OFF-ICE

Off ice training for hockey is so much  more than just strength and fitness. Off ice training is also about skill and coordination.

Hockey is a very complex sport. Since it is the only game played with extensions on both feet and hands, hockey can be considered to be the world's most difficult game. Balancing on three millimeters of steel on an extremely slippery surface with a five foot long stick, handling an uneven object which sometimes exceeds speeds of over 100 mph. These are all factors that require extremely developed skills. Each of these skills is something that the human body does not do naturally and must be learned and trained. The best way to learn and train a skill is to break it down into its separate building blocks.

When you train a hockey team, you don't start the practice with one drill to develop your breakout, fore-checking, power-play, goaltending, speed, endurance, cross-overs, backhand shots, neutral zone trap, face-offs and penalty-killing all at once. Even though you most likely will encounter all these pieces during a game, you have to train them one by one.

The training of some of the pieces mentioned above contradict each other. For example, it is difficult to train fore-checking and neutral zone trap at the same time, and it is impossible to develop speed and endurance at the same time. Speed training demands well-rested muscles, whereas endurance training keeps the muscles working under fatigue. Each skill consists of numerous building blocks. Each block needs its specific training to develop properly. A perfect skating stride, for example, demands strong leg muscles to support a 90 degree knee-bend. If you try to develop skating technique only through skating on the ice, you will notice that your legs can only support the required 90 knee-bend for a short time.

For the balance of the training, you will skate in a too upright position and thereby develop  poor skating technique. The strength has to be developed before the technique can be trained, and since strength is better developed off-ice, you can only be a good skater on-ice if you train off-ice.

Stick handling, passing and shooting also consist of building blocks, which are better developed off ice than on ice.

Young Russian players enrolled at  elite training centres, commonly have an off-ice/on-ice ratio of 9 to 1. This means, that for every 10 training sessions, 9 are off ice and only 1 is on ice. Federov, Bure and Mogilny still turned out pretty good. HIT will provide you with the opportunity to get enough quality off-ice training, to develop your talent to its maximum potential.