Movin' on Up: Stair Conditioning for Hockey Players
Accessible and effective offseason hockey training
Hey! It’s the offseason again, the perfect time to get away from the rink and recharge your proverbial batteries.
For aspiring hockey players, it’s also a time to build up their physical capacities, or hardware, as we like to call it.
Stair Training
Stair training is offseason hockey training that is highly transferrable and effective.
Running the stands is a classic old-school athletic activity, but current Edmonton Oilers strength and conditioning coach Joel Jackson has done some great research around stair conditioning to look into its worth.
We recently hosted Joel on our very own Hockey IQ Podcast. You can dive into Joel’s complete stair conditioning dive here.
Side note… one of the players under Joel’s responsibilities, Connor McDavid, seems to have pretty good S&C!
Stairs
“A solid set of stairs may be one of the best tools a coach can use for conditioning hockey players”.
While a city like Pittsburgh may have more stairs than most, there are plenty of places around your local town that you can find with elevation changes. This could be a sandhill, a local high school stadium, etc.
They are versatile, allowing for a wide variety of aerobic and anaerobic focused conditioning. Even better, Joel found that there may be biomechanical similarities to skating.
Ground Contact Times
Joel actually first learned about the unique ground contact times (GCT) seen in skating from Columbus, OH, resident and former Hockey IQ podcast guest Anthony Donskov.
Skating GCT is unique because they follow the opposite pattern of what you see when sprinting on land.
An athlete sprinting on land will display longer GCT when starting. As they accelerate and reach maximum speed those GCTs get progressively shorter.
The opposite is true with skating where the athlete displays shorter GCT in the acceleration phase and spends progressively more time with their skate blade in contact with the ice as they gather speed.
# of Steps Taken & Average Ground Contact Time:
1 Stair = 0.145 ± 0.02
2 Stairs = 0.173 ± 0.02
3 Stairs = 0.253 ± 0.02
4 Stairs = 0.394 ± 0.04
The average GCT increases exponentially from three to four stairs; which also corresponded with a noticeable breakdown in form and rhythm.
Compare this to skating
Stride #2 = 0.281 ± 0.03
Stride #6 = 0.348 ± 0.02
Joint Angles and Range of Motion
When sprinting on ice, a skater will display a greater range of motion in the hip and knee at maximum speed compared to the acceleration phase. A skater will display an increasingly more aggressive trunk angle as they reach max speed.
Amplitude & Direction of Movement
The similarities in lower body and trunk angles seen in between the stairs and skating above are a testament to how stair running mimics skating range of motion, but there are two aspects of this to call out:
(1) The knee reaches a greater degree of extension in the stair sprint, compared to the skating sprint. There is evidence of higher caliber skaters reaching a greater knee extension than their lower caliber counterparts.
(2) Exercises like the Hang Power Clean, Front Squat and Sprinting have many similarities to skating in terms of their amplitude and direction of movement.
But one aspect they do not achieve is the movement seen in the frontal plane with skating, specifically with external rotation and abduction at the hip. This is something that can be accomplished in stair sprinting simply by widening the athlete's stance and having them focus more on a lateral push-off (see below video).
Conclusion
Stair training can be a nice addition to an offseason aerobic training regime for many reasons, including:
Ground contact times
Range of motion
Amplitude of movement
Scheduling days outside of a windowless gym on a beautiful sunny day has to be good for the mental health of all involved, and that value shouldn't be underestimated, too.
Further Reading
Skills hockey players, coaches, and parents should be looking to acquire
Everyone works on physically getting strong and shooting puck, how about improving our reads?
3 Things hockey players should know about playing at the next level
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