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Climbing the Technique Mountain: Part II

By Andy Blaylock , 05/28/19, 3:45PM CDT

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Trainer Andy Blaylock breaks down why varied training techniques and less focus on specialization in practice could lead to greater results.


Battling through body contact forces a change of technique. Photo courtesy of Andy Blaylock.

Varied Practice Rounds Out Performance

In Part I of this article, I laid out the idea of improvement as climbing a type of landscape where something like your North-South or East-West position on the landscape determines the nature of the movement technique your body uses and the height at that point tells you how useful that movement is for a purpose. We saw that this landscape might have many peaks and understood how great coaching guides you to the tallest one.

How does this apply to hockey? Hockey has various techniques, so it is the same concept at work, right? Well, yes and no.

To understand this, let’s consider speed skating. In speed skating (especially, long track), moving toward the tallest peak is pretty much all there is to accomplish while training. The skating surface and wind conditions are very consistent. These and the lack of physical contact between skaters means that they just need to optimize their starts, forward stride, and right-over-left crossover techniques. However, what about a sport where there is far more variation in what is required of the skater?

In hockey, the skating surface changes through the game or period, getting rougher and rougher. The strategy that would most benefit your team can change in an instant, forcing players to be ready to change direction at a moment’s notice at just about any time. Players’ upper bodies need to operate somewhat independently of the lower body many times so they can play the puck. Also, players must move around the ice while engaging in physical contact with other players.

In a situation like that, is it the skater who has worked and worked to get to the very perfect central highest peak of the forward stride landscape who’ll be best? Alternatively, could it be the player who is pretty close (height-wise) to the highest peak of several different landscapes (those for all of the different types of skating that may be necessary during the game) AND has worked to be able to efficiently switch between those techniques as needed?

This second player has a robust technique that can adapt to the dynamic game and will be better. Some of my past articles have discussed the concept of varied practice and applied the idea to skating treadmills. They indicated that various methods offer a faster rate of learning, which is a different type of advantage as opposed to the one we are talking about here.

Here we are talking about a different benefit of varied practice that applies specifically to sports that demand versatility. To see this, consider “narrow practice” (as in “narrowly focused”). Narrow practice creates improvement toward one ideal technique and leaves the athlete to try to come up with something on the fly for anything outside of that. Varied practice helps the athlete adapt to different demands by covering a broader area of techniques for different tasks.


Skating on a treadmill training changes the nature of the forward stride task. Most of the change lies in the greater resistance in their plastic skating surface. Photo courtesy of Andy Blaylock.

What does this mean in terms of the landscape? In Part I, we considered filling one of these technique landscapes up with water such that only one island remains above the water. Let’s think about a technique landscape like that again. For one task, the only remaining island may be in a certain location. But, if we slightly change the nature of the task, the location of that island would move a little bit because a slightly different movement pattern would be best for it.

Say we change the skating surface. The best technique on that surface is different from the best method on the unchanged surface, so the island would move to an area that represents slightly different technique movement patterns. Skating with two hands on the stick, while handling a puck, while making or receiving a pass, or other techniques of the game would move the island around slightly as well.

In other words, the game moves the island (the area with the specific best technique) around by demanding a different task. How does the game “demand” specific “tasks”? When going against good players you can’t decide in advance what techniques you’ll use in a particular situation, and you have to take the opportunities they give you. A wide range of skills may be needed to win, depending on how the game plays out. Shouldn’t we move the “island” around in training to prepare for games?

To make sure we are clear, “moving the island around in training” means creating a dynamic learning environment where the task demanded of the player changes and players become versatile and able to deal with whatever the other team throws at them!

Note that different individuals’ body compositions also force changes in what technique is best for each resulting in individual “styles.” However, each individual still climbs their own landscapes for various tasks in the way described in these articles even though any two people’s optimal techniques will depend on their body style.


Another way to change the task is to precisely map out the key locations to get to in the movement process the way the Stride Matrix does. Photo courtesy Andy Blaylock.

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