Friday Shoot

On Friday afternoon I was home from work at a reasonable time (ie. while there is enough sunlight left in the day to make it worth going for a skate, a rare thing for me these days it seems).  So, I went down the primary school for a bit of shooting practice.  It's now two weeks since the Grand Final and although I've kept up with the fitness and skating aspects of preparation for the ice season, I haven't had much time with puck'n'stick.  So I thought that I could get a few shots in Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning to at least reawaken the neuromuscular paths and hence free up more awareness for the actual game situation when push comes to shove on Sunday.

The trip down the hill was an interesting contrast to my out-of-condition foray a couple weeks ago.  Not only did I not find it tiring, but I was actually putting on a bit of speed beyond what the slope of the hill itself did.  This was a good sign I thought.

Getting down the school I was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of footballers on the oval and a couple sheilas shooting netballs up the other end of the court to 'my' end.  Before I left a couple soccer players also arrived on the oval.  The footballers, meanwhile, had moved onto some of the 'adventure' play equipment in the schoolyard and were using it as a course on which to run agility/quickness high intensity drills.  Really good to see all these people out and about with their sporting pursuits and sharing the use of this often underused location.  Hopefully the powers that be don't all of a sudden get paranoid and put up a wall *touch wood*.

Apart from a post-shooting cool down skate and the occasional chase of a rapid rebound I didn't put any emphasis on my inline skating during the session.  The reasoning was simple and twofold: I didn't have time to do this if I wanted to fulfill my primary objective (shooting a reasonable number of pucks), and I don't want to key my muscles to inline skating technique (the whole point is to be ready for the ice, not have to 'reset' the muscular calibration for the first half of the game). 

I'm a good enough skater that I don't have to think about my feet when concentrating on shooting which means I've reached the standard I wanted to when I took up the inlines in my pursuit of becoming a better ice hockey player.  It's taken eleven months to find the balance, but it has timed out pretty well (ie both forms of hockey start their summer season shortly).

As for my shooting, I did two sets of the usual 25 rep circuit, going wrist snap, wrist shot, front snap, backhand.  My stats were not the greatest but I was pretty happy with it because at least half of the shots which missed missed by less than a couple inches.  I also noticed that I was lifting the puck a few times in a saucer shot, the backhand in particular.  My power was pretty good, much of it coming from a more natural weight transfer than in past.  This only became really evident in the second set of shots, particularly with my wrist shots (I start now with weight on back foot near puck and as shot goes off I am moving my whole body forward with it over the front leg - feels natural so I presume it's good).

9/4/4/3 and 6/4/4/3.

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Off ice: a core workout.  This is enough for a day because it takes about forty minutes.