Here's something Kevin and Mason got into on the podcast this week that I want every player heading into a season to hear, which is that the offseason program you pulled from an NHL player's Instagram was built for his body and his weak links, not yours, and copying it is one of the surest ways to spend a summer getting hurt instead of getting faster.

Mason Hackel is a certified Train 2.0 coach out of Ann Arbor and a level three ATG coach, and he fixed his own hip flexor and groin by rebuilding from the ground up, so the whole conversation runs on one idea, structural balance. You find your weakest link, you build your numbers around it, and you let everything else follow from there. His big three are the ATG split squat, which trains the front of a stride with the knee way out over the toe, the seated good morning, which trains the back of it, the glutes, the adductors and the low back, and an incline press to keep the upper body honest. The standard he works players toward on the first two is 75 percent of bodyweight for ten reps, which for a 200 pound player means 150 pounds on the split squat.

Two things in there stuck with me. The first is the Achilles problem for hockey players, because your foot spends all season locked in a tight skate getting almost no calf stimulus, and then somebody rushes you into plyometrics and something pops. The second is that low back strength is directly tied to skating speed, and Kevin's periodization runs the same order every time, structural balance first, then hypertrophy, then strength, then power, so you peak at camp instead of in July.

Kevin and Mason recorded this one in person at the Detroit camp, and the full episode is up now.

Check Out The Video Here →

The reason the gym work matters is that it feeds the mechanics, the shin angle, the heel pressure, the width in your corkscrew, and that's the system we teach inside Train 2.0+.

Signup For Train 2.0+ Here →

Something Mason said on the podcast is that he only runs 35 to 50 exercises and gets everything else from variations, and that it works the same way as the mechanics, because there are only nine of those and the variations are endless. That's exactly how the Mechanics Clip Library on the new platform is built.

It's 360 clips of the game's best players, and the thing that makes it useful rather than just a highlight reel is how it's organized, which is by mechanic first. Open it and you're looking at albums, 48 anchors, 53 crossunders, 30 soft drags, 29 punch turns, 19 turns, 21 mohawk 10-2’s, and inside each one you can filter down by player, so if you want every McDavid crossunder or every Crosby scooter sitting next to each other, that's two clicks. The newest clips this week are Macklin Celebrini, his stutter step into a shot release, the same stutter into a soft drag release, and a backhand saucer pass.

Kevin made the point on the episode that the gym is easy to measure, since a squat is a number to the lbs, but the ice is subjective, so the fix is to film yourself, keep a log, and watch things like your shin angle over time. The library is the other half of that, because a log of your own clips only tells you something once you have the standard beside it, and that's what these are. It also feeds straight into the side-by-side we showed you last week, where you drop your rep next to the NHL clip and lock the frames.

The Mechanics Clip Library, the side-by-side in My Videos, XLR8 and the AI Coach all live in Train 2.0 Max.

See What's Inside Train 2.0 Max →

At the end of the episode Kevin points people to Mason on the coaches map, and it's worth explaining what that the map has grown into something we didn't have a year ago. Right now there are 24 certified Train 2.0 coaches and another 12 working through certification, spread across Canada, the US, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Kazakhstan, and every one of them teaches the same mechanics you've been reading about in these emails, the anchor, the soft drag, the corkscrew, and the standards behind them. We have had 65 total in the program for either certifying or simply the information and programming.

That matters more now than it does in July, because the season is when players need eyes on them. You can learn the mechanics from the lessons and check yourself against the clip library, but a coach who knows the system can see in one session what would take you a month of filming to find on your own, and can put you on the ice with a plan for the week instead of a list of drills. Mason runs his out of Ann Arbor, Kevin is in Ottawa, Ben Frank is in Southern California, Matt Lieber is in Connecticut, and the map has the rest.

If there isn't one near you yet, that's worth knowing too, because the certification is how the map grows, and coaches lock a territory when they come on board.

Find a coach near you, or claim a territory as one:

Find Your Coach Here →