Great Lakes Clinic Take-Aways

For the second year in a row, Advantage Strength & Conditioning and Hockeystrengthandcondtioning.com put on the Great Lakes Hockey Strength and Conditioning Clinic. Again this year, they were able to bring in some great coaches to teach the rest of us what we need to know to become better coaches and strength coaches. It never ceases to amaze me how willing and excited these top coaches in the industry are to teach us what they know.  The resounding theme of the day, for me, was that we need to gain more information on our athletes to be able to better coach them and help them succeed.

The first presenter of the day was Devan McConnell, Head of Hockey Performance at UMass Lowell. Devan talked about what monitoring is and how we can use it to make our programs better. He focused on three main reasons for monitoring. The first reason is to gain better insight. Getting better insight will lead the coach toward asking better questions about what is in the program and why they are doing it. Gaining insight and asking the right question then allows for coaches to better know what the athletes can handle on a certain day. Are they too physically tired to workout as hard as you had planned? Are they in a mental state that inhibits them from going hard? After figuring out those answers you can then ask yourself some key questions for that day from a training perspective. For example, what will the cost of doing business be on that day? Will going hard do more harm than good? Can they go hard anyway because they will have a couple of recovery days ahead? Some of these questions are answered by the monitoring and some of them will be answered by “the art of coaching.” Sometimes your gut will tell you something different than the science. We as coaches need to get to know our athletes as well as we can so we can make those calls. This is what Devan referred to as “the art of coaching.” We all should be looking for ways to monitor our athletes. If you are like me, you do not have the budget for a high end monitoring system but there are low tech ways to monitor.  One way to monitor your athletes is a questionnaire. Asking questions about sleep, what they ate, stress level, how are they felt the workout was, etc. will help you make better decisions as a coach. Other simple ways to test readiness is to do tap tests (which they have an app for), and vertical jump. These will show you the readiness of the CNS.  So, despite budget, we as coaches need to find a way to monitor our athletes so we can better know the what, why, figure out readiness to know what the training load will look like.

The next presenter of the day was Greg Roskovensky. Greg is a Physical Therapist at Probility Therapy Services. He discussed whether or not we can program to be able to reduce the risk of injury for our athletes. Again monitoring was a big part of his presentation. Monitoring athletes gives us a better understanding of when, how and why most preventable injuries happen. We also need to be aware of the most common injuries that happen in each sport. If we are monitoring and testing we can adjust our programming to work on imbalances, overuse issues and avoid pushing kids too hard if they are tired and more susceptible to injury. Knee injuries tend to be common in hockey. As coaches we can work on building the muscles that support the knee and also work on landing techniques, ideally unilateral. Greg pointed out most practice injuries are non-contact injuries which would seem to be preventable. Are teams warming up sufficiently before practice? He gave a list of things to look for to be able to predict athletes who are likely to be injured which included: previous injury, asymmetry, motor control, BMI, stupidity, perceived recovery from exercise, mood, life stress, and position. Again, the more we know the better our strength programs can be. The best way to build a program that helps reduce injury is to identify intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors of both sport and training. A helpful formula he provided was Susceptible athlete + Mechanism of Injury = Injury. Another big take-away from Greg's presentation is that “athletes are significantly less likely to suffer injury with 16 or more weeks of training prior to season's beginning.

Another thing to think about when trying to keep athletes healthy is to avoid drastically changing the intensity of the workload week to week. Gradually building a chronic workload over time helps reduce injury. We also need to make sure athletes are recovering correctly. Some recovery techniques include foam rolling, stretching, eating well, staying hydrated and getting plenty of sleep. So monitoring to identify risk factors, work on imbalances, and make sure your athletes recover well. Doing these things should help keep your athletes from preventable injuries.

Anthony Donskov challenged us to think more about how we periodize our programs. A lot of people use a linear progression with their athletes but Anthony talked whether or not this is really an athlete focused way of programming. Are we just trying to fit an athlete into our programming with linear progressions or are we writing a program that fits the athlete? A big part of programming should come from monitoring and asking better questions. We should always have a “why” for our programming and the “why” shouldn't be “it's part of the plan”.

Another eye opening part of the Anthony's presentation was shining a light on a lot of the assumptions we have as strength coaches. The assumptions he talked about were:

• Science hasn't changed much since since the 40's-50's, so theory shouldn't either.

• There is one best method.

• Linear systems mimic complex biological systems

• We can predict biological adaptation

• Plan dictates the process

• Path-dependence is a superior training methodology

• Future training can be adequately predicted

• Top down training approach

• Macro planning is essential to athletic success

Most of the assumptions on this list cause us to forget about the athlete. Anthony was not saying linear training isn't effective but challenged us to ask better questions and always re-evaluate what we are doing so we can be athlete focused and not be stuck to our plan. Anthony summed it all up by saying “Let the process run the plan, not the plan run the process.”

Joe Maher, the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for University of Michigan gave us a break from sitting and ran a hands-on session teaching us proper technique for olympic lifting. Joe focused on the barbell snatch and clean. We went through the progression and positions he uses with his athletes. A big takeaway from this hands-on session was if the athlete isn't ready to progress, don't progress them. Seems obvious but, at least for me, it is often hard to jump keep an athlete where they are in a progression. Especially when the athlete is getting impatient with an exercise or they are “bored.” There is often pressure to progress even if they are not ready but it is important we stick to our guns to keep our athletes healthy. Olympic lifts are a great tool for developing power all our athletes need. We just need to be smart and let the athlete progress at the rate they need.

The last presenter of the day was Dave Cencer, the Strength and Conditioning Coach at Ferris State University. Dave talked about how we can train goalies slightly different than the rest of the team. His big thing is that 80% of the time the goalies train the same as the rest of the team but we should use the other 20% to focus more on what makes the goaltender position different from all the other skaters. The main difference between goalies and the other positions is they spend most of game doing explosive lateral movements. Goalies also do a lot of up and down movements. Dave also pointed out the squat position goalies are in most of the game is very quad dominant so we need to take that into account when programming. Ideally conditioning should be done with goalie specific movements. Another area we can make more goalie specific is plyometric training. A variation Dave uses for the skater jumps is butterfly jumps where the goalie starts in the butterfly position before getting up to explode laterally. Dave also tries to avoid a lot of squatting with his goaltenders during the season since they spend so much time in a quad dominant position during the season. Another good point was to focus on training movements, not muscles. Goalies need to be strong within a range of movement. It's one thing to be able to do the movement, but they need to be able to stay strong within them. Dave uses mostly plyometric training for power work in-season and olympic lifts in the off-season. Other things to focus on are hip mobility, core strength, and change of direction work. Again, 80% of the goalies training can be the same as everyone else. It is the other 20% we should use to get more specific to better prepare goaltenders

Overall, this was a very informative and interesting clinic. All of the presenters gave a ton of smart and practical information to think about. The great part of all for presenters is that everything was so practical. The main theme of the day seemed to be monitoring. We need to do some form of monitoring to be able to ask better questions and better take care of our athletes. I would like to thank Brian and Daryl again for putting together this great opportunity to learn from some of the best coaches and minds in the field.