Off Season Day 57

Aug 23 Run, Agility, Stickhandling
Aug 24 Arms, Legs, Ice Power & Edges
Aug 25 Rest
Aug 26 Arms, Agility, Stickhandling

In the evening of August 23 I forced myself to get ready and go for a run.  More of a wind than there has been before, still daylight, cool to cold.  I hadn't ran for five days so I knew it wouldn't be the easiest.  Which it wasn't, I had four walking periods of varied length which I used by being 'mindful' of the breathing/muscle/heart/brain interactions as I recovered for the next running phase.  I did, however, push it harder during the actual running through the middle phases, reaching pretty high running speeds along the river, to the school and on the final short slope to home.  Total time was 21 minutes.

After getting my breathing fully back I moved straight into a set of Agility exercises.  I built up what I'd done last week except that I increased the reps to six for each set and kept count of my best score amongst those reps in each set.  Will be interesting to measure the improvement now that the actual movements are pretty well secured in my neuromusculature.

Later in the evening I took the opportunity  to do some stickhandling training  during a twenty minute break between other, more domestic, activities.  I limited myself to two 'sets' each of two simple drills.  I will try to get the neuromuscular imprint fixed before working up the speed (treating this as an extension of agility training methodology).

The first drill involves facing a coffeetable from about 3 feet away, lay a hockey stick on the table edge with the grip end at my feet so as to form a diagonal obstacle between the edge of the table and my feet, then tap a golfball from one side of the obstacle to the other, performing whatever variants on the basic pattern I feel like doing at the time.  This drill requires the upper hand to pull/push the stick through the relatively stationary lower hand to control the height of the blade off the ground.

The second drill has two tins on the ground about shoulder width apart and about 18" in front of me, using them to form various improvasitional deking patterns, again using the lower hand to both rotate the stick for forehand/backhand sides but also to raise and lower the stick through the lower hand depending upon where the golf ball is.

I did each drill for about two minutes, twice.

In the morning of August 24 I did an arms workout.  2 circuits of ten reps each set, 1 minute recoveries between sets.  I backed this up with an almost full circuit of leg drills (minus lunges and squats, though I did Sumo Squats).  In both legs and arms sessions I reached the stage of moderate fatigue by the end of most sets.

In the evening I went down the Ice Arena for a 'Power and Edges for Ice Hockey' session with Corey.  Besides the technical side of things it was also a good anaerobic workout.  A short slalom event of tight turns and stops, crossovers (lateral extensions and cross under), T starts (glides), outside edges, backwards take off and first step (cross under on first couple steps), transitions, several long 'sprints' around all the circles incorporating above, line sprints, balance, recovery, core strength. A good hour.

August 25 I declared a rest day.

August 26, in the morning I completed an arms workout paced by agility exercises during my 1 minute recovery periods, and then completed the agility circuit, with six reps per set.  Have now added the wide variant to the lateral line drill, which is introducing distinct pylometric aspect to training.

In the evening I had about fifteen minutes stickhandling on the lino in the kitchen with a golf ball and my Bauer stick.  The lino is conveniently marked out in a grid composed of 6" squares which makes it fairly easy to create standard (and not so standard) patterns designed to exercise the various technical components of the act of stickhandling.

Ice 30