I am pretty sure that no one has ever watched a game of Hockey and commented “slow kills”.  We do hear that “speed kills” pretty often, and for good reason.  Speed can turn simple and manageable transition situations into deadly scoring opportunities.  Further, a rush that starts out as an odd-man rush as the attacking team leaves their defensive zone can be neutralized by backchecking speed.  Many other examples can be imagined, but the bottom line is being faster than the other team is a bit advantage.

As such, if you want to be an impact player and see a lot of ice time, it is very advantageous for YOU to have speed.  For the most part, youth players and parents find this to be obvious.  So, this article isn’t to convince you of the value of speed.  Instead it is to talk about the best way to get it.

You can look at speed through a lens that frames speed as having two key elements.  One would be foot speed and the other would be stride length.  In fact if you multiply the distance that you move down the ice on each stride (stride length) by the the number of strides per second (essentially footspeed within your stride motion) you get distance down the ice per second (speed).

Complicating this is the fact that advanced skaters become refined to a point where they can no longer make significant improvements in both.  In fact, they must sacrifice some of one to make gains in another.  When this happens, they hope to sacrifice just the right amount of one in order to find the approach that get them the most speed for their efforts.  Many factors can go into that choice, but that is a discussion for another day.

For younger, still-developing players, we don’t really need to ask questions related to fine-tuning the stride to optimize the footspeed / stride length balance.  Instead we want to improve both.  Most hockey practice asks players to go fast in a way that works on both of these at the same time.  Is this the best way?

Generally, the answer is no.  Our brain’s attention system can concentrate on only one task at a time.  As a result, fast gains are often made by breaking out training and working on separate concerns at separate times.  Depending on the time of year, it may be useful to do footspeed specific drills.  In fact, it has been shown that great gains can be made for on-ice footspeed using off-ice training.

However, it is definitely the case that when working on efficiency of the stride and lengthening it out to squeeze from it every last bit of performance, you are almost always better off working at the opposite end of the spectrum from footspeed.  In other words, to develop an efficient stride, it is a great prescription to slow things way down in order to refine the exact movement itself.  One pitfall of trying to work on stride technique with high footspeed is that a high footspeed approach usually minimizes the time available to achieve full extension within the stride.  It also usually limits the brain’s ability to really “feel” what happened to ensure the technique is executed correctly.  So far, we have talked about skating speed, but the idea applies to just about any fast movement in sports.

To summarize today’s message:  Even though our goal is to achieve high speed, it is often best to use slow motion drills to develop the body movements that will efficiently create high speed.  This is probably obvious to many readers.  At the same time, in many ways this runs counter to Hockey culture where we are always rewarding hard work and 100% effort.

In part 2, I will share a story of a parent I recently witnessed demanding more speed from his player when that player actually needed quite the opposite in the short term in order to eventually become a faster player.