The other day, I finished up running an Inline Hockey Performance Clinic at the Marple Sports Arena. Thank you to the Marple Sports Arena and all of the players that helped to make the camp a success. There were 2 components to the camp: The In Shoes Portion and the In Skates Portion (people still call training out of skates “Dryland”, which makes no sense for inline hockey players – it’s all dry!). Along with a lot of training in shoes and skill work in skates, we also did video analysis of shooting and skating mechanics. This post today is going to focus on the linear skating stride analysis and how you can become a faster and more explosive skater. The video analysis looked at the following 3 components: Stride Return, Chest Angle, and Arm Motion.
We all know why it is important to be fast and powerful: the ability to beat out your opponent to the puck, catch an opponent on a breakaway, breaking free out of the corner when you have an opponent on you, or wheeling out from behind the net to carry the puck. All of these real game scenarios are examples of speed and power. To review why power is so important to not just Inline Hockey but all sports, check out my article Power Reigns Supreme I wrote a few months back.
Stride Return:
Stride Return is the ability to bring your feet back together after each stride. In order to look at stride return, a posterior view was used. After you fully extend your ankle of your striding leg, you want to bring your striding legs’ foot all the way back to where the gliding foot is. As you can see in the video above of one of the players at my recent camp, he demonstrates the stride return pretty well.
Another component you can look at from this view is Stride Angle. Stride Angle is the direction in which a skater exerts the most amount of motion. Looking at this particular player, you can see that he strides backwards a little bit too much and would benefit more from pushing with all 4 wheels diagonally.
Chest Angle:
Chest Angle is the angle that your legs and chest form at your waist. We look at chest angle to see if the player is leaning forward too far or leaning backward too far. If the player were to lean forward too far during skating and got pushed from behind, he or she would fall forward. If the player were to lean backward too far during skating and got pushed from the front, he or she would fall backward. The optimal angle is a 120 degree angle at the waist that looks pretty much like the video above. So to this skater, I say, nice job!
Arm Motion:
Arm Motion is the path in which your arms travel when skating. During a linear skating path, you want your arms to move forwards and backwards and not side to side. Imagine it this way: there is an imaginary line that runs down your forehead, over your nose, through the middle of your chest and down the middle of your body splitting your body into right and left sides. Each arm should not cross that imaginary midline when skating forward; otherwise, you are only slowing yourself down. Looking at the video above, you’ll notice that his arm motion is not moving front to back; rather, it crosses the midline. Refer to the video below for the proper arm movement strategy:
Bottom line:
During stride return, the closer you bring your feet together, the longer and more efficient your strides will be. Your chest angle shouldn’t be too far backwards or too far forwards in order to promote balance during forward skating. Lastly, your arm motion should not cross the middle of your body and should move front to back.
If you follow these guidelines, you will become a faster and more efficient skater. You might be saying to yourself, “I’m already faster than everyone I play against! I don’t need to do this!” Well, you might be right. You may just be genetically gifted enough to get by without proper technique; however, imagine how much faster you could be with improved technique – and you never know which of your opponents is training hard and doing what they can to become faster than you. The same thing goes for not only practicing proper skating mechanics, but training on the rink and lifting weights. You may be able to get by as a great player without training hard; but, imagine how much better you would be if you trained, how much longer your playing career would be, and how much more fun you would have.
Along with proper technique, there is a simple formula that determines how fast you move:
SKATING VELOCITY = STRIDE LENGTH x STRIDE FREQUENCY
Simply put, by using proper form, you will improve your stride length. Seems easy enough. The tricky part is improving stride frequency, which is how quickly you can repeat the full stride motion. Stride frequency is improved by becoming stronger and more powerful, so that is why training is important for improving skating speed. When watching an inline or ice hockey game, you may notice that there may be a player out there that looks really really fast because he moves his feet in a fast and choppy fashion; however, this individual is only taking advantage of one part of the equation above. The objective is to increase both variables (Stride Length and Stride Frequency) in the equation through skating with proper technique and training – which will lead to overall faster and more explosive skating.
Train hard, train smart!
If you want to know how to become more explosive, email me at EKSportPerformance@gmail.com . In the meantime, check out my exercise library on YouTube.
Warm regards,
Eric Keene
