This is one of my first ever public essays. Nothing else I have produced has gone into as much detail.

Enjoy!

It has been years since I participated in a training camp, or did any of the power skating classes commonly taught in all hockey rinks. So my view on the training is limited to my own memory, as I’m missing any possible changes or advancements, if you call it that, in training methodologies.

However, watching from afar and staying connected on social media as well as finding the mechanics education and athletic ability I have today, has opened up enough of a picture for me to comment on the current state of hockey training.

It does not look like it is producing the results that coaches intend.

If this training worked, everyone should be skating like Connor McDavid, or at the very least, 90% like McDavid. I see that is not the case.

I don’t believe this is a problem where a small number of very talented players produce the most points in hockey games. In-game production is a separate conversation from human movement. For now, I will leave that out in favor of talking about how training impacts your movement. And when talking about training hockey players how to move, we are failing as coaches.

How “Sports Specific Training” Falls Apart

The most common question I see when players talk about their training is, “Is this Hockey Specific?” There is a problem with that question, and it is fundamentally a big problem.

If everyone does the same thing, is that generalized or specified by definition?

And, what does “Hockey Specific” even mean?

One of the biggest failures of most coaches is failing to answer this question with the upmost clarity.

Here I write about what I formerly believed “Hockey Specific” meant, which lines up 99% with what I think all other hockey fanatics think this means; what I think is a corrective to what they think it means; and how I think we can adapt Hockey Training around it.

Before I learned what I know now, I thought “Hockey Specific” meant anything that mimicked the on-ice movements based off how the movements looked and felt, and that no other athlete was doing any of the movements hockey players were doing. That was what I was told what it meant by my other coaches. So I believed that, and I stayed with this belief up until I had major problems with my hip and changed my training, which I will talk about later. In terms of how this calls back to being a generalized or specified statement, there seems to be nothing wrong with it. This is how you want your specific coach in your specific sport thinking about your specific movements.

But, here is where it falls apart: what they say is specific training is also what other athletes in other sports are doing. If everyone does the same ladder agility drills, does it matter which sport is best used for it? If everyone does the same hex-bar deadlifts, does it matter which athlete it is most optimal for? If everyone does the same sprints, does it matter which player is most conditioned? This performative contradiction was eye opening for me; but the understanding that training is about athletic ability, and not about how any drill or exercise is specific to a given sport is the concept needing enlightenment. So it is movement specific, not sport specific. Plus, what’s amazing with this concept is it works with on-ice movement. If hockey players and figure skaters do the same edge balancing drills, how do you distinguish what they do differently for their training, physic, body composition, and attitude aside? They are doing the same drills but they play different sports. How does that make any sense?

Now I do not do 3/4 of those drills listed above, but I wanted to show those most common drills to list the point I made. That leads us to how I think we can adapt Hockey Training to this movement specific training. Ability is always first, not the drills. If your knee cannot handle twice your bodyweight on a squat, you are set up trouble as a hockey player. If your ankle cannot handle collapsing to the f0oor on both the inside and outside edge, you are set up for trouble as a hockey player. If your shoulder cannot handle 10% of your bodyweight on a seemingly remedial external rotation exercise, you are set up for trouble as a hockey player. If any part of your body is missing the ability that any of the best athletes in the world can do, how can you expect to perform at an elite level? This was the problem I had when I exited a solo hockey practice with a limp in my step. My hip’s ability was not where it should have been for the level I wanted to be at. (with that said, I now think no “sport specifc” training can help a chronic injury of any type or can it match up any defciencies with movement; in fact it may create movement defciencies). With hockey on-ice training, the same ideas apply. If you can’t get in a wide stance, it will be hard to move on the ice or protect the puck. If you can’t collapse your knee and ankle with control, it will be harder to deke in tight or evade defenders. If you can’t rotate and drop the hips, it will be hard to shoot or stickhandle.

When I trained my general movement, my specific sport got easier. When I fixed my hips and got them freakishly strong, it was much easier to move on the ice. When I matched my movement with a superstar NHLer’s movement, I freed up my skating, stickhandling, and shooting ability. I’m also not the only person to say this. The thousands of success stories collected and taught from Athletic Truth Group and Train 2.0 Hockey is a growing proof that training ability makes training the specifc sport easier. Without that frst step, you are left to random, genetic chance. And if you are reading this, you are probably not a genetic freak athlete. I hope this answer to a confusing question about “hockey specific training” was what you were looking for.

The Hockey Sense/Hockey IQ Flaw

Like “Hockey Specific Training,” Hockey Sense is one of the phrases most thrown around in the hockey community without knowing what it actually means. Once again, that’s a generalization of specific situations.

Hockey sense, as I define it, appears to be an understanding of the rules of the game. That’s it. The problem is, this applies to any other sport: basketball sense, football/ soccer sense, chess sense, {insert video game} sense, business sense, and so on. The most obvious statement anyone can make is that if someone is doing well in any of these areas, they must have a good sense of that area; wow, I could not see that for myself! Stating the obvious like this as coaches and commentators of hockey is not helpful at all. So let’s think of a better way, and to that we need to be able to predict what the results of a play will produce so that we can measure and repeat them.

When attempting to predict, we have no way of measuring precisely how people/players understand the rules of their games. We can only see results after the fact, not within the moment. What looks like a good play would just as easily turn bad if only one factor is changed. For example, there have been some instances where the goal gets knocked off of its position, and goalies won’t put it back on because they know the rule that it’s not their responsibility to put it back in place, and therefore any goal will not count if scored. But, some players don’t know of that rule, so the goalie trying to communicate that to his teammates went as well as you’d expect. So with that in mind, how can you ever predict a play?

I don’t think you need 100% accuracy in predicting plays in hockey, because that’s impossible. It may not even reach 50% accuracy. Alex Ovechkin, for example, has a below 20% shooting percentage, defned as the amount of goals he scores divided by the amount of shots he takes, and yet he still has over 800 goals and has taken the most shots on goal in NHL history. This leads us into what could be the go-to predictor for hockey sense: what I’ll call Click-Run actions.

Click-Run actions, also known as patterns or “if-then’s”, give us the closest cue into the minds of the best hockey players, whether they’re mechanically gifted, athletically gifted, or not. We can continue from the previous example with Ovechkin. One of his if-then’s is this: if I stay in an area between the top of the circle and the faceoff dot, and I keep my stance wide, slightly move backwards as the puck is passed to me for my one-timer, then I will get a high scoring chance compared to other scoring chances. What others call his “office” is really an if-then action. Sidney Crosby gets many net-front scoring chances with an if-then: if the puck goes to my teammate at the point, then I move from the corner to the net at the exact moment he shoots so I’m not too early and not too late. An Auston Matthews “if-then” could be: if I’m in front of my opponent and I’m in a wide stance with the puck, then I change the angle by lunging forward so that I get the puck around the opponent’s stick, skate, leg, etc. so that the puck can go on net. To state the obvious, no these players don’t say or think this out loud, otherwise this would take too long and the game would be much much slower. Instead, these are programmed. CLICK — RUN (a Robert Cialdini phrase). This programming is your hockey sense, or life sense or anything sense.

My guess is that a Click-Run action needs to work no more than 20% of the time at the highest level of hockey (the National Hockey League) to be a successful pattern. Crosby has a deke formula that works 1 out of 5 times. Patrick Kane will enter the zone the exact same way when given the chance, yet it works less times than it fails (instead of puck possession, he needs to give it away). Connor McDavid’s drive wide formula works the most out of any other player in the world, yet it does not work every single time, because if it did work each time he would have 5–8 goals a game. What about takeaways, how many times did Pavel Datsyuk miss a takeaway versus make a takeaway? (that number doesn’t exist, yet he is the most well-known takeaway artist in hockey). Add Ovechkin’s shooting percentage, and you see rarely any player has an above 20% success rate in any category.

My hope here is to illustrate how complicated it is to measure hockey sense, and to show why it should not be mindlessly thrown around like alcohol and drugs at a frat house. I have never seen a single Scout, General Manager, Coach, Commentator, etc. intentionally specify what they mean by “Hockey Sense” and I know the reason they don’t — you cannot defne it. The only credible measurable existing for hockey IQ is point production over time, but you can only measure that after it’s happened. Predicting a pattern/Click-Run action, while possible to do, needs to be examined after the fact, because that’s what it’s like to predict the future. You find out the present traits of a given player only after the plays have happened, and because the past is not the future, you can never be certain that it will happen again even if it’s a so-called pattern. This is Hockey IQ’s biggest flaw.

Can hockey sense apply to something more foundational to players’ movement within the game, like mechanics and physics? Possibly to correct it from a flaw to a power tool? I believe it can, because if you have the physical abilities, both athletically and mechanically, it will be easier to get more creative with different plays that stay within the rules of the game. Plus, the patterns that we’ve looked at are a hint that mechanics can work. We will look at that later, but frst we need to look at the flaws in mechanics/ technical training.

Why Power Skating Doesn’t Work

The most common hockey mechanics training clinics go by what’s known as Power Skating. Here’s a quote on what Power Skating is from thecoachessite.com:

“ ‘Power skating’ has been adapted from figure skaters. Many figure skaters are unqualified to be hockey skating coaches. Moreover, there are many misconceptions about the skills and drills used by power skating instructors. Power skating uses fgure skating techniques and ‘tricks’ in an attempt to improve the skating performance of hockey players. We still see power skating instructors using what used be called ‘compulsory figures’ from fgure skating.”

Learning how to skate from any athlete who skates makes sense because you want to have access to as many tools as possible when learning movement. Movement is so dynamic that you might need these multiple tools, and this applies to any style of skating, whether that’s hockey, freestyle, speed or fgure. The problem is, there are different sports with different premises of each game, and that means there will be different equipment and, this is most important, different biomechanics. There’s a reason hockey players don’t wear figure skates, and it’s the same reason speed skaters don’t wear hockey skates. Each one of these sports is different, and how to move in each sport is fundamentally different.

The biggest flaw with power skating is it teaches too much different movements/skills for different sports like figure skating, and has not enough focus on moving like the best NHL players.

What Power Skating does Well

Mastery of any unnatural movement is special. Skating is not what humans are designed to do. Anyone who teaches this skill should be praised, and they often are. Some people consider hockey or skating to be one of the harder sports because the skating is so difficult to teach.

Likewise with personal training, if you’re lucky to find an amazing coach especially one who practices with proficiency what they preach, you will make progress.

I also believe that the best power skating coaches does a great job of opening up the capabilities of skating. What they can pull off borders on what freestyle skaters can do, obviously without the extra front flips and splits. It is incredible to watch, and fun to do. There is always room for fun.

What off-ice trainers do well

Some players will get strong and change body composition with some off ice training; their bodies are the product of their work. Because everyone’s body is different, having different genetics and different weak links, no program will ever be perfect for anyone. In fact it is said that the perfect program is the one you haven’t done. This means trainers have a tough job.

There is also the factor that team training doesn’t work because it isn’t personalized enough for players to make true progress. Many trainers do a great job at customizing for their players, and to do it for 10–20 years is taxing. This is a high wear-out job; if you get 4 trainers who start in a gym at the beginning of the year, only 1 will remain at the end of the year. So any trainer who can do this for a living and get results deserves recognition.

Mechanics are always First

Here is where I will favor “Sport Specifc” training — it is hard to get good at hockey without working on hockey. You can only do so much in the gym before you need to work on the skills of your sport.

The best analogy I’ve seen to explain this is hardware vs. software conceptualized from Keegan Smith. Hardware is the work in the gym to balance the body through exercise and strengthen its abilities in all ranges. Software is the skills and tactics of the specific sport.

But this can go a layer deeper. Mechanics training is hardware for hockey. If you don’t have the ability to move on the ice, it will be much harder to execute your team’s tactics. That’s why players who’ve mastered their mechanics change the tactics of their teams and opposing teams. Connor McDavid, Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Auston Matthews, Matthew Barzal, Pavel Bure, Pavel Datsyuk and so many others all move differently than 95% of the players who have ever stepped on NHL ice. This means that they play differently. This means tactics coaches need to adjust how their team plays against them. They are literal gamechangers. Many people have their hypotheses as to why they are gamechangers, and I have my own too.

I believe these players are in a different class because they have different mechanics and different abilities in their movement.

From looking at their on-ice play, we can see they use movements that are either not taught or are exact opposites to what is commonly taught. Take the cue “hands out while you shoot”. Many coaches teach a full extension of both arms. But when you analyze shooters like Ovechkin, Matthews, Laine, Petterson, and Bedard from multiple angles with slo-mo and sped up (because that is what makes a complete analysis), you realize they don’t extend their arms fully on any of their shots. In fact, sometimes the top hand stays close to their hips, and they simply rotate. Another example with the crossover is that the foot that’s crossing over is the primary force for this movement. But upon further experimentation and studying players like McDavid, Barzal, and Bure, you will see this is not the case. Often times, crossovers are taught to have a high step with the inside edge foot. You don’t see that happen with these three players. They take much smaller steps, but they are twice as fast. So if power is generated by the inside edge foot, why are they taking smaller steps and moving faster? This is because they use the outside edge foot as the primary force production. This even works off ice especially in sports like basketball, you can try it for yourself.

What gets even more interesting is how to learn to do what they do. If you asked them directly, you’re likely to get the same answers they were told by their skills coaches. I believe this is why people are highly confused. If I say I study the best, clearly it doesn’t make sense for me to show a hypothesis different from what the best say they do. But the psychology says otherwise, which I won’t dive into. To study the best, you have to look at what they do that you can also match. This does not mean do everything they do. You would not want to copy Chad Ochocinco’s McDonald’s diet to somehow get shredded, because you are not his body and genetics. Likewise, if the best NHLers act like puppets with what they say they do for their training, that will not help you if you are already doing what they say to do.

So we’ve established the hypothesis that the best NHLers, which is not the same as “an NHLer”, play differently because they move differently on the ice. Now we need to show you how you can get there quickest, and to do that we need to breakthrough common gym misconceptions.

Master the Hardware

Strength through all ranges is the mother of all qualities. I’ve intentionally modified this age old quote to make the point that there are more metrics than just squat, bench, and deadlift.

There is also the concept of structural balance, which in its most basic sense is the balance of the upper body to the lower body, balance of antagonist groups of muscles, and balance of each side of the body with both upper-lower and antagonist muscles. With the world class trainers I work with in addition to seeing my own clients, I have heard less than 1% of people anywhere are structurally balanced. This means you almost certainly have something to work on in the gym, even if it’s something remedial like a Poliquin Step or a Powell Raise.

You master the hardware by working towards structural balance. This is how people like Ben Patrick can dunk a basketball, do the splits, and dunk again. His body’s hardware is set up to take what is seemingly torture, because he’s mastered strength through range. This is also the same principle that helped me overcome chronic groin and hip flexor pains to skate much faster and more agile, shoot quicker and faster, and do the splits (albeit not perfectly, but compared to what I could do when I was 5 years old, this is a miracle).

This appears to be the secret to athleticism.

You are going to end up in weird positions in hockey. If you are not strong enough in those movements, then I ask you this: do you have a planned route to fixing those areas, or are you staying as you are?

The Solution for Hockey Training

Hockey Training should be a math equation. That is what makes the path to the NHL the simplest it has ever been. I have yet to see this actually implemented.

It is my belief that your movement, your ability on and off the ice, is the most measurable factor that turns pathetic weasel players into superstar talents. You don’t get this by copying everything the best players do by determining if exercises are “hockey specifc” or not.

We often hear scouts talk about so called “measures” like Hockey Sense or IQ and “being in the right place at the right time” but they never specify what they mean. While you could in theory track the patterns of the pros, you always have the hindsight problem of needing to look to the past instead of predicting what will happen next in a sport with so much up to random chance. But when you do find a pattern, it doesn’t need to work more than 20% to be effective.

Power Skating, while a marvel in teaching skills, does little in teaching how the best NHLers today are moving. We need to distinguish the different sports at the same time we experiment with fun skills.

All of this is what I aim to solve in my Hockey Hacks System. I’m working on the world’s first NHLer math equation system, focusing on what is movement specific so you can unlock the ultimate hockey athlete inside of you. They are hacks because they cause quicker adjustments once you see and feel them, then you won’t be able to un-see and un-feel them.

You can check out all programs on my website. And if you’re ready to invest into your development with coaching that gives you the most support, accountability, and results, sign up for a free-initial consult here.

Thank you for reading.

Yours in Hockey Hacks,
Mason