HockeyOT athlete Sheldon Souray (Anaheim Ducks)

I have been working with pro hockey players for over 15 years. As a result, I have tried many different types of training ideas with my athletes. The first pro hockey player I had the opportunity to train was my younger brother, Ethan. He played junior hockey for the OHL’s Niagara Falls Thunder in the mid-1990’s at the same time I was competing in track & field for the University of South Carolina. We would go to the gym together and he would jump on the stationary bike, while I would head over to the free weights and hit my cleans, squats and presses. When he was drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks in 1994, they told him to get stronger. It was then that he decided that he would start hitting the weights in addition to the sprint and plyometric work on the track with me. After 2 years of this “new” training, he was definitely a faster and more powerful player. In fact, once he cracked the Blackhawks line up in 1996-7, he quickly became one of their more physical players. With Ethan being a guinea pig of sorts, we tried to tweak his workouts in many ways to see what would work the best. His best season as an NHLer came with the Edmonton Oilers in 2003-4 when he scored 20 goals and had a very physical year finishing near the top of the team in hits while being a solid penalty-killer. This best season happened 10 years after he began to really train off the ice for the sport of hockey. This probably comes as no surprise to those that are really in the training world, as it is said that it takes 10 years to build a really complete athlete in any sport. Having the opportunity to help my younger brother with his hockey career was very rewarding. In some ways, I wish I could do it over and try to eliminate some of the mistakes that I felt we made along the way in the trial-and-error process of figuring out what would work for him the best as an athlete. The good news for us is that we now have a whole new generation of players to work with. These players are benefiting from what we have learned over the last 15 years. Check out the HockeyOT circuit we had the “new generation” of players do this morning in the video below.

Dr. Chad Moreau is the President of HockeyOT.com, an online training site dedicated to improving the fitness level of hockey players of all levels. He was the former Strength & Conditioning/Nutrition Consultant for the Edmonton Oilers (NHL) and the Long Beach Ice Dogs (ECHL). For more information please visit hockeyot.com.