Hockey players must tolerate quite a bit of pain and discomfort, and serious players must be willing and able to participate in very heavy training all through the year to remain competitive. Between the strenuous flurries of activity, the psychological stress of performance, the lack of warm up time, and the bulky padding of a hockey uniform, a player at the top level of competitive hockey may sweat away up to eight pounds of water weight during the course of a single game. A hockey player’s body must be prepared to safely weather this kind of ordeal on a regular basis, which requires a level of physical fitness that few other sports require.
Classical music and pink tulle are the last things most people associate with the rough and tumble sport of hockey, many players train at ballet studios. From young boys and girls who are in amateur junior leagues all the way up to Olympic-level hockey players, spending time refining plies at the ballet barre often proves to give skaters a leg up on the ice.
A hockey player must be able to rev their personal engine from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. At the pro level, a hockey player rarely spends more than a full minute at a time actively skating on the ice.
Between the strenuous flurries of activity, the psychological stress of performance, the lack of warm up time, and the bulky padding of a hockey uniform, a player at the top level of competitive hockey may sweat away up to eight pounds of water weight during the course of a single game. A hockey player’s body must be prepared to safely weather this kind of ordeal on a regular basis, which requires a level of physical fitness that few other sports require.
Hockey players must tolerate quite a bit of pain and discomfort, and serious players must be willing and able to participate in very heavy training all through the year to remain competitive. Unlike many sports that primarily require endurance, Hockey is all about sudden short bursts of extremely intense activity.
The need to be able to swiftly transition from a state of rest to one of peak activity requires specific forms of training that focus on shortening response times and achieving efficient and graceful movement without much of a warm up. A hockey skater’s workout regimen contains many predictable activities like lifting weights and jogging, but one place where many players go in order to improve their agility and response time proves to be somewhat surprising to many sports fans.
