The Importance of In-Season Strength & Conditioning For Hockey Players
It was an awesome spring and summer of training for our hockey athletes, and I'm really excited to watch and follow all of their seasons.
It's remarkable to me that we had over 100 hockey athletes train with us this summer. It wasn't too long ago when I sat down and made it a goal to squash the notion that AHP was "just a baseball gym."
It's hard to believe it's September, but here we are. In a post later this week, I'm going to outline my principles and strategies for training hockey players in-season, but today I just want to stress the WHY.
Long-Term Development! If you only train in the off-season, you are leaving six months of potential development on the table. With a proper prescribed program we can accomplish three objectives: a) prepare to perform our best this week ; b) build qualities to ensure we are prepared to play our best at the end of the season ; c) build qualities to deepen our foundational potential to develop long-term
Below is a great example, of an athlete who has trained with us since he was 12 years old.
This is a post from a couple years ago. Colt is now in his NHL draft year, after putting up an excellent 16-year old season with Moose Jaw in the WHL (38 points in 61 games as defenseman) - a season that also included him playing on U17 Team Canada.
This particular post was in his grade 10 year. His team trained with us twice a week, and he also consistently trained an 'extra' third session with us every single week.
Consistency wins. For young athletes, think of in-season training sessions as small weekly deposits that, over time, can accrue a ton of compound interest.
Just like investing - even something small is better than nothing. One session every couple weeks is still thirteen quality training sessions over six months. They absolutely can move the needle!
Below is the absolute pinnacle example of this working long-term. I've coached and trained Erik Sabrowski since he was thirteen and he's now in his third MLB season (and has been absolutely dominant). A couple days ago he was featured on MLB network! (It's a different sport, obviously, but the principles still apply!)
