Risks and Advantages of Skating Treadmill Training for Hockey

Part 1

Skating treadmills are a bit of a polarizing concept in the hockey world. When asking around, it is not hard to find someone who is against them. It is also pretty common for folks to swear by them as a key to the speed they have developed as players. Can both groups be right at the same time?

In Part 1 of this article, we consider the main risk associated with moving skating-speed-development off of the ice and onto a skating treadmill. On the other hand, there are good reasons to do skating training on a treadmill, so in Part 2, we’ll consider the advantages of doing so. One can see that we are driving at a balanced approach that strives for the best of all worlds.

The main risk that skating treadmills bring relates to the fact that the specific skating task that a skater experience is not identical to the on-ice task. The obvious thing to point to when considering this is the forward incline angle which puts players into the position of skating uphill. We never skate uphill, so this is a clear mismatch from on-ice skating right?

Actually, it isn’t that simple. Uphill skating at any specific reasonable angle actually matches the instantaneous body position relative to the skating surface that a skater experiences at some point in their acceleration from a stationary position. How can this be true? Well, when a force is applied at ice level, it accelerates a skater’s center of mass, which is up two or so feet in the air (given a deep knee bend).

For this acceleration to be efficiently aligned so as to create horizontal motion as opposed to rotation around the center of mass, the skater must lean their body forward. This forward lean creates an angle relative to the horizontal surface of the ice which is less than 90 degrees.

Likewise, when skating uphill on a treadmill, there is an angle less than 90 degrees that the body makes compared to the treadmill. Since skaters are usually stationary on a treadmill, they can’t lean forward, but the treadmill can “lean” uphill for you creating that matching body angle.

Note:  For the strongly physics-minded, there is still an instantaneous difference between accelerating and skating uphill in terms of the total “weight” that the skater feels, but we’ll ignore that for this discussion.

So, the angle isn’t the culprit… what is? The second candidate is almost as obvious and that is the resistance experienced skating on plastic as opposed to ice. This difference isn’t huge but has slight effects on the balance points and joint angles involved in the “perfect” technique for a given skating condition on the treadmill. And it can confuse a skater that is learning into trying techniques that just won’t work on the ice.

The risk is that if you leave it to the skater to find the best way to perform on a skating treadmill, they will converge toward a “treadmill” skating technique as opposed to an “on-ice” skating technique. This is why it is critical to teach proper “Power Skating” mechanics on skating treadmills and hold players to that as opposed to allowing them to just focus on being “treadmill-efficient”. This is made even worse if you train mostly at high angles because you will see some skaters apply this lower-speed “start” stride technique even at high speeds.

This summarizes the bad news with respect to skating treadmill training. But as we have seen, detailed instruction minimizes the risks.

In Part 2, we will move on to the good news which will explain how treadmills can be tools that make the learning process for skating happen faster!