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Stop Starting Practice With Laps
I want you to try something at your next practice which is cutting the laps at the start and going straight into mechanics work, because that dead time at the beginning of a session is almost always wasted and it doesn't have to be.
Here's how I'd run it. Get the team warm off the ice with a dynamic warm-up so you're not burning ice time just getting loose, and then when you hit the ice, skate for maybe 30 seconds and go straight into the work. The biggest shift though is what you focus on and how you structure it, which is every player has a puck from the very first drill, because skating and puck handling trained separately never actually combine the way you want them to once you try to put them together in a game. And the mechanics I'd prioritize are the outside edge and soft drags, since those are the two things that give a player the biggest advantage precisely because so few please ever touch them.
Run four or five lines so nobody's standing around, keep everyone moving the entire time, and don't stop for water until the block is done. It sounds like a lot until players relax into it, trust the movement, and let gravity do some of the work, at which point it turns into one of the better feeling 10 minutes of the whole practice.
I just posted a full walkthrough of exactly how to structure this.
The outside edge work, the soft drags, and the mechanics-first approach that ties it all together, that's the foundation of the Downhill Skating System. If you want to build it into your own team's practices:
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Flip McDavid To A Righty And Put Your Rep Beside His
Since the new platform opened the tool I keep going back to is the side-by-side comparison in My Videos, and it does one thing really well which is put your own rep next to an NHL rep and hold the two of them together.
On one side is a player rep of the anchor and soft drag. On the other is McDavid doing the same thing, except he's mirrored so he reads as a right-handed player, and that one change matters a lot more than it sounds like it should, because when you study a mechanic off somebody shooting the other way your brain spends the whole clip translating instead of actually seeing the movement. Flip him and the comparison goes direct.
From there you zoom the player clip to 2x so both bodies sit at about the same size on screen, since it's almost impossible to judge a shin angle when one clip is filmed from the corner and the other one is a broadcast angle. Then you lock the frames, which means one transport drives both clips at once, so when you step forward you step forward on both, and you can sit the two soft drags at the exact same point in the movement.
It's the piece that connects straight back to the top of this email, because the soft drag is one of the two mechanics I'd build that ten minute block around, and this is how you find out whether you're getting it or whether you just think you are. There's a guided demo already set up in there so you can see exactly what the controls do before you upload anything of your own.
The side-by-side, the Mechanics Clip Library the NHL clips come from, and the AI Coach all live in Train 2.0 Max.
Seven Cities, One Summer, And Now The Season Starts
We just wrapped the last camp of the summer in Edmonton, which closes out a run that went Toronto, Calgary, Detroit, Vancouver, Anaheim, Montreal and Edmonton since May.
The same thing came up at every single stop, which is that players were never short on effort or short on fitness, they were short on a picture. Nobody had ever shown them what the position is actually supposed to look like, so they had no way of telling a good rep from a bad one and they were just repeating whatever they already did. Once they had the standard in front of them the work got a lot simpler, because now there's something to aim at.
And now the season starts, which is exactly where that progress quietly gets lost, because ice time turns into team ice time and mechanics work is the first thing to fall off the schedule. That's backwards. In-season is when mechanics matter most, since you're playing games every weekend and every one of those games is either reinforcing a good pattern or grooving a bad one deeper. Ten minutes at the start of practice, which is the whole point of the first section of this email, is enough to keep it moving all year long.
We build the next round of camps off requests, so if you want one in your city, or you want us in with your team this season, get it in front of us now. The cities that ask early are the cities that end up on the calendar.