hello guys, I am a 22 year old hockey player from australia, and as you can imagine - not coming from a hockey mad country has its drawbacks when it comes to finding good sport specific advice!
So here i am… i play in our Junior A equivalent league here in aus, and have noticed recently that I have been slacking off a bit when im not in on the play, because my legs are tiring quickly and im having ‘concrete’ leg syndrome where the lactic acid is just killing me and preventing me from using my speed to defend as well as attack.
I have about 6 or so weeks before state rep team tryouts so i would like to improve my fitness in this area leading up to the trials!
I have read the elitefts article a long time ago, and also constructing a hockey programme from bodybuilding.com, and read PEter Twists hockey conditioning book recently, which were all very helpful, but I am now needing to focus on delaying lactic acid system instead of overall strength and agility! Concrete legs are my main enemy out there on the ice.
You won’t find much useful info from Peter Twist or other conditioning coaches because they use old school methods and don’t really understand the energy systems like Charlie Francis and the methods discussed on this site.
Most coaches and trainers will have you skate as hard as you can going back and forth for 30 seconds or so thinking that this will improve conditioning. They couldn’t be more wrong, it just trains your body to go slower than you’re capable of and it takes you days to recover from the lactic acid build-up.
What you should be doing is dividing your workouts into high intensity days and low intensity days. On the high intensity days you would do maybe 6-8 x 30m runs with 5 minutes recovery in between reps. Then on your low intensity days(called TEMPO runs) you’d run at 75% or slower with walking inbetween and do about 2500m worth of work.
Because lactic acid is tied in with aerobic work from the Tempo runs, you won’t accumulate lactic acid like you used to previously.
Any field does the job too. I don’t know if you have opportunity where you live, but up here in Canada you can pay 5 bucks and shoot around on an ice rink for an hour or two.
I am currently a men’s league player in TX, transplanted from ND and know both sides. Here is a workout I found that is great. It involves a track so everyone on this furom should like that.
Personally if you have access to a hockey treadmill, that is the best lactic acid training available. It is also more specific to training for hockey. I will email you the article, can’t find the link.