Aberdeen,

Last year we used a workout that helped us with overall strength gains. It consisted mainly of some agility work, some sprint work, and some olympic style lifts (clean, squat, deadlift & bench press). The nicest part about it is each week players do a different set and rep routine (so that they don't plateau) and only repeat the pattern the next month. Players track their total weight for each week, and the following month they are pretty much guaranteed to see a significant increase in amount lifted over the last period of same sets & reps. The program is from BFS (Bigger, Faster, Stronger - www.biggerfasterstronger.com) and has been around a while. I purchased the book which was very inexpensive, and it teaches the finer points of the movements & safety precautions. The kids really enjoyed it too.

We had very few injuries last year, and players were noticeably stronger on their feet, but I didn't see a huge improvement in skating ability so this year I looked for something more hockey specific. I ended up finding some great information from Maria Mountain who works in the Toronto area and has trained many professional and college hockey players. She has a bunch of videos and articles at http://hockeytrainingpro.com/wordpress/hockey-training-articles/ . I ended up buying workout materials from her for a couple of reasons; they are affordable ($80) and really well-rounded with equal emphasis on speed, strength, agility, flexibility and mobility (as well as what she calls "energy system development"). The whole program is pretty complex, but also simple to follow since there are calendars that lead you through an 8 week prep period and detailed instructions for everything. Plus, Maria actually responds directly to emails with questions. I am pretty excited to put it to use and see the results this season.

Let me know if you have questions on either of these programs. They are a little tough to describe altogether here.

Hope this helps,
Dave

Thanks Dave. Will check the Bruins (and other) stuff out.

Michael Boyle - wasn't he training the Bruins years ago? He presents for USA Hockey, if memory serves me correctly.

His site is www strengthcoach dot com - I just found it tonight and will check it out.

Comparison of Off Ice Programs from Around the Hockey World

Here are some links to material on this site concerning off- ice training. This site is called the ABC’s of International Hockey and the goal is to show how the game is coached around the world. These files give the coaches a chance to compare methods of training. We started off-ice training in the early 80’s in North America. I remember going to the Flames office in 1980 and talking with David Poile, who was the asst. GM then and saying to them that if the Flames would start training like the Europeans in the off season they could gain a big advantage on the other teams. He looked at me like I had just landed in a space ship and patronized me by saying something like ‘Tom maybe some day the NHL will start training like in other hockey nations but right now the players are on their own to get ready for training camp.

I ran the first off-ice training program in Calgary that summer. Jim Nill was the only pro that attended (he had experience off ice training with the Canadian National Team) and we used an old high school gym, outdoor fields and the Nautilus training equipment and did a lot of the things that I learned from the Ludek Bukac of Czechoslovakia and Verner Persson of Sweden along with my PE training. A few years later everyone was doing off ice.

Players started by training like Football line men and many got really bulky. Later the training turned to a lot of stationary biking and many players like Lanny McDonald got high groin pulls because they didn’t stretch. Then everyone started training like sprinters. So we have gone through many stages but I still don’t see programs that are as comprehensive as the ones in many European places, in other words combining the physical, with game understanding, split vision and concepts like the give and go using other games.

1. Craig Anderson has a program called Poliquin Performance and answers important questions about age appropriate training.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/filemgmt_data/Training%20off%20ice.pdf

2. Article with diagrams by Vladimir Bogomolov from the Soviet era. The former communist world is far ahead of where we are today because they focus on both preparing the body but don’t forget they are training Hockey Players and athleticism and game understanding must also be prepared.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/filemgmt/index.php?id=22

3. IIHF Manual – Many Sided Physical Training In Ice Hockey – Off Ice
Harri Hakkanrainen of Finland presented this at the 2003 International Coaching Symposium. The Finns are the current IIHF World Champions.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/filemgmt/index.php?id=18

4. These are videos I did last summer in Jihlava, Czech Republic. I had the Czech coaches run the dryland because I wanted to see what they do for youth players with simple equipment. Speed, strength, power, agility, balance, reaction time, split vision, coordination are the focus. In the last two IIHF World Championships the Czechs have won a Gold and a Bronze.

a. Split vision
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20100812101249211

b. Speed, agility, power.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20100812094928560

c. Speed, coordination, agility.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=2010081209085436

d. Agility, coordination, reaction time.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20100812090131696

e. Agility coordination using sticks.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20100812085251864

5. This is a video of a Russian coach putting Swedish high school aged players through an intense hockey specific circuit using weights, the Russian skating board, gymnastics, plyo’s, balance and partner exercises. There is about a 30” delay with an old Soviet video and then it starts.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20080727160049393

6. My college women doing plyo training for quickness, agility and anaerobic fitness.
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20080727130328111

7. Moscow Dynamo training in the 70’s with Olympic lifts and then outdoors with games and weights.
Outdoors:
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20080727114217729

Olympic Lifts:
http://www.hockeycoachingabcs.com/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20080727160048673

9. Czechoslovakia off ice program dictated to our hockey class by the national coach Ludek Bukac at a coaching seminar at the U of Calgary in the late 70’s. This program was designed at Charles University in Prague. They filmed 100 games and then broke the games down into how much of hockey is strength, then agility, etc. and these 72 workouts combining weights, running, games, plyo’s etc. are based on the numbers they came up with.

Do we do any research like this before designing programs now?

http://www.dailyhattrick.com/hockeycoachforums/uploads/forum2/Czech%20national%20dryland.PDF

So just some Food for Thought on what is the Ideal Program.

Stay away from energy drinks, doctors say

Reuters Health, Calgary Sun, Monday, May 30, 2011




NEW YORK - In a new report, a large group of American doctors urge kids and teens to avoid energy drinks and only consume sports drinks in limited amount.

The recommendations come in the wake of a national debate over energy drinks, which experts fear may have side effects.

"Children never need energy drinks," said Dr. Holly Benjamin, of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who worked on the new report. "They contain caffeine and other stimulant substances that aren't nutritional, so you don't need them."

And kids might be more vulnerable to the contents of energy drinks than grownups.

"If you drink them on a regular basis, it stresses the body," Benjamin told Reuters Health. "You don't really want to stress the body of a person that's growing."

For the new recommendations, published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers went through earlier studies and reports on both energy drinks and sports drinks, which don't contain any stimulants.

They note that energy drinks contain a jumble of ingredients -- including vitamins and herbal extracts -- with possible side effects that aren't always well understood.

While there aren't many documented cases of harm directly linked to the beverages, stimulants can disturb the heart's rhythm and may lead to seizures in very rare cases, Benjamin said.

Recently, she saw a 15-year-old boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who came into the hospital with a seizure after having drunk two 24-ounce bottles of Mountain Dew, a soft drink that contains caffeine.

The boy was already taking stimulant ADHD medication, and the extra caffeine in principle might have pushed him over the edge, according to Benjamin.

"You just never know," she said. "It's definitely a concern."

Earlier this year, Pediatrics published another review of the literature on energy drinks.

In it, Florida pediatricians described cases of seizures, delusions, heart problems and kidney or liver damage in people who had drunk one or more non-alcoholic energy drinks -- including brands like Red Bull, Spike Shooter and Redline.

While they acknowledged that such cases are very rare, and can't be conclusively linked to the drinks, they urged caution, especially in kids with medical conditions.

U.S. sales of non-alcoholic energy drinks are expected to hit $9 billion this year, with children and young adults accounting for half the market.

Manufacturers claim their products will enhance both mental and physical performance, and were quick to downplay the February report.

"The effects of caffeine are well-known and as an 8.4 oz can of Red Bull contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee (80 mg), it should be treated accordingly," Red Bull said in an emailed statement to Reuters Health.

Benjamin said that for most kids, water is the best thing to quench their thirst. If they happen to be young athletes training hard, a sports drink might be helpful, too, because it contains sugar.

But for kids who lead less-active lives, sports and energy drinks might just serve to pile on extra pounds, fueling the national obesity epidemic.

While she acknowledged that more research is needed, Benjamin said the safest thing to drink is water.
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I posted this here because it is related to hydration in fitness... I see far too many kids / adults relying on this stuff. Check out the Gatorade Sport Science website. (http://www.gssiweb.com/) - keep in mind they are biased to sell their product... but I still think it is better than all of these energy drinks! (Ultimately, use water - maybe a bit of sodium / potassium added - like table salt - to prevent cramping and to encourage the drinking reflex). Coaching college, I had kids doing tons of these energy drinks, uppers, etc. before the game... buying into the marketing hype and the established culture of "that's just what we do in hockey..." No ability to think for themselves or think critically or do their own research to find out what is hype and what is fact... we have truly become a society of sheep who take the path of least resistance...

Yup. We did a U15 camp all weekend. We had three one-hour nutrition seminars (one for each of our three groups of 20-25 kids.) Parents were also welcome. Only a handful showed up. Parents are important role models and they often either don't know (or don't care) about what their kids eat... We had parents bringing junk food to their kids as soon as they got off-ice. Wow.

How a tired brain can slow your physical performance

Alex Hutchinson Globe and Mail Sept. 04, 2011


“Improve your marathon time while sitting at your computer” is the kind of claim you expect from an infomercial or a spam e-mail, not from the keynote speaker at an academic gathering.

“It sounds crazy,” Samuele Marcora admitted during his talk at a conference on fatigue at Charles Sturt University in Australia last month, “but it’s actually not.”

Dr. Marcora, a professor at the University of Kent’s Centre for Sports Studies in Britain, has spent the past few years unravelling the surprising links between tired brains and physical performance. His initial results suggest that what we perceive as physical limits are actually highly dependent on our levels of motivation and mental fatigue – and that we may be able to use this fact to our advantage.

Back in 2009, Dr. Marcora and his colleagues published a study in which 16 volunteers cycled to exhaustion after spending 90 minutes either watching “emotionally neutral” documentary movies or performing a demanding cognitive test called the AX-CPT, which requires “sustained attention, working memory, response inhibition and error monitoring.”

Although the cognitive test didn’t produce any physical fatigue, the volunteers gave up on the cycling test 15 per cent sooner when they were mentally fatigued compared to when they had simply watched the documentaries.

Dr. Marcora explains these results using a new “psychobiological” model of fatigue that views exercise limits as a balance between motivation and perceived effort: We stop not because our muscles are starved of oxygen or depleted of fuel, but because the effort it would take to keep going is greater than the rewards for continuing. In this picture, a tired brain and tired muscles are equally capable of increasing your perceived effort, and ultimately making you quit.

This principle doesn’t apply only to endurance sports. At the fatigue conference last month, researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, presented data on the effects of mental fatigue on intermittent sports such as soccer, which mix short bursts of intense sprinting with longer stretches of low and medium intensity.

Using the AX-CPT test to induce mental fatigue prior to a simulated 45-minute game, the researchers found that the short, high-intensity sprints – when motivation was maximal – were unaffected by mental fatigue.

But the volunteers covered less ground during the long periods of low-intensity activity, and found that maintaining any given speed felt harder when they were mentally fatigued, even though their heart rate and other physical indicators were unaffected – exactly as predicted by Dr. Marcora’s model.

The findings have clear implications for athletes, since even low-intensity movement is crucial for maintaining good field position during a soccer game, the study’s lead author, Mitch Smith, explained. “Practically speaking, we think it’s important to avoid cognitively demanding activity prior to a match,” he said.

For the rest of us, the findings about mental fatigue suggest that doing a workout after a demanding day at the office will feel tougher, even if you’ve spent the entire day comfortably sitting in your chair.

That’s one reason many people prefer heading to the gym in the morning – but it doesn’t necessarily trump competing factors like the stress-busting effects of post-work exercise or simple scheduling convenience. The motivational boost offered by group training or a personal trainer can also help offset the effects of mental fatigue.

The ultimate payoff of this research, Dr. Marcora hopes, will be ways of fighting off the effects of mental fatigue. One option, not surprisingly, is caffeine: Funded by the British ministry of defence, he’s currently studying the use of high-dose caffeine gum, which is absorbed more quickly than caffeine pills or coffee. Initial results suggest that caffeine completely reverses the decline in physical performance caused by the mentally fatiguing AX-CPT task; Dr. Marcora speculates that caffeine blocks the effects of a brain chemical called adenosine that is linked to mental fatigue.

More intriguing is the prospect of training the brain to better withstand the effects of mental fatigue: no drugs needed, just a lot of hard thinking. Dr. Marcora is testing this idea by training a group of volunteers for a cycling test, with half of them training their brains for several hours a week using the AX-CPT and two other cognitively demanding tasks.

If it works, it will not only be a neat trick – “improve your marathon time while sitting at your computer!” – it will also offer powerful evidence for the psychobiological theory of fatigue, and provide a new way for athletes to improve their performance when they’ve maxed out the physical training their bodies can handle.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this kind of brain training will offer any easy shortcuts to success, Dr. Marcora cautions.

“For the volunteers in these mental fatigue studies, it’s not nice,” he says. “It’s really bad. People hate you at the end of the test.”

Inducing mental fatigue

The AX-CPT is a “continuous performance test” that asks you to watch a series of cues (i.e. letters of the alphabet) and respond only after a specific sequence (i.e. A followed by X) appears. The test relies heavily on an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which also happens to be the area of the brain related to perception of effort during physical exercise. As a result, prolonged use of this area of the brain makes exercise feel harder. You can read more about the AX-CPT, and try an online sample, at bit.ly/AXCPTdemo.


Alex Hutchinson blogs about research on exercise at sweatscience.com. His new book – Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? – is now available.

It’s never too late to get your brain off the couch, study finds

Paul Taylor Globe and Mail Mar. 16, 2011

Good advice for us couches... I mean coaches!!!

Dean

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It’s never too late to start exercising, especially when it comes to brain fitness.

Neurologists have long known that our brains get slightly smaller as we grow older and that this shrinkage is associated with a gradual decline in certain mental functions. Previous research has demonstrated that regular exercise can slow the pace of shrinkage and help protect memories and preserve the ability to learn new things.

Now, a new study suggests that even starting an exercise program later in life can undo some of the brain shrinkage in seniors who’ve spent years as couch potatoes.

“Our results show we can reverse the atrophy that was already taking place,” said the lead researcher, Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh.

For the study, they recruited 120 healthy but sedentary volunteers, ranging in age from 60 to 80. (None had been diagnosed with dementia or were suspected of having Alzheimer’s disease.)

Half of the seniors were given an aerobic exercise regimen of walking around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week. Aerobic exercise is designed to increase the heart rate for an extended period.

The other half served as a control group. They were told to do stretching and toning exercises – activities that would barely budge their heart rates.

Each participant underwent a series of MRI scans to measure changes in the size of the hippocampus, the brain structure involved in all forms of memory formation.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed a dramatic difference in the two groups after one year. The walkers experienced increases in volume of the left and right hippocampus by 2.12 and 1.97 per cent respectively. The same regions of the brain in those who did stretching decreased by 1.40 and 1.43 per cent, respectively, which amounts to the normal expected shrinkage.

“You can think of the increase in volume of the hippocampus as turning back the clock by about two years,” explained the senior author of the study, Art Kramer of the University of Illinois.

Furthermore, the bigger brains seemed to work better. Tests conducted over the course of the study showed that those in the aerobic exercise group demonstrated improved memory function, compared with their performance measured at the beginning of the trial.

The researchers are continuing to observe the volunteers. Dr. Erickson expects that hippocampus expansion of the walkers “will eventually slow down and stop” because the brain generally shrinks with age. But when atrophy does becomes apparent once more, the rate of shrinkage will likely be slowed if they keep exercising regularly.

Dr. Kramer stressed that it doesn’t take a complex or particularly strenuous exercise program to produce meaningful results. “All you need is a pair of walking shoes and a place to walk,” he added.

Kai - I went back to take a look at the videos you created here:
https://sth-se.diino.com/kai_kmk24/pelikirja
https://sth-se.diino.com/kai_kmk24/Hockey%20videos

Looks like they are no longer there. Any chance you'd be willing to share these again? I'd like to use the off-ice training routing this winter if possible.

Hope you are having a good season,

Dave

Dave I think this is the proper topic for this video. I dont know if I was able to upload the video to files section of this site? I tried it but nothing happened?
Any questions about the video, I'm happy to help.

p.s. I hope this is the right video


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Funny third on Kai. Witches Brew