Off-Season Weight Gain: Eat that Elephant
If utilized the right way, the hockey off-season can completely transform a player, especially at the youth level. From a training standpoint, this is the time when there are the least competing demands and the most time available for physical development. For many players, gaining weight is also a top priority for this time of year.
Gaining weight can be a formidable task. If a player's goal is to gain 5lbs in an off-season, that process isn't overly intimidating. In contrast, when players are looking to make a jump from youth to junior or collegiate hockey or from one of these levels to professional hockey, and are 20+ lbs under the average playing weight, getting up to an appropriate size may seem like an unattainable feat. This is especially true in light of the fact that most players claim that they “eat all the time” but can't gain weight.
Reality Education-Setting up a time template
If players are serious about putting on substantial amounts of weight, they need to be realistic about both what they're actually doing now (opposed to what they think they're doing), and what it's going to take to achieve their goal. I find that when players think they're eating all the time, their daily breakdown looks something like this:
12:00 pm: Cafeteria lunch
4:00pm: After school snacks
7:00pm: Dinner
9:00pm: Snack
In other words, there is roughly a 15-hour stretch from their last snack into their first meal the next day, and their diet is void of quality nutrients. When I point this out to players they have an “a-ha” moment and realize they aren't eating as much as they think they are. Using this realization to lay out a realistic eating plan is the first step in the process. Now their eating schedule will look something like:
7:00 am: Homemade breakfast or breakfast smoothie
10:00 am: Homemade snack
12:00 pm: Packed lunch
4:00 pm: Homemade snack or smoothie
7:00 pm: Dinner
9:00 pm: Homemade snack or smoothie
With this format, they eat about 6 times per day instead of four, and the 15-hour fast is cut down to a much more manageable 10-hour eating hiatus. The goal here isn't to have athletes set an alarm and force themselves to eat at inconvenient intervals, but to provide some structure to their daily routine and increase the frequency of meals slightly.
Nutrient Selection-Keep it simple
As a coach, I tend to think of foods in light of their macronutrient composition; most players don't. They want to know what to eat, not necessarily the specific breakdown of each food choice. Because most undersized players are incredibly lean, they're afforded a greater degree of flexibility in making macronutrient selections. I try to keep my recommendations to them as simple as possible: Eat REAL food.
Real food can mean different things to different people, but I always come back to a definition I learned from Brian St. Pierre:
Real food can be hunted or grown.
I've found this is a definition players can internalize, and instantly gets them away from eating more food products and processed options. For example, players recognize that they can hunt animals like chickens, turkeys, and cows, but not Doritos or Dunkaroos. They know they can grow an apple or banana, but not fruit snacks.
There are extensions to this definition worth pointing out. You can't grow or hunt things like yogurt or bread, but these aren't necessarily bad food choices. In these cases, players should choose food products that are as close to the original source as possible. For example, sprouted grain bread is a better choice than white bread, and plain greek yogurt is better than pre-mixed fruit-flavored yogurt.
The goal here is to change the way they view the foods they eat on a daily basis and start to make a higher percentage of better choices.
Eat the Elephant
When players have a lot of weight to gain, it's important for them to recognize that it won't happen overnight, and it doesn't need to. If a player has a 4-month off-season and needs to gain 20 lbs, that's 5 lbs per month or about 1.25 lbs per week. Breaking down larger goals into smaller short-term goals makes the task much more manageable.
This comes back to the old riddle:
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
The key is to take CONSISTENT steps and to monitor progress along the way.
