Reply To: 2010-2020 Coach Discussion Forum

[Tom Molloy]

Endurance skating is practicing slowness
In this case, after 35 second stop-start, his acceleration is half as fast.

By Jack Blatherwick
Let’s Play Hockey Columnist

During every physical movement, your brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerves are learning. The (anatomical) structure is modified in order to memorize and repeat the exact range and speed of motion in training. This is especially true for young athletes in the years just before puberty and for the next 2-5 years (to learn more about adolescent brain-nervous system plasticity, start a search with either “Adolescent learning” by JN Giedd; or “White matter matters” by R Douglas Fields).

Changes to the nervous system have nothing to do with your stated intent; it’s all about the speed and quality of movement. What you repeat most often determines what you will become. If your endurance training is slow – and most endurance training is slow – these patterns are imprinted into your nervous system … permanently.

It is now possible to “see” these changes with modern (MRI and other scanning) technologies, but the concept is not new. We’ve known for decades that training is specific, meaning the final result looks and feels just like the training repetitions. This is why we practice the golf swing with as much quality as possible, using video or having a coach observe. We’d never think of intentionally repeating a bad swing over and over.

Therefore, it’s amazing that in every sport (except track) we have mindlessly accepted a tradition that endurance training should be mostly slow, when our objective is to play the game fast. If we thought about it for 10 seconds, we’d conclude that in hockey our conditioning program should prepare us to maintain – for an entire game – the highest quality skills at the fastest possible speed. But outside “experts” convinced us that long, slow aerobic training was necessary.

Our conditioning objectives became confused with those of middle-age fitness folks – aerobic training at a slow jogging pace – heart rates at a steady 70 percent of maximum. Instead, hockey practices and off-ice conditioning should feature speed, with high-intensity intervals. Peak heart rates reach maximum, and might not drop below 70 percent during recovery. This resembles the endurance challenges of a game.

But endurance conditioning in youth hockey is not as high a priority as it might be in college or the NHL. Stick skills, playmaking, skating fundamentals, quickness and agility are much more important at young ages when these fine motor skills can still be learned. Therefore, coaches should never sacrifice quality skating skill with the thought that conditioning-skating needs to be a slow, torturous grind. Stops-and-starts and agility or flow drills at top speed should not last more than 10 seconds, and rest intervals must be adequate – but just barely (40-60 seconds).

Long, hard (40-second) conditioning-skates only teach the central nervous system to remember slow feet, inadequate knee bend, weak extension, inefficient posture and excessive arm swing – all resulting in slow acceleration. This is like practicing terrible golf swings over and over for decades. In that regard, my CNS became a repetitive machine.

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