Off Season Hockey Training

Keep Healthy and Ready to Perform With Off Season Hockey Training

Hockey is a sport that requires skill, and to improve your skills, you need to practice them. Conversely, to improve your conditioning for hockey, you also need to “practice” it or train for it. Unfortunately not many people do, and this can lead to injuries. So to keep you healthy and ready to perform at your best, let’s highlight some areas to concentrate on in this off season.

Your primary goal will be to focus on building lean muscle. Some benefits of increasing lean muscle include help in reducing body fat percentage and improving your testosterone to cortisol ratio.

Compound exercises more effective at increasing strength

Hockey players looking to build lean muscle should concentrate on basic compound exercises because they are far more effective at increasing strength and size and they use multiple joints and muscles at one time, which is similar to how we play hockey.

Some Exercises You Can Include in Your Hockey Training Program are:

• Squat
• Bench press
• Deadlift
• Military press
• Lunges
• Pull ups

Your secondary goal is to increase your explosive power and speed.  A game of hockey is full of short bursts of hard anaerobic skating, and to improve at that you need to train for it. To do so, you will need to train at a much more intense pace than you are probably used to. Keep in mind when you are hockey training in an anaerobic state, you will be very short of breath and will not be able to carry on a conversation.

For those that are used to long slow jogs or working aerobically, you will have greater aerobic conditioning, but you will find your hockey performance will be slower. To get better at playing with more anaerobic speed and power, you need to train for it.

 Some exercise options to help include:

• Box jumps
• Prowler pushes/sprints
• Hill sprints
• Weighted sled sprints
• Sprinting

Take advantage of your time off the ice to train for the upcoming season and keep yourself healthy while having your best season yet. Try the suggested exercises to see how they can improve your game.

Credits: https://www.hockeytraining.com/off-season/