This week West Coast Hockey Prep Camp is privileged to have Jon Bula from Factory Hockey sharing his philosophies and expertise on training elite level hockey players:
“Harder isn’t always better”
I’ve been training elite level amateur and professional hockey players now for almost 15 years, and as a group hockey players work really hard in the off season. Sometimes however working harder isn’t always better.
An extremely important thing I like to teach my athletes is that adding strength to a dysfunctional movement pattern only makes things harder to fix in the long run, and will even increase your odds of an overuse type injury. Young players especially need to understand this. It is easy to get caught up in short sightedness when it comes to athletic development. Everyone wants to be bigger, stronger, faster, and they want it now. A hockey player who wants to make a career out of the game can’t afford to not think long term as well. The younger you can learn how to perform weight training exercises with proper form and movement control the more years you will enjoy safely pushing your body to the next level.
At Factory Hockey Player Development we take pride in teaching proper movement and training techniques. Sometimes this means taking your foot of the gas a bit, slowing things down and learning. We deal with exceptional athletes all the time so the learning process is usually a quick one. There is a time and place to train so hard that you are seeing cross eyed, but never without mastering the fundamentals first.
Anyone can put together a workout that is hard, but it takes true professionals to teach proper athletic movement. After those skills are acquired a proper progressive training program can be adopted allowing you to achieve new athletic heights. We train our players hard, but we always make sure to be smart first.
Jon Bula
MSc, BHK
Strength and Conditioning Specialist
