What McDavid Does Different
Everyone wants to skate like Connor McDavid and with all the miss-information on the internet it’s rarely taught what he is really doing to generate so much skating speed, which is the gap this week's video closes. We take three things that separate him from the other superstar skaters and put them side by side with what traditional power skating still teaches, and those differences are massive, because they better allow a player to skate downhill, loose, relaxed and effortless, instead of applying old powerskating methods and sub-optimal mechanics.
When you are not wasting energy with every stride, you don’t gas out as fast, which frees your brain up to make the next play or better see the ice and take what is given. It is not that these subtle differences looks different, it is that when the body is working so hard just to keep up to game speed you shut it down to optimizing play making and more specifically decision making.
The mechanics underneath all three are the ones we teach directly inside the new Train 2.0 platform. You can start with the free training below.
Live On Zoom, Saturday September 26
The video is the four minute version of this. On Saturday September 26 coach Shawn is taking the whole thing apart live for 45 minutes, starting with the improvement dilemma that most players know far too well, where the power skating and the shooting reps and the gym work all made them better without ever closing the gap, and then going through the three keys for skating downhill that skating coaches do not teach, which are Y-angle instead of stiff ankles, shin angle instead of sitting low, and the rocker instead of living on your toes.
It starts at 1:00 PM Eastern, which is 10:00 AM Pacific and 7:00 PM in Europe, and the last stretch of it is yours for questions about your own stride or your kid's. It is free, there are 30 live seats, and the button flips to sold out when they are gone.
Post The Clip, Get It Back Marked Up
There has been video in the players’ lounge since the day we opened it, and what there has never been is a clean way to answer one. Somebody puts up a shift and asks what is going on with their shot, and the replies come back as typed paragraphs, which is the slowest possible way to explain something that happens in half a second and is mostly about where a foot was.
That closed this week. Every video post in the Lounge now carries an Analyze button, which drops that clip straight into the analyzer with the drawing tools, the frame by frame scrub and the mirror already on it. You draw on it, you talk over it while you scrub, and then the recording goes straight back into that post's thread as your reply, which is something our coaches have been using with their players.
Analyze is a Train 2.0 Max tool, so if you are on Max you can pick up anybody's clip in the Lounge and hand back a marked up answer. Putting your own shift up and getting one back costs you nothing, which is the part worth saying out loud, because the fastest feedback most players will ever get is somebody drawing on their own video while they talk.