Doc Hockey Corner: Holiday Healing and Deliberate Practice

By Dr. Shayne Baylis, Doc Hockey


The most common New Year’s resolution is to purchase a gym membership and get into shape. The gym membership will hopefully bring you better health, energy and life. Health allows us to enjoy the activities we love and support the family we love, so we must take care of our bodies mentally and physically.

The New Year is also a time to evaluate the first half of the hockey season. It’s time to note if you are where you wanted to be as a player and as a team?

Now is the time to figure out if you only need to tweak your strategy to keep improving on your success or to totally revamp your approach to steer the ship in a new direction. Without this brainstorming, you may just be holding on to a dream that things will miraculously take a turn for the better; realistically if they have not changed yet, they probably are not going to change.

Playing half a year of rigorous practice and competitive games takes a toll on our overworked muscles, joints and ligaments, leaving us on the verge of an injury that is invisible to us.

At this point, it might be a good time to take a break and let your body heal. No I am not saying it’s a good idea to lie in bed all holiday season with a bag of chocolate Lindor truffles, candy covered peanuts, and gummy bears.

Nutritionally, one should feed the body what it needs to replenish and build its capacity to do work. Foods to look for include salads (spinach and arugula) with lots of colours, fruits (clementines are abundant this time of year), and protein (chicken, chick peas, quinoa, etc.) to build and repair the muscles that need to recover.

With regards to working out, you might want to consider switching your cardio training to cycling, rowing or swimming to give your body a break from the regular skating routine. Working different muscles like hamstrings, low back, and upper back will help create new strength and power.

Often flexibility is found to have an inverse effect on injury occurrence. Focus on your flexibility and mobility (using active muscle contractions with movements at the end of the range of stretch).

Scar tissue is one of the most common limiting factors that decreases flexibility and strength, and is a precursor to injury. When a muscle is unable to contract from scar tissue, you become weaker and lose power.

Breaking down these areas of scar tissue and dysfunction will restore flexibility and fundamental movements (squat, lunge, touching toes etc.) That is why an Active Release practitioner is an important preventative strategy to help you perform at your best.

Furthermore, a deep tissue massage will help recovery of tissues by increasing circulation and fluid exchange of toxins and nutrients in and out of the cells. Yoga classes will help fluidity of fascia (a tissue that encases muscles) that limits flexibility too.
Raising your game
Now, who do we look to for critiquing our play to identify weaknesses and strengths over the past half year? Are we able to trust ourselves to make the necessary criticisms of our play?

This is why coaches and mentors are so important to give us that honest advice as to where we need to improve because sometimes it is tough to see our faults. It is the perfect time as the weather gets frigid enough for those outdoor rinks to freeze and give us a great opportunity to work on those individual skills that hold us back from being that complete player we strive to become.

Practice weaknesses such as acceleration (work on short sprints from a stand-still), shooting quickly with your head up, one-timers, backwards skating, cross-overs, awareness of players around you and vision of the ice, stickhandling, and protecting the puck – just to name a few.

And we can’t forget the fun tricky stuff like shooting and stickhandling between our legs, behind the back passes and flipping the puck up over sticks and players to heighten our creativity. It is this type of drive and deliberate practice (focus on certain elements of your game) that one needs to obtain in order to separate those who are good from those who will become great.

As we reflect on half the year, remember that even your body needs a holiday during the holidays. So relax from the stresses of the game, work on individual skills, eat right, and treat yourself to some therapeutic Active Release Technique®.

Have a great second half of the year!