Changes to the In-Season Program
Each hockey season offers its own characteristics and demands. It seems that each successive season, the schedule gets more difficult for us from a perspective of scheduling strength training sessions. For example, during this current season, we played the most games in the league (38 games) prior to the Christmas break. We had some difficulty getting in quality workouts because we played games so frequently.
In our strength and conditioning program, a change that I implemented this year was backing off on all leg work. In years past, we have always done leg strength exercises 2-3 times per week when we would be on longer home stands. Each workout that we would do was always a total body workout consisting of lower body and upper body work. We would have at least 2 leg exercises in the lift for that day including a leg push (squat, single leg squat, lunge, etc.) and an exercise for the posterior chain (SLDL, slide board leg curls, etc). The reason for this was that we don't get too many workouts in throughout the year. My philosophy was that we need to take advantage of our training facility while we are at home. So we will get in as many total body lifts as we can during those times.
Why did I make this adjustment? There are a few reasons why I incorporated this change.
I have to admit that there were times in the past that I thought we were flat or had no jump in our legs during games where we lifted close to the next game. For example, if we had a Friday night game, we would have had our last workout on the Wednesday night before. I always thought that we could push through it and be ok. We have always been one of the best teams during the second half of the season when we did leg exercises 2-3 times per week. I thought that since it worked in the past, why change it.
This season, it seems like we are playing every other night. It is common for us to play 4 games in a seven day span. As a result, we need to have our legs on a nightly basis. With recovery being so important during the season, it seems that there are more instances where my role is being more of a recovery coach rather than a strength and conditioning coach. When we don't get many workouts in, this is the case.
How did we make the change? First, it is important to note that we still get our leg work in. The exception is that we work our legs only once per week in the weight room during the in-season phase. One exercise for leg pushing and one exercise for the posterior chain in our leg workout. This is also done on a night where we don't play a game again for 3 days rather than 2. (We primarily lift post- games to ensure that we optimize our recovery period before our next game.). My thought process is that since we don't get many workouts in anyways, there is a good chance that our guys would be pretty sore in 2 days. The extra day off is key in the recovery process.
We will now get in 1 leg/upper pull workout and 2 upper body push, pull, and core workouts. For example, a typical good week of training for us would be a Sunday night, Wednesday night, and Friday night home game schedule. We will lift post game after each game. The Sunday night workout would consist of an Olympic lift variation, leg exercises, and upper body pulling exercises. The Wednesday night workout would consist of upper body pressing and core exercises. The Friday night workout would consist of a circuit that includes upper body pressing, pulling, and core exercises. Our core work consists of traditional core exercises as well as hip strength and stability exercises.
What my main concern is and will always be is injury prevention. Is the lack of leg work going to set us up for more chances of injury? Or, is getting 2 leg exercises per week the right amount of work that will allow us to prevent injuries and have fresher legs? We will have to wait until the end of the season to determine if this has worked or not.
