Some fitness instructors who specialize in hockey training insist that hockey players should stay off the ice during the summer months. He called back in the weeks leading up to training camp. Some believe that riding a bicycle is the best way to develop a hockey player’s energy system. Others, like me, use a combination of poses to train hockey players who will be fitter, faster, and more injury-resistant.
The elite players I coach skate 1-2 times a week. Some of them go to the local ski guru and work on their skiing skills. This is my favorite, I don’t want them to fight, I want them to skate. For professional players, we play on the ice twice a week, once for interval sessions of medium duration and once for training in agility and speed. Skiing is complemented by agility training on the ground, a track or hill run, and yes, even some cycling. You might ask yourself, “What’s the difference? As long as they’re getting fitter, what does it matter if they’re just cycling or not?” To be clear, I’m not saying hockey players shouldn’t bike. I have hockey players who bike occasionally during the summer, but not all the time. And I think it’s a great tool to use during the season. Here are some of the pros and cons of using the bike with hockey players:
PROs I love cycling because you can easily adjust the resistance. It is relatively safe; No athlete will twist their ankle while riding a bike. From a skill perspective, there is a level playing field for different athletes. If you’re running on the track, some hockey players have a great running stride while some athletes aren’t quite as efficient. Finally, the player will get a great leg workout. When we do intervals on the bike, they’ll tell me their legs feel the same fatigue they do when they’re on the ice.
cons I don’t like the bike because it trains the hockey player into a hip and spine flexion position, a position in which they actually spend a good amount of their time on the ice and sitting on the bench. If they are students, they spend all day sitting at their desks with a flexed hip and spine position. With these persistent stances, we see a shortening of the hip flexors among other adaptations. When a player skates they have to extend from the hip to take a full powerful stride. If the hip joint is tight, he will not be able to get that range of hip joint and will likely compensate by taking short erratic steps or by overextending the lower back. This will reduce skating performance and may lead to overuse injuries.
One argument against off-season skating is that it allows a player’s groin to recover from the use it gets while skating. This is used to support the use of the bicycle as a training tool. If you look at a person riding a bicycle and notice that their thighs remain parallel while they pedal, the motion is in the sagittal plane. So you can see how this won’t stretch your groin the way skiing does.
If you take an athlete who needs to be abducted from the hip (which causes the quadriceps or hamstrings to stretch) to move in their sport and train them in a way that puts no stress on those muscles, can you see how they can adaptively shorten in response to new demands? It is not frequently stretched, so it does not need to be long and it will shorten. Then if the athlete starts skating every day, they now put their short quadriceps muscles into more frequent intervals and risk fatigue. Not a great way to start boot camp.
So my argument against cycling in the off-season is that it exacerbates muscular imbalances that already occur in hockey players and negates some of the necessary adaptive stretching of the adductor muscle (thigh). Both may reduce skating efficiency and contribute to overuse injuries.
I will close by saying that there are some amazing fitness instructors who specialize in training hockey players, love the stationary bike, use it effectively as part of an overall hockey training regimen and produce some very effective players. They obviously address muscular imbalances and movement issues in other areas of their training. My goal is to encourage you to continue to think about the specific demands of hockey on athletes and to train them systematically with those demands in mind.