Original Source: Maria Mountain, MSc CSCS

Posted on: Mar 27, 2013

A great article by Maria Mountain MSc CSCS is a Fitness Coach and the owner of Revolution Conditioning in London, Ontario, Canada and has recently partnered with GoalieTutors.com to provide the most current and up-to-date advice and exercise to ensure that all GoalieTutor clients are well informed.  

The Off-Ice Training Pyramid

Whether you are a skater or a goalie, there is a hierarchy of off-ice training that you need to follow to maximize your gains while minimizing your risk of injury.  Basically we are trying to build a pyramid of performance with a very broad base and fine peak.  Let me explain.

The Off-Ice Training Base: Mobility and Stability

At the broadest point of the pyramid, the bottom, is your mobility and stability.  The two go hand in hand because they are related to one another.  You see, flexibility is just the range of motion about a joint.  So if you just lay there and someone bent your knee as far as it could go (without snapping of course), that would be the flexibilityabout that joint.

Mobility on the other hand is how much of that flexibility you can actually use in a functional way.  For example, we routinely have athletes enter our training programs at Revolution Conditioning who have full range of motion at their knees, hips and ankles (so adequate flexibility), yet they cannot do a perfect squat.The squat is a measure of their mobility. So we know that the inability to execute this movement is not due to their flexibility, so it could be due to lack of strength (not usually the case with athletes), lack of stability through those movements or it could be a loss of that motor pattern. Sounds odd doesn’t it, that a motor pattern could be lost – that an athlete’s body could literally have forgotten how to squat, but it happens more often than you think. Luckily we have ways to re-train that pattern or build the stability in the hips and torso that are required to bring back a nice clean movement.

The Next Level: Functional Strength

At first I was just going to call this segment ‘strength’, but what we are really after is functional strength or useable strength.  Doing leg press will make you strong won’t it?  But it will not teach you to stabilize that strength, therefore it is not useable strength or functional strength which is what we are after.

Another reason we must be careful to build functional strength and not just big dumb muscles is that as a hockey player you need to carry all your muscle mass.  During this phase of training it is not odd to add 6lbs of muscle to a player (or add 12-16lbs over the course of a 4-month training cycle), if that muscle is not useable in a way that makes the player faster, more stable, gives them a harder shot, then it is wasteful.  I don’t think we could find a player who would strap an extra 5lbs dumbbell to themselves for a game.

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