No matter your sport of choice, hobby, or favorite pastime, you need to train if you hope to excel. Training at home for some things is easier than others, as you probably imagine. You can easily spend the day painting in your kitchen to get some practice for your artistic side, but hockey training is a whole different beast entirely. Fortunately, with a little creativity, you can easily step up your training game at home so you can be sure you’re ready for anything you might face in the rink. Whether you’re a new hockey player or you’ve been playing for years, you can definitely benefit from some new training methods to help you get the edge over your competitors.
Make Sure You Have a Good Exercise Regimen
When playing hockey, or any other sport for that matter, it’s important that you have great speed, strength, and endurance so you can outshine your opposing team. Things can get pretty heated on the court, so it’s important to make sure that you’re ready for anything. One thing that many athletes seem to gloss over to flexibility, which is incredibly important in a high-impact sport such as hockey. Being flexible will help you make sure that you’re less prone to injury in general.
So, let’s start by looking at some flexibility training. It’s simple enough, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s incredibly important no matter how big and bad you are. You can find some pretty helpful full-body stretch exercises on the internet. Some people opt for doing yoga because it builds strength and flexibility at the same time. You always want to be sure that you can get your full range of motion on the rink, so please don’t skip over this.
Even simple stretches before you do any strength training or cardio can go a long way. Just make sure you’re stretching correctly for whatever muscle group you’ll be using. You wouldn’t want to get your legs nice and limber to do a bench press, and limber arms would serve little purpose for squats. Everyone’s body is different so it’s important that you find stretches that work for you.
The next most important thing for hockey is arguably cardio. You want to make sure that you can withstand the entire 60 minutes of the game without getting too winded. Most people would recommend some anaerobic exercises, so you’d be looking at things like wind sprints and explosive running. Both of these exercises will help you increase your lung capacity and also improve your stamina to help you along with those particularly fierce encounters you have in the rink.
Next up, strength training. Many people would recommend, at the very least, push-ups and pull-ups. These exercises focus on your push and pull muscles, which are both important for hitting the puck around the court. The stronger your arms are, the more devastating hits you can land on the puck. You want to make sure that when you hit the puck, it’s moving fast enough to make it difficult for your opponent to block. That requires great power.
If you can afford to have a home gym in your house that would be even better. Bench presses and deadlifts will seriously step up your arm game and make you much more of a force to be reckoned with during matches. The harder you can hit the puck, the better, and keep that in mind while you’re training.
Arms are important, but legs are just as important. Your legs are what keep you grounded and allow you to move around the rink. Without their support, you would likely just stumble around the rink and wouldn’t be much use to your team. Ensuring that you work your legs out will also help you keep your body looking symmetrical from head to toe, which is just an added bonus. Remember, friends, don’t let friends skip leg day.
Working on Your Stickhandling and Shooting
The rink is truly a great equalizer. Strength training is important, but even the strongest man in the world wouldn’t do much good on the rink if they didn’t know how to properly handle a stick or hit a puck. Strength, speed, and accuracy are the three most important attributes for a good hockey player to possess. The ratio of these attributes can vary depending on position, but everyone on a solid hockey team has to have all three of these.
Because of its importance, knowing how to train yourself for your stickhandling abilities as well as your accuracy at home is important if you want to stay sharp during the off-season. There’s nothing worse than coming back to the rink after an off-season and being rusty, so make sure you’re doing your training three to five times a week to avoid that.
One of the most famous adages is to hit 100 pucks a day, but that simply won’t get you the results you need. You might improve accuracy by a little bit, but there’s no challenge in hitting a puck into an open net. Something that you could try adding to your regimen is called puck hacky. All you need is your stick and a tennis ball. Just bounce the tennis ball on the blade of your stick and keep track of how many times you can do it. This exercise will help greatly with your hand-eye coordination.
Something that every professional has done at some point or another is an exercise simply called flipping the puck. For this exercise, you’ll need a bucket or an old tire and a bunch of pucks. The goal is to use your hockey stick to flip the pucks into the bucket or tire. You can just try flipping it, or you can knock the puck into the air and slap it back down into your tire or bucket. Make sure you keep track of your attempts and misses so you can track your improvement over time.
This exercise helps a lot with hand-eye coordination just like puck hacky, but with the added bonus of puck handling and timing practice. If using pucks is too hard for you when you first start out doing this drill, simply switch them out for tennis balls until you’re ready to proceed. When you’re training you do want to push yourself, but make sure you’re being reasonable. If you go too far beyond what your body can do your training won’t amount to much and you could end up injuring yourself by mistake.
Consider Getting an At-Home Rink
There’s nothing that will train you for playing hockey more than playing hockey, and that’s exactly what you can do with an at-home rink. It allows you to get the feel of the ice under your blades while practicing your handling at the same time. Obviously, this option won’t work for some people. Space or budget might simply not allow for something like an at-home rink, but for those that can swing it, it’s a worthwhile investment.
It might sound both hard and complicated to get an at-home rink, but it actually couldn’t be easier and might cost a lot less than you would realize. Most at-home rinks use synthetic ice, rather than true ice, which makes storage a lot easier and makes the whole thing more practical. If you needed to use true ice, you would need to flood out a part of your house and keep that part of your house incredibly cold so it wouldn’t melt. Synthetic ice, on the other hand, is specially designed to be used in all climates, especially in places that true ice would just melt.
While synthetic ice does have drawbacks for competitive bouts, it’s actually better for training than using true ice in a lot of ways. True ice has a higher glide factor, but synthetic ice allows for easy resistance training because it’s a little harder to move on than true ice. That means that if you spend your off-season training on synthetic ice, you’ll find it a lot easier to move around on true ice when the season begins.
As far as the space it takes to create a synthetic ice rink, it can vary. There are all sorts of different products out there that can meet different needs. Whether you’re looking for something you can plop on your backyard law and practice away or you’re looking to convert your basement, there are options available to help you achieve your vision.
Stay Sharp, Even During Off Seasons
One mistake that no athlete wants to make is slacking off during their off-season, even if it is incredibly tempting to do so. Fortunately, with a little discipline and creativity, you can make sure that you return to the rink stronger, faster, and more accurate than ever better. Who knows, if you train hard enough you might even be able to carry your team to the championship this year and for many years to come.