Archive for category Hockey
4 Hockey Stretching Exercises To Perform Regularly
As you get going with your hockey training, it’s important that you pay attention to some of the important hockey stretching exercises that you should be doing. By performing stretching regularly you will help to reduce the amount of post-workout muscle soreness you experience while also ensuring that you can work through a full range of motion in all the weight training for hockey exercises you perform as well.
Stretching really only takes five to ten minutes at the end of each workout or on-ice session, but will make a big difference on your progress overall.
Let’s take a quick look at four good hockey stretching exercises that you should be including regularly.
Quad Stretching
The first stretch is the simple quad stretch, which will help to loosen up the legs which often become quite tight after hours of skating.
To perform this one simply bend one leg upwards and grab a hold of the ankle underneath the bum while pulling backward ever so gentle. Read the rest of this entry »
The Essential Hockey Skills: Fundamentals
The most important hockey skills to master are most certainly the fundamentals. Like in any sport, you’ll find that the best hockey players are those that have a profound mastery of the fundamentals. So, what are the fundamentals in hockey? I don’t know about you, but for me, skating, passing, and shooting immediately come to mind. Now, just because they’re fundamentals, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily easy to learn. Let’s take a look at these three hockey skills one by one.
1. Skating
Skating is probably the fundamental hockey skill. If you want to play the sport at a high level, you have to be able to skate, and skate well. And, let’s face it; skating isn’t exactly the easiest skill at which to become proficient. In fact, for many, it’s quite difficult. As ice is a commodity for most, half of the battle is getting time to practice. Unlike a football field or a baseball diamond, a hockey rink isn’t necessarily something that you can find around the next corner. And, if you do, you’re going to pay for your time on the rink. This being said, it’s important that you make the most of the time that you do get on the ice. Practice, practice, practice. Once you master one skating skill, move onto the next. It’s important that you don’t get caught up on what you’re good at, because that can mean stagnation in your overall development. Instead, once you’ve attained the ability to do one skating move, move onto one at which you struggle more. For example, if you’ve become proficient at stopping with your right foot first, to the point at which you can utilize it without thinking or hesitation in a game, move onto stopping with your left foot. When you have time to practice, make most of your stops with your left foot first; and so on, and so on. Eventually, and I’m talking years later, when you think you’ve gotten a pretty good grasp of skating in general, you can cycle back through the individual skating skills or work on other parts of your game.Here’s a quick list of some of the skating skills that you’ll use often in games, that should be worked on incessantly until perfected. Read the rest of this entry »