How do you enhance your hockey skills?
Reido asked:
I am an avid hockey player, but always want to improve. My hero is Alexander Ovechkin. I wish I could cut corners and stick handle like him.
I am an avid hockey player, but always want to improve. My hero is Alexander Ovechkin. I wish I could cut corners and stick handle like him.
Practice a lot, and practice crazy ideas as well as the fundamentals. Without fundamentals, you won’t be good. But if you’re too afraid to try new stuff, you won’t be great.
practice,practice, practice, and more practice
As always, practice makes perfect. If I could add some personal experience, when everyone else is standing around waiting to shoot at the goalie before the game, or in down time in practice,……just always be handling the puck, practice skating with the puck with your head up, looking around.
I enhance my skills by playing up — ie., I play in a division where I’m not as good as most of the players around me and have to hustle to keep up. I also sometimes just go play pickup with guys who are a million times better than I am — pro, ex pro, college players — and between playing with them and them stopping to help me learn things, I get a lot out of it.
I go to practice and stick time regularly, and take hockey skills classes or skating classes now and then when I can afford it and have the time.
Honestly, the most improvement I get usually comes with playing with better players and going all out to learn and try to keep up.
Cutting corners isn’t how Ovechkin got there, and the work you put in makes the rewards that much more satisfying, anyway. Or at least that’s how I feel.
Pushing yourself to your edge limit to learn and improve is fun, too.
You can’t do it all at the rink - weight train, cross-train, do whatever you can to build up your legs. The stronger they are, the more power you’ll get from ‘em when you’re racing down the rink or muscling a guy off the puck.
Practice makes perfect… Just do drills over and over again. You also have to have the passion for hockey.