Introduction
Welcome to your first step in improving your sporting performance.
If you have been directed to this page you are either a young hockey player at London Wayfarers HC, or a parent of a budding young player. The main thing is that you feel it is important to help develop your / their athletic ability, to allow you / them to play the sport you / they enjoy to the best of your ability.
This resource is designed to help players develop their Performance which is key to junior players improving as players as they continue to develop. It is strongly suggested that you have completed the Foundation Training programme prior to beginning this section. This page can be found here, Foundation Training, if you would like to review the foundation sessions, build the base and make sure you help avoid injury during training. It is hugely important for young athletes to develop their athletic ability through controlled steps to enable their bodies to adjust to changes in loading.
aim
Over the course of this resource you will be taken through a series of exercises to test your speed, explosiveness and agility along with other fundamental movements that make up your key aspects to improve your sporting performance. Our overriding aim is to provide London Wayfarers HC with an Athletic Sports Programme that will significantly enhance the performance of all junior players at the club. This initial programme will provide a basis for overall enhancement to the performance and culture within the club for junior players.
our programme
London Wayfarers HC & Body Logic Health have developed a unique athletic development programme, based around 2 Key Steps:
BUILD YOUR FOUNDATION
ELEVATE YOUR PERFORMANCE
in this section your foundation will be made stronger by developing the following core elements:
power
Once you have built your foundation strength you need to combine this with the speed of movement. You develop power by training to move load at speed. For hockey this needs to be durable too, the ability to keep going throughout the entire match.
Maximising your muscle strength through movement.
agility
An important area of development for all hockey players. Your agility is about co-ordinated dynamic movement patterns. This brings in your change of direction, stepping and importantly stick control during these movements. Absolutely essential and why many of the exercises require you to hold the hockey stick in your hands, building your movement while improving patterns and directional changes.
speed development
Every athlete will work on speed development, for different sports there are different requirements. In hockey you need a mix of both pure speed with underlying endurance speed to get you around the pitch for the full game.
Younger athletes will develop endurance, however there is a challenge at the bottom of this page for all the young hockey players. Our focus primarily is on improving your pure speed.
recovery
Once your training progresses to performance development, your body needs time to recover. This is as important for juniors as their bodies will be changing, developing and growing at different rates. Recovery does not have to be nothing, an easy run, a walk or bike ride will all help your body have time to recovery allowing maximum development from your training sessions.
explosiveness
When training explosiveness you are looking at the speed at which a movement can be created, your acceleration. The driving force here is the neuromuscular system, the ability to execute a skill, at speed, accurately and repetitively.
Sounds like an ability every hockey player should have.
Build your performance
In this section you will find ten exercises to complete that will improve your athletic performance.
The main point to take on board here is to allow time for recovery between each set. These exercises are designed to be tiring however to maximise the potential of the training they need to be completed with good form and speed. You will always benefit from completing the training however to achieve the best results maximising the leg speed, the drive through the movement will help you really challenge the muscles to create the adaptions needed to improve performance.
You can complete the training either as an individual exercise at the end of another training session, as a short workout of 4-5 exercises or as a full performance programme. However between sets it is important to take the time to rest the neural and muscular system, maybe pick up your hockey stick and practice your control with static dribbling skill work. If completing the training you find during a set your performance is dropping then stop and move onto the next exercise – fatigue has already occurred and your benefits have been gained.
At the bottom of the page there is an extra speed endurance test that will help with stamina for matches, check it out for an additional test.
Most of all have fun while you are training.
To maximise your benefit from the training you should only complete the performance training two or three times a week, depending on your other training sessions. You can work on any 4-5 during a session, or if you are keen for a full session complete them all. Enjoy lifting your athletic development & performance.
Elevate your performance
Ready to progress to the next stage of your athletic development?
What next or what else?
One final challege of your stamina & fitness – The cooper challenge.
This is a simple and easy fitness challenge to undertake to understand how you are progressing from an endurance perspective. Give this a go as a training session or to see how your training is progressing. The best place to do this down the park or at your hockey pitch, so you have a known distance to work out how far you have run, ideally 400 metres works really well. Manage your pacing so you can keep going at a constant pace throughout the 12 minute challenge.
The test is simply to run as far as you can in a 12 minute period. Please complete a short five minute warm up before you undertake the challenge.
As a guide females, depending on age, will run between 1500m and 2300m while the males should achieve between 2100m and 3000m. Enjoy the challenge!
And Finally
Our suggestion would be to begin work on this Performance for Athletic Development once you have completed the Foundation training so you are building a stronger base, this will maximise the benefits of your time and training.
Build A Better Hockey Player
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Body Logic Health
292 Battersea Park Rd
Battersea
London
SW11 3BT
