A Shift Toward Individualization

My training philosophy and methods are constantly evolving. At the end of the year, I find it helpful to take a look back over the past 12 months and reflect on how my programs are different (or not) from previous years and what things are likely to carry over into future programs. I made several significant changes to the way I approach programming this past year, many of which fall under the umbrella of a shift toward individualization.

Every off-season when our players first return, I take them through a fairly comprehensive assessment process. The goal of this assessment is largely to gain an understanding of their joint positioning, mobility, changes in range of motion from previous years and ultimately to determine any structural or adaptive changes I'd need to be aware of in the training process. This past year, I also performed a comprehensive body composition analysis, got a resting heart rate and heart rate variability measure, and performed basic “performance” testing. The results from this process were very interesting.

As a quick aside, I think it's worth pointing out that one of the major goals of any assessment process is to identify outliers. For example, there may only be 1-2 kids on a typical team that have a 1/1 Active Straight Leg Raise on the Functional Movement Screen, but those are the kids that will need to take specific steps to improve that capacity. Similarly, a typical team may only have a few kids with resting heart rates above 65-75 bpm, but those are the kids that may have a more difficult time recovering from high intensity work and may warrant more aerobic work to improve their fitness. As a whole, quality programming built around sound progressions, from a movement and physical quality standpoint, will still lead to group-wide improvements. However, some qualities in some players will get lost using this strategy and finding even subtle ways to individualize some things will improve the opportunity for each player to make improvements specific to their needs.

Individualizing Corrective Exercise

Our assessment process uses a combination of tests taken from the Postural Restoration Institute (PRI), Functional Movement Screen, Selective Functional Movement Assessment, and more traditional orthopedic assessments. While these tests provide a lot of information, I'm really using them to look for red flags, which will then be addressed through corrective exercise or manual therapy. From a corrective standpoint, the goal is to find the most influential exercises and perform them consistently to drive an adaptation, without corrective work consuming the program. As a general rule, these exercises are built into pre-warm-ups and cooldowns and may take 10-15 minutes total.  From a PRI standpoint, everyone gets put into one of 2-4 buckets and that dictates their breathing work for the first couple of phases. If someone has a glaring limitation in one of the FMS tests (a 1/1, 1/2, or 2/1), we'll also include correctives for these assessments. Depending on the player and the limitation, we'll reassess periodically to make sure that the corrective work is indeed having the intended effect and eventually to make sure it “sticks”.

Individualizing Training

This can be a very complex topic, but the implementation doesn't need to be. For each player, I try to think of the player's position, role (or desired role) within the team, and current physiological profile, and then prioritize what improvements need to be made to put the player in the best position to succeed in the future. As a few examples:

1. A first line player that plays ~18-20+ minutes a game that presents with a resting heart rate above 75 bpm and poor results on a conditioning test, but is extremely explosive may need 4-8 weeks of aerobic work at the beginning of the off-season to improve their capacity to recover from their high intensity work, in terms of a single work bout, repeated work bouts within a practice/game, and in the nights/days between practices, games, and training sessions. The goal is not to make this player so aerobically dominant that they lose the qualities that make them special on the ice, which is unlikely to happen in a 4-8 weeks series of blocks anyway, but simply to give them a little more balance in their profile so they can best express their abilities, consistently.
2. A goalie that presents with…well, almost all goalies. In somewhat of a contrast to the last example, before I become overly concerned with a goalie's conditioning, I want them to be one of the most explosive players on the team. For the first Summer ever, the training phases and conditioning protocols were fairly divergent for our goalies compared to other positions. We did almost no lactic conditioning and spent more time in phases designed to improve power, with a balance of alactic power, alactic capacity, and tempo work for conditioning, depending on the phase.
3. A 4^th line player, especially if they don't penalty kill. If you think about it, a player in this role will play anywhere from about 8-12 minutes across a 2.5-3 hour game. This breaks down to roughly 1 minute of ice time every 15 minutes of real time. While the specific roles of individual players and lines differs among organizations, in most cases, the goal for these players is to mix things up, provide some energy on the ice, and in some cases, shut down a line on the other team. In general, shifts aren't very long and there is a lot of time between them. This information, taken as a whole, means that these players can almost be trained like goalies; the goal being to help them become as explosive/powerful as possible. Depending on their role in practice, and how firm their position is, they'll need to be well-conditioned enough to not stick out in practice and potentially to be prepared to take on more ice time if they move up a line, but in general, this role has significantly different conditioning needs than other players.

There is inevitably a lot more to consider than what's been identified above, but the idea is to determine what the needs are of the specific individual, how their current physiological profile suits those needs, and program accordingly. Often times, players within a team or training group can be divided into buckets with similar training needs and only a few different programs will need to be written.

Individualizing Results Interpretation

This is a slight spin on the above discussion, but having spent hundreds of hours in research labs, I tend to think in averages. This isn't an inherently bad way to process testing results, but it's certainly limited. For example, we had several players add 4+ inches to their vertical jump last Summer, but not put on any significant amount of muscle (e.g. < 5lbs). We had several players add ~1” to their vertical (which I'd consider a fairly insignificant improvement), but put on 15+ lbs of muscle. The reality is that not everyone needs the same things so we shouldn't expect everyone to make the same progress. Looking at the above examples, the players that put on a ton of muscle, but had minor vertical jump improvements were players going into their first year of juniors and were significantly under-sized for their frames. In other words, the weight gain was one of their primary training goals and therefore an area that needed to be targeted to put them in the best position to succeed the next year. In addition, looking at any of the equations that calculate power based on vertical jump height and body weight, these players experienced significant improvements in power because they're moving so much more weight through a slightly greater vertical distance.

This is not only a necessary distinction for me, but it's important to convey these results to the players as well. It's easy to see why players may be discouraged if they put too much of an emphasis on the progress they made in a tertiary (or less) training goal. Helping players to prioritize training goals and demonstrate how their efforts, both in and out of the gym, have helped them achieve their goals is a more effective approach in getting buy-in and better results.

In the end, the goal is always to find the programs that put the players in the best position to succeed, as individuals and as a team. Individualizing programs creates a lot more work for the coach, but ultimately leads to better outcomes for the players.