Terry Brand, a former college coach who now works with AAA teams in Wisconsin voiced his concern recently that youth coaches rarely know how to prepare their teams for high speed competition. They need to understand interval training to help players develop.
"I see youth teams doing tough 'Herbies' - - stops-and-starts that go on so long they're teaching slowness," Brand said. "It's a shame, because skating drills should make kids faster, better skaters."
The interesting thing is Herb Brooks would agree. Unfortunately, the editors of the film "Miracle" chose to spectacularize the conditioning plan for the 1980 Olympic Team. They featured the most dramatic scene -- the night after the game in Norway, when Brooks was mad and skated his players into the ground -- stops and starts that went on so long the janitors actually turned the lights off.
In previous years, Brooks had many days like that at the University of Minnesota - - endless stops-and-starts called 'Herbies.' The rookies would often get sick before Monday practices worrying about how long they were going to skate that afternoon.
But after discussing the merits of these torturous practices, and checking with coaches in track and swimming about interval training, Brooks changed the strategy for conditioning the 1980 team.
From that point on, Brooks re-defined the word "conditioning" to include "forming habits," like Pavlovian conditioning. The habits to be formed prior to competition in the Olympics were habits of competing at full speed for an entire three period game.
Prior to that decision, Brooks believed - - as many coaches still do - - that on-ice conditioning requires hard stops-and-starts that last up to 45 seconds. But this approach fails in every respect to prepare a team for high speed games. It doesn't build anaerobic power or improve quickness, because the repetitions (after the first one) are too slow. It may increase mental toughness, but there are many constructive ways to accomplish that.
Consider the major goal of a conditioning plan. Every coach would say, "I want my team to play fast for the entire game -- to maintain the highest level of skill and tenacity -- and to be as mentally sharp on the last shift as the first."
OK. The first goal is learning to skate faster, but when we do stops-and-starts lasting longer than 15-20 seconds, we're teaching slowness. This is what Coach Brand observes in youth practices that copy the Hollywood model of that late-night skate in Norway.
To play faster and more skillfully, the practices must reinforce 'quality' habits over and over again for several months. This was the essential ingredient of Brooks' plan for the 1980 team. Every practice featured two hours of uncomfortably fast drills that required skating, passing, shooting, and quick decisions.
Listen closely to Mike Eruzione in the interview on the supplemental DVD which accompanies the movie. The captain of the 1980 team said, "Our practices were fun … yet they were hard. We were actually doing the conditioning and didn't even know it (while we did team flow drills up and down the ice for two hours)."
In-season conditioning means "forming habits" you want to repeat in a game. By keeping this pace up for an entire practice, you are building high speed endurance for an entire game.
It is an exercise in ivory tower irrelevance to attach definitions of aerobic or anaerobic endurance to this process. This is "hockey endurance" -- or “getting in hockey shape” as players refer to it.
The physiological adaptations that allow players to recover quickly and repeat with quality for hours, the systemic endurance conditioning, is a byproduct of the entire overspeed interval practice, not the consequence of one or two or ten killer skating drills. At times, coach Brooks used 'Herbies' for discipline and mental toughness, not for conditioning.
In youth hockey, skating drills should never be used for discipline, because at this age habits are being formed with every repetition.
Understanding interval training is important. Each work interval must have the highest possible intensity, and the rest intervals need to be long enough to allow for quality repetition after repetition. To ensure that endurance is also improved, the rest intervals cannot be so long that the heart rate drops below a training level - - 70% of maximum. On a conditioning day, the explanations by the coach are kept to a minimum.
This is the art and science of preparing a team to compete in the fastest competition in hockey, the Olympic games, the Stanley Cup playoffs, or the playoffs at any level. This is where Herb Brooks was smarter than the Hollywood writers who saw great camera appeal in that torturous night of skating drills in Norway.
For psychological reasons, that night was probably a defining moment in the seven-month preparation season. However, it was not a significant event in the conditioning process that allowed the team to skate with the Russians for three periods and come back two days later to do the same thing in the Gold Medal game with Finland.
As Brooks would say many times, "It is not enough to train hard; you must train intelligently as well."
Repetition forms habits ...
good ones or bad.
In youth hockey, every skating drill should be done with the highest quality, because the habits formed are relatively permanent.
Conditioning means "forming quality habits"
