Fast Reactions Part 3 - The Cliff Notes Version

In parts one and two of the Fast Reactions series, I laid out an argument that, to me, solves a problem. That problem is the mystery of why there are a lot of hockey players whose physical skills are easily world class but cannot seem to find a place on an NHL roster. Meanwhile there are many NHL veterans who are coach favorites because a plethora of non-physical skills, yet they do not have classically “correct” skating technique or super high-end puckhandling moves. Are these coaches missing the point?

I wasn’t totally happy with those two articles when I finished them because they didn’t seem like they would make the reader feel that there was a surprising result which was made clear. As I looked back at those articles it seems they go too complicated and the key points get lost.

Here in Part 3, I want to fix that by just giving the “Cliff’s Notes” version. Feel free to go back and look at the previous parts if you want to pick apart more detailed arguments.

Part 1 - https://www.youthhockeyhub.com/news_article/show/902411

Part 2 - https://www.youthhockeyhub.com/news_article/show/924378

To boil it all down, the overall idea is that the key to being a great hockey player is reacting quickly to changes in the play in order to leverage fast-emerging opportunities and generally make things as difficult as possible for the other team.

Of course, high-quality skill is needed, just not to the same degree as fast mental processing. But, the two go hand in hand in most cases because a large portion of the training we do to help skaters develop fast reactions simultaneously develops high-quality skill. This is because the two are linked.  So, how are they linked?

Reacting quickly to changes in the flow of the play is a result of the brain quickly processing visual (and sometimes auditory) input and outputting strategically advantageous decisions. We see the result of this as players execute strategy, tactics, and systems as well as anticipation of what's about to happen. But none of this is doable if movement skill is not automatic, because focusing on movement skill details takes mental resources away from processing the game.

Now, let's look at executing “high-quality” skill (“perfect technique”). Note that the essence of “high-quality skill” is that we move the body in such a way as to get the most motion in the needed direction that we can from our movements. Great techniques achieve this. We call movements like this “efficient”. We need to understand that efficient skill is composed of automatically-controlled sub-skills which are themselves efficient.

Training a skill set often means getting those sub-units right AND automatic before integrating them into more complex skills. So, the very training that frees the mind to process read-and-react decisions during gameplay generates automatic execution of sub-skills that is needed to develop high-quality complex skills.

What’s the upshot of all of this? Mostly, it is useful to keep this in mind as players progress to the higher levels of the game. It tells us that while players should do some maintenance on the fundamentals no matter what level they play, eventually players need to focus more and more on “integration” of skills. This means integrating skills together into complex multitasking and it also means integrating skills into read-and-react gameplay situations.