Guidelines and Prescriptions

Some guidelines have been discussed within this blog, however it is essential for athletes to only progress to exercises involving higher resistance once they have mastered the technique for the previous exercise, so for example going from body weight squat, to medicine ball front squat then onto barbell squats. These steady progressions will build up a solid base to avoid strains and injuries.


With regards to club levels hockey players, when first attempting any new exercise they should focus on sets with high repetitions and low loads, purely to master techniques. From there players can increase the loads and decrease the number of repetitions. When the players level of strength has increased to the standard of being able to squat around 1.5 x body weight (Cormie et al, 2011), they can progress on to more specific power training. Newton and Kraemer (1994) found that athletes with a solid base of strength training struggled finding power improvements when carrying out further strength training, suggesting that strong athletes need to progress onto more specific power programs, increasing the velocity in their training.


If a club level hockey player is able to improve their lower body strength through the exercises above, they will:

• gain a base of strength, increasing their power (Stone et al, 2006)
• gain muscular and tendon hypertrophy, reducing injury risks (Hedrick and Wada, 2008)
• be able to apply more force to the ground and decrease contact time, improving sprint speed and acceleration (Spinks et al, 2007)

All these improvements give a club level player the opportunity to go onto more advanced power training, and allow them to be physically stronger and faster than opposing players, which therefore starts to bridge the cap between the club level player and national league player.

Image 13, Team Adidas England Hockey, 2010.