouts of work, the more prepared you are to demonstrate skill.
In hockey, skill rules the day. However, without a solid level of work capacity, you'll never develop the skills that become ingrained only through practice. For instance, if you tire after 30 minutes of practice, and your coach works on a passing skillset at the end of practices, you won't have the energy or processing capacity to properly learn the new skill. Learning a new skill while fatigued is not only very unlikely, but it's probable that you won't perform it perfectly. Practice makes permanent. This is the reason we advocate skill-based work before conditioning work - but that's a different article altogether.
If you're building your offseason macrocycle like this: GPP (General Physical Preparedness) - Strength - Power - Speed - SPP (specific physical preparedness) then you'd do best to use CrossFit in the GPP phases.
CrossFit makes no bones about it: their specialty is NOT specializing. The closer you get to your season, the more you'll prioritize your time to include a greater percentage of skill-based work. That's the job of your on-ice coaches, however; our job as conditioning coaches is to deliver the best possible athlete to the team's doorstep for training camp.
In-season, maintenance of strength and power are critical, but some work capacity work is also necessary to maintain peak fitness. While you can get away with maximal lifts for strength only once every two weeks, work capacity can start to diminish over a matter of days. In-season, bodybuilding methods (3 or 4 sets of 8-12 reps on machines) are an even bigger waste of time than in the off-season. When you're skating nearly every day, you have to budget both time and energy.
In that sense, too, CrossFit makes very efficient use of your time. Who can really perform intensely for an hour after 2 hours of hard practice? You're far better to hit a hard 20-minute WOD, generate the type of endurance and work capacity you want to maintain, and go home.
CrossFit incorporates a lot of lifts that are critical for athletic development, in set and rep schemes, that are glaringly absent from other programs. For instance, doing several heavy singles is a much better method of developing maximal strength (necessary for power) than doing 3-4 sets of mediocre reps at questionable intensity. And yet, most coaches aren't confident enough in their own skillset to coach an athlete to a 1RM. Some throw around the 'safety' card - but it's a red herring. Hitting a 1-rep max in the clean, squat, deadlift, press, or pullup isn't unsafe; it just requires a more in-depth knowledge by a qualified coach who's been both under the books AND under the bar before. CrossFit provides that coaching and the workouts to match.
Using CrossFit in our own program on CatalystHockey.com, we've seen remarkable improvement in work capacity in our athletes. Improved work capacity means more effort in the strength phase, which means more transfer to speed, which means better agility.... built on a solid, planned foundation, CrossFit is the first step to a much better hockey player.
