The Best Way to Maximize Fitness for Hockey:
Getting & Staying in Shape
By Kim McCullough, MSc, YCS
Interval Training: The Key to Conditioning
No matter what your age or ability level, interval training will give players the best bang for their buck. Period.
Interval training is by far the most efficient and effective way of conditioning players.
Interval training involves high intensity efforts interspersed with periods of rest. The key to effective interval training is to ‘work hard and rest easy’ by adhering to proper work-to-rest ratios.
But how do you determine the appropriate work-to-rest ratios to use?
The challenge when designing an interval program for most sports is that:
• The work-to-rest ratios are often unpredictable
• It is difficult to predict how athletes will respond to the program
Know Your Sport
The average hockey shift could be as short as 30 seconds and as long as 1.5 minutes while the rest periods can vary from 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length. It is impossible to determine the exact work-to-rest ratios used in each sport, so you must do your best to use conditioning drills that mimic the ratios most commonly seen in your sport.
Once you understand the unique work-to-rest ratios of your sport, you can begin to design a conditioning program that will address the needs of your athletes. If a hockey forward gets an average of 8 shifts per period that are 45 seconds in length and rests for an average of 1.5 minutes between shifts, you will want to address these unique needs in your training. You can design a program that progressively builds the athlete up until the point where they can put forth 100% effort for 45 seconds and recover in as little as 45 seconds! You can put together a very specific and defined program, but you need one more piece of the puzzle first.
Know Your Players
Quite often, coaches will get their hands on conditioning programs that have been used before by different teams or players. Some of these programs will be more appropriate and reputable than others. You could have your hands on the best conditioning program in the world, but it won’t be effective unless you know how it effects your players.
When determining whether a conditioning program is appropriate for your players, the most important thing to look at is NOT whether they can perform the hard working effort but rather how well they recover from that hard effort.
As I mentioned above, proper interval training requires that athletes ‘work hard and rest easy’. All too often, coaches will use work-to-rest ratios that are inappropriate to their athletes’ current fitness levels. A coach wants to get his players into shape in time for first game of the season but only has 4 practices before the puck drops. So in the interest of time, he starts his players on an interval program uses work-to-rest ratios that are in the 1:1 range. This means that if they are skating hard for 45 seconds, they only get 45 seconds of rest before they must go again. This is perfectly appropriate work-to-rest interval - if you are gearing up for playoffs and your players have been building up to this high level of intensity.
But it is NOT an appropriate place to start the season!
Odds are that your players aren’t going to be performing these 1:1 intervals very well. They may be fast in the first few sprints. But by the fourth sprint, their performance may drop off markedly. They start gasping for air and their skating form gets sloppy. In order for interval training to be effective (especially during the early stages of the season), athletes must have adequate time to rest.
How must Rest is enough?
Here are a few easy ways to determine whether your athletes are getting enough rest between intervals:
1) Quality of Efforts: This one is easy to see. If your players look sloppy by the third interval when they are supposed to perform 10, they probably aren’t getting enough rest between intervals. It could be that they simply aren’t in good enough shape to perform 10 intervals well. It is then our responsibility as coaches to ensure that we are assigning our players a number of intervals that are appropriate to their conditioning levels while simultaneously addressing their needs.
2) Talk test: A simple way to gauge whether your athletes have recovered enough between intervals is to do the ‘talk test’. If after finishing an interval, they can tell you a long story about what they did that day, they either aren’t working hard enough or the rest interval can be decreased. On the other hand, if they are practically hyperventilating after an interval and can barely squeeze a one word answer to your question, they probably need a little more rest. The general rule of thumb for when a player has recovered enough to perform the next interval is that they should be able to give you a one sentence answer to any question you ask. This usually means that their breathing rate has slowed down enough to indicate sufficient recovery. It isn’t overly scientific - but it works!
When trying to get your players into peak shape, keep in mind:
• The unique work-to-rest ratios in your sport
• How well your athletes are recovering from the intervals you prescribe
Bottom line: Your conditioning program will be only as good as its sport-specific design and its athlete-specific application.
© Total Female Hockey 2008
Kim McCullough, YCS, MSc, is a Athletic Development Specialist and founder of Total Female Hockey. In addition to training and coaching girls at all levels of hockey, from novice to the National team, Kim has also played at the highest level of women’s hockey in the world for the last decade. Kim’s female player development website features a state-of-the-art Complete Off-Season Training Program and her blog gives the coaches and parents of aspiring young players access to the most up-to-date tips and advice on how to help their players take their game to the next level. To learn more about female-specific player development, get your Free Report: The #1 Mistake Female Players Make in the Off-Season at http://www.totalfemalehockey.com
