Power Skating — Top Tips to Elevate Your Game
The game of hockey is such an exhilarating sport to play and watch. It requires concentration, tenacity and grit.
One of the key components of the game is not just how you handle the stick or shoot the puck, but also being able to skate with power and finesse.
So often players are put on the ice and before they can even say Stanley Cup, they are given a stick and taught how to “play” the game without having learned the fundamentals. This can adversely affect the player’s ability to reach their fullest potential. In fact, players may even be cut during tryouts due to inadequate skating skills.
Why Power Skating is Important and Top Tips:
1. Multi-Directional Skating: Learning how to skate and quickly turn in a multidirectional facet significantly will help your game. At any given moment, the puck can be in front, behind, or to the side of you, in any varying degree. Being able to spontaneously adapt and move around yourself to skate toward the puck can ultimately be the difference in scoring a game-winning goal. Therefore, it is crucial that players have a solid foundation of the basics.
Some basic elements include:
- Forward and backward crossovers — both clockwise and counterclockwise
- Two-foot and one-foot turns on both the left and right foot as well as in the clockwise and counterclockwise directions
- Mohawks
- Hops
- Jumps utilizing varying planes of direction and switching between the left and right foot
- Quick crossover to hop backward; back crossovers to hop forward
2. Edges: Balance and edge control is the foundation of skating. When we skate, we utilize both the inside and outside edges of our skates. We count on our inside edges to help assist us with our start and our stride as well as with mohawks and quick steps. Having even minimal control over the inside edge helps us with our stability and balance on the ice. The outside edge, for example, assists us with turning and stopping.
Think of forward crossovers — when performing the crossover correctly, as we begin the progression of picking up the free leg and crossing it over, we lean over the skating leg while pushing off the inside edge and optimizing full extension of the pushing leg (to avoid loss of power). Our weight is distributed over the hip, thigh, knee, and ankle of the skating side, aiding us in maintaining the outside edge. In action — when performing a left-over-right crossover, we lean our weight over the right hip, thigh, knee, and ankle to properly hold the right outside edge. The left foot will press deep into the ice, pushing diagonally off the inside edge, extending back with full range of extension before crossing over the right foot. This all happens within milliseconds, and during the game it’s not something we focus on, as we have more “important” things to concentrate on — such as the puck! Having a solid foundation of edges will become second nature during the game.
3. Power and Agility: Strength, power and agility are integral components of skating, at any stage. The more powerful we are, the more explosive we will be in our movements, which can be especially helpful in accelerating the puck to the opposite end of the rink to score a goal or to out skate an opponent and avoid being checked into the boards.
4. As quoted in “Hockey Anatomy” by Michael Terry and Paul Goodman: “Power and explosiveness are beneficial in just about every aspect of hockey as well. When changing direction or taking off for a loose puck, the more powerful athlete will be able to generate his or her maximum force more quickly, which translates to a more explosive first few strides and the advantage over a less powerful athlete. A more powerful goalie will push from post to post faster than a less powerful goalie, allowing them to potentially stop more shots and ready themself quicker, giving them the advantage as well.”
Agility is the ability to perform skills quickly and easily. It is no surprise that agility is required in all facets of hockey. The more agile athlete will have the advantage most all of the time. Working on power and agility drills both on and off the ice have proven to be effective in improving one’s overall game.
We see many great, young players making their way up the ranks of the hockey system without having properly learned the importance of basic skating skills. Many of them do not make it past high school hockey due to the lack of solid fundamentals, which adversely affect stride, crossovers, turns, stops and overall skating ability.
If you want to play hockey, don’t overlook the importance of learning basic skating skills to take your game to the next level.
Resources: Strength, Power, Speed and Agility on the Ice (us.humankinetics.com); Tucker Hockey (tuckerhockey.com)
The following article originally appeared in Recreational Ice Skating Fall Magazine, a written publication of the Ice Sports Industry (ISI).
