This is an overview of the chapter. For strength and conditioning coaches and hockey coaches, designing training programs can be hard because of there are so many physical demands on hockey players. There is limited research and objective information on the best training programs for hockey and skating skills. It is believed that all the components of fitness are important: muscle strength, power, and endurance, and cardiovascular endurance and anaerobic capacity. The research on training for hockey and skating suggests that upper and lower body muscle strength, power, and endurance are important for skating acceleration and upper body power is important for stick velocity when shooting. We don’t know what off-ice training can improve skating agility which is how players skate during a game.

Research on skating can be confusing if a we look at resent research done with players on skating treadmills. There are biomechanical differences when skating on a treadmill compared to skating on ice. The most obvious difference is that treadmills make a player skate uphill, despite the fact that every hockey rink in the world is flat. Some of the findings in studies done on treadmills contradict how players skate on ice. However, there is good research from studies done on a normal hockey rink that show a coach what characteristics are important for fast, high-performance skating. The aspects of skating that are consistently found to be characteristics of fast skaters include: stride width (wide stride when pushing off), quick and low recovery of the skate after pushing off (slower skaters have a long recovery), quick set of the blade on the ice and turning it into the push-off skate, arm movement side-to-side in equal coordinated movement with the legs, deep knee bend, a lot of forward lean of the trunk, and the ability to move the center of gravity over the base of support to maintain balance.