The Ultimate Guide to Structuring Off-Season Training for Hockey Players

You’ve just made it through what felt like the longest hockey season of your life, and as more and more games continue to be crammed into the schedule each year, chances are, it was. You played multiple games each weekend, practiced hard day-in and day-out, oftentimes working on systems and special teams or even conditioning at the end of practice. You most likely had mandatory off-ice training with your team two to three times per week on top of hockey, all leaving little or no time to focus on your own level of play. You promised yourself that when the season ends, I’m going to work on my own game and skate as much as humanly possible so I can come back better than everyone else…outwork the competition.

The Problem

If the majority of your hockey season consisted of playing hockey, the answer to getting better is not to just play more hockey. Skating just as much as you did during the season is a surefire way to burn out mentally and dramatically increase your risk of an overuse injury. 

But How Do I Get Better?

I’ve spent an entire career training high-end pro, collegiate and youth hockey players who seemed to have the game just come easier to them. I’ve also spent an entire career training the grinders on the outside-looking in. These were the players who were never quite blessed with elite skill, but had the ability to work as hard as humanly possible to earn their shot at every level of their career. To this day, I still hear those players shouting back at me “but the summer is the only time I have to improve my game, I have to skate” and to their credit, they were spot-on. A developing athlete needs to continue working on their skill, refining what parts of their game work well, while eliminating the traits that hinder them. 

Managing the dosage of your training is what makes the difference in your development into an elite hockey player. 

There is a time and place to push your training volume both on and off of the ice. Furthermore, an even better method to ensure proper off-season development is to categorize which on-ice sessions should be paired with certain off-ice sessions on a particular day. For example, you would probably think it would be better to have a hard skating session paired with an off-ice upper body workout on the same day. Save the hard lower body workout for the next day, when you may be doing an easy skill session on the ice. The problem with this approach is that your lower body would never have time to recover, causing you to work at a lower intensity the rest of the week. Below is a table outlining the method that has allowed my athletes to reach the highest levels of preparation year in and year out:

So How Should My Training Look in the Grand Scheme of Things?

First of all, I know I’m going to sound biased, but you can save yourself a ton of stress by letting us plan this all out for you.

In terms of mapping out your optimal on and off-ice training during the hockey off-season, you must realize that you never have to completely refrain from one or the other, you just need to strategically prioritize one over the other at different times. Below is an example of how I usually structure my players’ training schedule throughout the course of an off-season:

At the beginning of the off-season, the amount of on-ice training should be minimal and skill-based in nature to allow you to push yourself in the gym. This is the time to improve mobility, muscle mass and strength that has inevitably been lost during the season. If on-ice volume is too high, you will be too sore to create those adaptations in the gym. 

As the start of the season gets closer, the on-ice training becomes more specific to game and practice-type situations. The off-ice training becomes shorter, yet more intense (higher speeds, heavier weights). These shorter workouts limit the amount of fatigue that can be accumulated, allowing you to practice at a higher level, as you should feel more recovered this way.

Tying it All Together

You have probably heard the saying “don’t burn the candle at both ends” when someone refers to the amount of work you are doing. If on-ice training is on one end of the candle, and off-ice training is on the other end, that candle is going to melt away very quickly if both ends are burning at full intensity. Instead, you should methodically train at different intensities to ensure that you can train all off-season without burning out, or even worse, getting injured. “Work hard, but work SMART.” 

If you’re interested in training with us in person, or would like remote training programs designed for you, shoot us an email at info@asaptrainingct.com.