Let me start this article by doing a quick disclosure about my bias as it relates to the idea of variety in practice.  I have created a hockey training center that features skill development on synthetic ice.  Synthetic ice offers a slight change to any task that incorporates skating or puck handling because it has increased friction as compared to ice.  So, mixing in our training on synthetic ice with a skater’s regular on-ice practice fosters the very sort of variety built into practice that this article and the linked article below are about.  The subject of both articles is essentially that training modes that are slightly modified are actually hugely beneficial to the rate of learning a new skill or refining a somewhat familiar skill.  Since this is very much aligned with the philosophy of our training center, my bias should be obvious.

With that out of the way, let's look at a few of the beliefs that are common in the Hockey community that run counter to the concept of varied practice.

First, there is the idea of transfer of training. It is intuitive to think that the more similar a task is to a task that will be used in a game, the more working on that task will transfer over to the game.  This is true.  Much of hockey training is built on this idea and is founded on movements that absolutely do happen in a game situation.  Yet, in virtually every sport nowadays, a lot of time is spent in the weight room doing movements that are distinctly abstracted away from the game.

For example, adding two legged strength via a squat is, in-general, beneficial to hockey players.  However, at almost no point during the game will players extend their legs very slowly on two legs through resistance of double their body weight or more (as you do in a squat).  Also, getting stronger at pulling the arms toward the shoulders as in a biceps curl can be worthwhile, but at almost no point is the exact motion of a biceps curl happening in a game of hockey (even though biceps strength is key, especially to stabilize the top hand, when flexing the stick during a shot).  However, these exercises are common ways that players gain strength to prepare for the game and few people doubt their value.

People actually are more likely to doubt the value of an exercise when its motion is quite close to a motion that will be used in the game.  The logic behind this is as follows.  Players spend lots of time to try to “perfect” their technique and they strongly fear that any subtle tweaks to the precise way that a technique is executed will create bad habits.  This too is indeed a realistic concern.  If a task where resistance is added or removed or it is changed in some other way such that the optimal technique isn’t the same as the way the technique is used in a game, there is a high risk of modifying the player’s habit in a non-beneficial way.

Finally there is nostalgia.  In Minnesota, we hold the great hockey players of yesteryear in a very high regard.  We tell stories about how the bulk of their training was on the pond or at the park.  And we remind each other and the young players that we are bringing along that the surest path to greatness is to fall in love with the game and make sure not to get burned out with too much structured practice along the way.  In the old days the game was learned on the ice, and I think many of us feel a connection to the belief that that is where learning the game should stay.

There are great things about learning hockey through unstructured play on the pond and there are aspects of the game that are still by far best learned on the ice.  However, it is useful to ask, using whatever technology we could, what is the fastest way to improve?  In doing this, we find many of the best answers do not involve using real refrigerated ice.  This is especially true if you are budget constrained and would still like to get access to private or small group attention.

Regardless if you are budget constrained or not, a part of the answer to the question of how to get better at hockey as fast as possible can be found in the this article.

If you don’t have time to read that article, I’ll summarize the key concepts here.  The idea is that you will effectively double your rate of improvement if you mix in small variations away from the most common version of the practice of a skill within a long-term training process.  This is a huge difference!  Consider that if you double the rate of improvement, the supposed 10,000 hours to expertise is cut in half to 5000 hours.

There are many ways in which these variations within the exercises used to practice a technique can be achieved, but here are a few for example; changing the resistance that is working against a movement, changing the speed at which a movement is executed, closing the eyes to change the way the body processes balance, and even doing normally two handed exercises with only one hand.  There are many ways, but bottom line, by mixing up these challenges the motor control system is always in a position of needing to adapt to accommodate the new challenge.  The article refers to this as re-encoding.  This strengthens the neural connections in a way that does not happen if it is just continuing repetition of a well-practiced task.

This concept of variety within a long-term practice plan has the opposite effect on training design from the idea of transfer to the ice.  You see, if you only looked at the concept of transfer, you would make your training environment always include as close as possible to game-like versions of exercises. This would lead to lots of repetitions of the same exact form of exercise.  However, this article’s concept of variety in practice to foster maximum skill re-encoding response tells us to mix training up.  In order to take both ideas into account, we need to build a series of different but still quite similar tasks into the practice in order to ensure that our brain’s reinforcement response to practice stays at a maximum level while not sacrificing transfer to the ice.

In part 2 of this article we’ll consider how this can be done within the world of hockey development.