Sprint Based Hockey will be demonstrated as a system that gives coaches what they want but do not know how to develop - faster players.

PART TWO: Sprint Based Hockey: a Weekly Template

It’s Tuesday evening, practice is almost over. Looking over the practice sheet quickly, Coach nods in approval at the grueling, sweat pouring, hard working drills performed tonight. Only one piece is missing. Coach blows the whistle and shouts “on the line.” A classic. The bag skate begins. 

It’s now Friday evening, in the locker room after a 5-2 loss. Coach cannot believe how slow the team was and how out of shape they looked. More bag skating on Tuesday. May not even have pucks for the last half.

And so the cycle begins.

Does this sound like your team? A team you were on? A team you know of?

Hockey coaches want fast players who can repeat high speeds throughout every shift. The problem is, most coaches do not know how to make players fast. They rely more on what they did versus modern science and human physiology. They never cultivate speed properly and simply exhaust players during practice. 

Introducing Sprint Based Hockey

Sprint Based Hockey is a system that slightly modifies classic practice layouts to prioritize fast and fresh over slow and tired. It is best utilized by an organization that emphasizes short shifts and high intensity speeds during games.

In order to get fast, players must skate fast. This is achieved through organizations viewing speed as a skill, having that awareness throughout a practice, and not over conditioning players at the end of practices. 

Track coaches, whose jobs rely on getting athletes fast, have known about this for years. You cannot have an athlete run 17 mph (27 km/h) all week at practice and expect them to sprint 22 mph (35 km/h) at a competition. In the same way, you wouldn’t train for the 100m dash by practicing triathlons. 

Despite this, hockey coaches around the world, at all levels, train their players to be slow during practice but expect them to be fast during games. Or maybe they have a well planned practice, but never give players time to sprint as fast as possible with complete rest before the next sprint. Rest? I know. Blasphemy. 

Now, speed is not the only factor in winning hockey games, but it is foolish for coaches to not address it, or worse, stunt it. The game has changed. Big plays come from speed to blow past defenders or to create time and space for a scoring opportunity. Throughout this article, Sprint Based Hockey will be demonstrated as a system that gives coaches what they want but do not know how to develop – faster players. 

How to Make Players Fast – The Science

Under the Sprint Based Hockey system, speed is treated as a skill, like passing and shooting, and has a dedicated time during a practice for it to be worked on. Developing on ice speed is a balance of art and science. When we talk about improving sprint speed on ice, keep it simple and remember less is more.

All sprints must be under 6 seconds, and athletes must have close to 1 minute of rest between certain sprints to fully recover. A sprint under 6 seconds with full recovery stresses the players’ neuromuscular system (brain and body), their phosphocreatine system (explosive burst energy), and allows for recovery of both. 

To simplify, rest about 30 seconds for every 10 yards or meters skated.

Table 1. Suggested Guidelines for Distance, Rest Intervals, and Repetitions.

With the above guidelines in hand, the best time in a practice to optimize speed and skill is at the beginning, after a warm up. The same sprints performed at the end of practice will not result in the same adaptations. As an example, as the ice gets dirty from a practice, so does the body’s ability to adapt to high stress stimulus. 

A tired player will not come close to the level of speed needed to make their neuromuscular or phosphocreatine systems adapt and get faster. It is commonplace in the track and field world that athletes may only improve if they are sprinting over 90% of their maximum speed. In other words, not when they’re tired. 

If a coach attempts to improve speed with tired players, they are wasting everyone’s time. 

How to fit this into your practice layout is what makes speed training a balance of art and science. 

Incorporating Sprints Into Your Practice

As stated in the introduction, Sprint Based Hockey is a system that slightly modifies classic practice layouts. You do not need to throw everything out. My suggestion to coaches is take the first 10-20 minutes of a practice to work on speed and skill. And be a coach. If you really need to hammer systems, skip the player development for a practice. That’s okay. 

Continue with your current warm up structure, whether that is a stretch at center ice, a four blues flow drill, or stations around the ice after a few laps and shots at the net. Perform sprints after your warm up or you may incorporate them as part of these drills. 

The following are three options for incorporating sprints into your practice:

Dedicated Station Work, Incorporating a Sprint Station

• 4-6 repetitions per station
• Allows for a dedicated area of sprint and rest
• High accumulation of reps through a week & season
• High levels of player development
• May incorporate stops and starts or patterns that are position specific
• No more than 1-2 turns or stops and starts
• Ideal would be the goal line to the blue line or red line with 0:30-1:00 of rest in between
• Players may compete or race against each other to enhance competitiveness
• Ideal would be using an on ice timing system to record times
• Players rotate and switch stations on a whistle

The following video was taken from a college hockey practice. Three stations, one of which is a sprint.

Video 1. College hockey practice. Speed and skill stations with goal line to blue line sprint.

Station or Drill Work, Incorporating Sprints When Players Rotate or Switch Drills

• Players skate sprints between every station as they rotate
• Not laps! Sprints
• Under 6 seconds, full rest in between
• May be position specific and vary the starts such as a glide to sprint or crossover start, or have 1-2 stops or turns

Table 2. Potential Timing Breakdown for 2 Sprints.

The following video was taken from a college hockey practice. Blue line to blue line sprints were performed with 4 groups, following the start and rest intervals from Table 2.

Video 2. College hockey practice. Blue line to blue line sprints – 4 groups.

Perform Sprints Immediately Following Warm Up, Move on

• Following a warm up, the team is split into 4 groups
• Allows for smaller sprint groups where coaches may track and monitor effort
• Fills rest time while other groups sprint

Table 3. Potential timing breakdown for 6 sprints.

The following video was taken from a college hockey practice. Goal line to blue line sprints were performed with 4 groups, following the start and rest intervals from Table 3. Notice at 1:12 how they jump early. They are excited. They want to win. They are competing and pushing each other. This is the key to improving speed.

Video 3. College hockey practice. Goal line to blue line sprints – 4 groups.

In Practice Awareness – Do Not Stunt Speeds Growth

To really hammer in the point, Sprint Based Hockey is a system that slightly modifies classic practice layouts to develop speed. Armed with the above examples, you may seamlessly and effortlessly incorporate proper sprints into your current practice layout. Now, the biggest key is not stunting speeds growth throughout the rest of practice.

(Conditioning will be addressed later. Prepare yourself Old School Coach)

My key suggestion for this is awareness. Reverse engineer your ideal game. If you want players taking short shifts and skating at high speeds, you cannot have a small area game or drill where players are going for over 60 or 90 seconds. I have seen this far too many times. 

This flies in the face of Sprint Based Hockey. If your drill or small area game starts looking like pond hockey or beer league where players are actively going for longer than 45 seconds or 1 minute, they are now intentionally slowing themselves down or pacing. Their next repetition will be slower than their first and so on and so on to the point high speeds are not achieved or even possible. 

The following are two simple suggestions on how to modify current drills or small area games such as 3v3. 

Begin Timing Drills

The shorter, the better. If a repetition of a drill or live-go lasts longer than 60 seconds, you have turned it into an acid bath and players will begin to coast once they pass the second or third repetition. Fresh is fast. Tired is slow. 

A time limit will also create a sense of urgency. Every player at some point has imagined the clock winding down and making the perfect pass or shot for the game winner. Long drills turn into lazy drills. If a player or group of players know they only have 25 seconds to execute, they will go as hard as possible during that drill and battle until the end.

Be sure there is enough rest in between so players are chomping at the bit to go again versus hiding in the back of the pack to skip their turn. 

Structure Practices to Have Highs and Lows

Waving intensities throughout a practice can allow you as the coach to push the intensity during timed drills and then allow rest during a low intensity moment such as a quick whiteboard session. This low intensity portion of practice will allow players to flush out lactate (the burn they feel in their legs) and restore vital components to their phosphocreatine energy system. 

What this may look like is 10-15 minutes of drills followed by a white board session, system install, etc. for 10-15 minutes. Again this lower intensity part of practice lets players recover and optimizes their ability to sprint during the next high intensity drill. If the entire practice is a meat grinder, players get slower and slower during practice. The opposite of what we want in a game and especially in a Sprint Based Hockey practice. 

Addressing Conditioning

What are the biggest objections to Sprint Based Hockey? Conditioning.

I get it. Getting on the line and hard skates at the end of practice are cultural and tradition in hockey. Former players love to tell stories of how Coach made a kid puke that one time. 

However, consider the negative effects. Look at your players during a conditioning skate. It is the exact opposite of what you want in a game. Classic end of practice conditioning does not mimic the game IQ, speeds, and fast decision making that you want transferred to game day. 

As for the mental toughness argument, mental toughness is situation specific. An offensive zone faceoff, down by 1, with 37 seconds left on the clock is a high pressure situation. Decision making must be executed at perfect speeds and timing. What part of skating back and forth without a puck prepares a player for that high pressure situation? How does it help them make good decisions and execute with all the nerves pulsing through them?

Aside from the obvious above, bag skating disrupts the neuromuscular coordination developed in the sprints at the start of practice. This may best be explained through the SAID principle, which stands for specific adaptations to imposed demands. High intensity sprints, lasting less than 6 seconds and having full rest, work a different neurological pathway than low intensity skating. Different aspects of muscles will fire differently based on differing angles and available energy substrates. Be specific. Don’t train slow to get fast. 

What’s worse, is players “save themselves” if they know there is a skate at the end of practice. Now you just went through an entire on ice practice where players skated at 85% so they do not die at the end. 

If I were the Hockey Coach, no bag skating – ever. I would use drills and small area games to condition my players. If you are bag skating, I think you are lazy and lack creativity. Bag skating at the end shows you do not trust your practice plan in order to condition for the game. Which begs the question: are you really preparing for the game then?

This final video was made from two different videos available on YouTube. One is a classic bag skate. The other is 3v3. Which positions and postures do you want your team in during a game? Who is improving their IQ, spacing, decision making, and overall preparing for the game more? Look at the final length of the bag skate. If I’m the Hockey Coach and I see that during a game, I am sitting that player. 

Video 4. Bag skate versus 3v3 for conditioning.

Sprint Based Hockey

Sprint Based Hockey is the perfect practice system for an organization that emphasizes short shifts and high intensity speeds during games. It breaks free from old traditions and utilizes scientific principles already in use by other sports. Sprint Based Hockey focuses on developing speed during practices through low volume sprinting and does not stunt its growth through unrealistic length drills or mismanaged conditioning. 

Hockey Coaches, you must be sprinting your players on ice. Less is more. 

Are there some holes in Sprint Based Hockey? Absolutely. No system is perfect. For starters, it assumes your players skate well and therefore have the ability to improve their speed. It assumes you have enough ice time to incorporate player development. And finally, it assumes your organization emphasizes speed. 

In conclusion, if you want fast players, but do not know how to make them fast, Sprint Based Hockey is the answer.

• Treat speed as a skill – must be worked on
• Incorporate sprints at the start of practice
• 4-6 sprints, under 6 seconds, rest to full or near full recovery after each sprint
• Do not let drills or live go’s go to long and slow athletes down below game speeds and intensities
• Use drills, small area games, or full ice live-go’s to condition for the game
• Never bag skate – ever
• Fresh and fast over slow and tired

To learn more about Chris’ principles behind Sprint Based Hockey, you may reach him at coachchriskerr@gmail.com.

PART TWO: Sprint Based Hockey: a Weekly Template