How To: Warm-up For a Hockey Game
Before I start to explain how you should be warming up, I have to ask…
Do you warm-up before your hockey games?
And I don’t mean the warm-up on the ice. While this warm-up is important, it’s more of a tactical warm-up to get you feeling the puck, to get used to the ice and fine-tune your skills so you can be ready for the game.
The warm-up I am referring to is the one that should be done before you get dressed. I’m sure at some point while watching an NHL game you’ve seen the teams warm-up by playing a game of “2 touch”. It’s a great game that gets the body warm while working on some footwork and competitiveness.
Although this is a great warm-up, you should be incorporating more than a game of “2 touch” into your warm-up. If you don’t know why warming up for hockey games is important then you better read this article.
Now that you’ve read “1 Simple way to maximize your performance” and know why you should be warming up, I’m going make things extremely simple for you and give you a warm-up plan that you can implement before your next game.
To maximize our performance on the ice we need to increase the amount of blood that is going to the working tissues (muscles of the legs as they are the most important). This is accomplished by foam rolling. After foam rolling, we need to activate our glutes and hips. These two areas of the body are where we’ll generate all of our power when we skate. If we don’t activate the muscles that make up our glutes and hips then we won’t have strong powerful explosive strides. Next, we need to work on our mobility. Improving our mobility will greatly reduce the chance of pulling a muscle while also improving the stride length (this equals more speed). The next step in our warm-up is getting the muscles of the core firing. Just like the glutes and hips are important for our skating stride, the muscles of our core are important for our balance and stability. The final part of the warm-up is to stimulate the central nervous system (CNS). This is accomplished by implementing jumps and quicker movements into our warm-up.
Watch the video below to see what the full warm up looks like (the video is sped up so please make sure to perform the drills slow and with control). I’ve also included the warm-up sheet as a download so you have a step by step guide to follow. Make things easier for yourself by downloading the sheet to use as a reference for your next pregame warm up.
