Learning to Play the Game
Contents

All sections

Off the Ice

Underneath all five layers

Not a layer of play, but every layer above depends on it: kit, conditioning, practice, the mental side, culture, and how to watch.

The 6 documents in this section

EquipmentHockey gear does two separate jobs: it keeps you out of hospital, and it decides what your body is able to do on the ice.Conditioning and RecoveryHockey asks your body for repeated near-maximal efforts of roughly thirty to eighty seconds, separated by two to five minutes sitting down, for sixty minutes of clock time.Practice and DevelopmentThe 10,000-hour rule was never a research finding. It was the average hours the best group of violinists in one study had accumulated by about age twenty, popularised as a threshold —…The Mental GameThe mental side of hockey closes the gap between your worst performance and your best. It does not raise your best.Team Play and CultureThe fastest way to be accepted by a hockey team is reliability, not skill. Being where you said you would be is what lets a teammate pass without looking up first.How to Watch HockeyAlmost everything that decides a hockey game happens away from the puck, and the camera that follows the puck is training you to miss it.

Cite this page

This page is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. You may share and adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided you give credit. Here is the credit line.

Plain text

James Bloom, "Off the Ice", Learning to Play the Game. https://learn-ice-hockey.com/off-the-ice/ — licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

HTML

<a href="https://learn-ice-hockey.com/off-the-ice/">Off the Ice</a> by <a href="https://github.com/jamesdbloom">James Bloom</a>, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC 4.0</a>.

BibTeX

@misc{off-the-ice,
  author  = {James Bloom},
  title   = {Off the Ice},
  howpublished = {Learning to Play the Game},
  url     = {https://learn-ice-hockey.com/off-the-ice/},
  note    = {Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}