What You Can Do Now to Be Ready for When You Hit the Ice!
Right now, June 2020, the world in many places is still on pause. Unfortunately, hockey is no exception.
Lately, hockey players and fans alike have been starved of their favorite sport. There are no new games to watch—worse yet, there may be no new games to play. For minor hockey, the season is supposed to be starting soon, but with the current state of affairs, the exact start date is questionable.
Hockey will hopefully be up and running again in no time! Until then, there are plenty of ways you can prepare at home for the upcoming season.
Practice Your Hockey Skills at Home
Just because you have no team to practice with and no ice to practice on doesn’t mean you can’t practice. Some of the most important work that professional hockey players do is the work they put in off the ice.
Research and Practice At-Home Hockey Drills
If you simply google “at-home hockey drills,” you’ll find a bunch of stickhandling, shooting, passing, and agility drills you can do at home. Most of the drills require nothing more than a stick, a few pucks, and a training area with a flat surface (like a backyard deck, a garage, a driveway, or the road).
If you spend some time every day practicing off-ice drills, you’ll be able to surprise your teammates and your competition with your improved technique when you get back on the ice.
There are also plenty of hockey training aids you can buy that will allow you to perform more complex drills at home. Here’s a list of affordable training equipment you can order online that will improve your off-ice skill development:
• Extra pucks and balls
• A net
• Targets and tarps
• Synthetic ice tiles
• Agility ladder
• Agility cones
• Stickhandling bars and shafts
• Slide boards and booties
Stay Physically Active
Quarantine is the perfect excuse to sit on the couch and binge-watch Netflix shows all day. Employment is low, school is finished, the anxiety about world issues is high, and summer is supposed to be a time for relaxation.
However, one of the most important things you can do right now as an aspiring hockey pro is to overcome the urge to rest and to stay physically active.
If you stay active throughout the summer, you’ll have a huge advantage over all the other players at your level who let their physical activity slip. You’ll be fit, energized, and ready to take on the upcoming hockey season!
Perform an At-Home Workout Routine
Even though gyms are closed right now, there are still a ton of at-home workout routines that are available online.
Some of these routines don’t use any equipment whatsoever—all you need is your bodyweight and some determination. You can even find a bunch of workout routines that are specifically designed for hockey players. You can train your reaction time, your legs, your core, and everything else you need to be an unstoppable force on the ice, all from the comfort of your living room!
If you want to get started right away, here’s a quick list of some of the best exercises:
• Diamond push-ups
• Squats with a 3-second pause
• Planking
• Lunges
• One-legged squats
• Crunches
• Vertical jumps
• Lateral jumps
Play Social-Distancing Sports
Another option that offers some variety and fun for staying fit during quarantine is to play sports that allow for safe social distancing.
Jogging is a great way to get some exercise and enjoy the outdoors at the same time. Not only will running keep you fit, but simply getting out of the house for an hour a day will provide a huge mood boost that will keep you motivated to continue exercising. If you own a bike, cycling will achieve the same results.
Any sports that involve a racket and a lot of distance between the participants are also good social distancing options. Sports like badminton and tennis will train stamina, speed, and reaction time—three crucial skills for hockey players.
Basketball is another option if you own a net or if you can find a free one around your community. A couple hours a week of shooting hoops will improve your accuracy and hand-eye coordination.
Stay Healthy
Being a dominant hockey player involves more than just on-ice skills and hitting the gym every so often. One of the best things you can do during quarantine to make sure you’re ready for the next hockey season is to maintain other healthy habits like sleeping, eating, and mindfulness.
Develop a Good Sleep Schedule
I get it. It’s quarantine and there’s no personal responsibility. All the days blur together and, unless you’re near a window, you can never tell whether it’s day or night. You sleep when you’re tired, not when you know you should be going to bed.
The problem is that this kind of routine takes a huge negative toll on your body. Having a dysfunctional internal clock makes you tired more often. It also limits your reaction time, your processing speed, and your physical capabilities.
So, if you’re on a sleep schedule like the one above, do your best to fix it. If your sleep pattern is still solid, do your best not to fall into a bad pattern.
Simply keeping your sleep regulated to something like 11PM-7AM will give you a massive advantage over your hockey competitors once the next season starts. You’ll especially see this difference at the beginning of the season, when everyone else is a little more exhausted and slower than usual while they try to get their sleep back in order. Meanwhile, you’ll be skating circles around them.
Develop Good Eating Habits
Aside from getting proper sleep, you should also make sure you’re getting proper fuel.
It’s easy to neglect your nutrition when you have nowhere to go and ordering in from restaurants is more popular than ever. However, if you start eating healthy now, you’ll have a clear leg-up over your hockey competitors.
Use this time to develop good eating habits so that when you get back out on the ice, you’ll have high energy and high awareness.
Here are the basic ingredients to a healthy hockey-player’s diet that’ll keep you energetic and strong:
• Eat lots of fruit and veggies (they make great snacks!)
• Eat lean proteins like fish and chicken
• Eat slow-release carbs like oats, wholegrain breads, and pasta
• Drink lots of water
• Don’t eat too close to bedtime (around 2-3 hours before is ideal)
• Avoid meals that are too large
• Avoid sugar and processed foods
Meditate and Practice Mindfulness
While you’re physically preparing for the upcoming hockey season by eating healthy, sleeping well, and exercising, you can also be mentally preparing for the upcoming season.
Many successful athletes use meditation and visualization to help keep themselves calm, focused, and motivated. While you’re at home, use some of your free time to meditate and visualize your success every day.
Meditation involves sitting upright in a quiet, comfortable place and closing your eyes. Do your best to clear your mind and focus only on your breathing. Those new to meditation should start by doing 3-5 minutes in a row. Once you’re experienced, you can increase your meditation time to 15 minutes and beyond.
Visualization is the technique of “mentally rehearsing” your sport. The main benefit is to decrease panic and performance anxiety. Spend some time each day visualizing yourself on the ice during a hockey game. Use your mind’s eye to watch yourself score a goal, make and receive passes, and skate faster than everyone around you. Visualization will help increase your confidence and motivation to practice and play hockey, and it can be done on the couch, in the shower, or as you’re falling asleep.
Study Hockey
“Studying” is a sore word for most people because school forces them to learn boring information year upon year. Yet, studying is a crucial part of improving at anything, whether it’s a school subject or your favorite sport.
Studying hockey shouldn’t be boring like memorizing times tables or learning what mitochondria do. There are plenty of fun things you can do outside of working out or eating healthy during quarantine that will make you a better hockey player through study.
Watch Old Professional Hockey Games
Many TV channels and online sports platforms like NHL.com have a bunch of old professional games ready for you to watch. All you need is an electronic device and reasonably fast internet service, and you can have professional hockey games on-demand.
You can either watch the games at random, or you can seek out some of the most exciting and skillful games by looking for Olympic re-runs and playoff games.
Regardless of what game you watch, make sure you pay attention to what you’re watching. Look carefully at how the players position themselves, take shots, and react as the game progresses. Think about your own games and your own technique and consider what you can do to improve yourself based on what you’re seeing the pros do.
Watch Hockey Analysis and Skill Videos
If you’re looking for a fast-track to improving at specific areas in hockey, search through YouTube and other sports video archives for analysis and skill videos.
There are thousands of videos available for any hockey skill you can think of, most of which are short and sweet. There are also a ton of clips of NHL analysts and commentators talking about plays and goals from pro games. You can collect many tidbits of simple advice from these videos that you can implement in your own game when the time comes to get back out on the ice.
Read Hockey Books
Reading is one of the best ways to pass time if you’re stuck indoors with nowhere to go. Luckily, there are tons of hockey books available to read that are both interesting and educational. Books like Ken Dryden’s The Game and Craig Custance’s Behind the Bench can provide hours of entertainment, insight, and motivation to practice and play hockey.
You can order hockey books online through businesses like Amazon and Indigo, or you can buy e-book versions through Kobo, Lulu, or Kindle.
As you can see, just because you’re stuck indoors without ice to skate on doesn’t mean you can’t use your time wisely at home. For now, surprise your competition by training in the shadows. Work on your hockey skills, exercise, stay healthy, and study the game while you wait for things to get back to normal.
Once you get back out on the ice, you’ll start to see all the training you did at home begin to pay off. While all the players around you are trying to readjust to being active again, sleeping properly, and feeling a stick in their hands, you’ll already be set up for success.
