Get The Eyes up!

This isn’t going to be a long post, but it is one that’s very much overdue, mainly because of the video I’m going to share right now…

Ya, if a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, well… Just how much is a video like this worth?

Now, if you follow me at all on social media, you’ll know I’m regularly on a tear about the gadgets and drills I see used there, especially in Instagram, where lots of unfounded drills and awful training tools are more the norm than, well…

Then, as for the brevity of this post, that’s mostly because puckhandling is one of my favorite subjects, I’ve shown hundreds of scientifically based drills within this site — many of my own design, and I’ve shared a great video on “Specificity in Teaching Puckhandling” as recently as our latest CCC-TV Hockey Show.

There is one final bit of advice I want to share with members, however, and it’s as true in other sports as it is in hockey. What I want to remind everyone about is the fact that “the more you do something a certain way, the more that becomes the way you do it.” But, let me explain that a bit more…

Picture how careful major league players are in protecting their swings. For example, there are stories about one of the greatest hitters of all-time, Ted Williams, perfecting his swing in a hotel room’s mirror, or whiling away the time waiting at a bus stop swinging a rolled up magazine. I was a pretty good hitter through to semi-pro ball, and I had learned to swing a bat full speed while balancing a book on my head — this 100 times per night, from both sides. The idea here, is that good baseball players — including pitchers — know that their movements have to be practiced perfectly until they become second nature.

When it comes to hockey, however, I’m constantly reminding my followers that our game is kinda crazy — or helter-skelter, and it’s also known as a “read and react” sport. In other words, there’s not much time to think in the heat of battle, so the best players are known to react instinctively in critical situations.

So, returning a hockey player’s stickhandling, what do you think he’s going to do in the heat of battling, wanting to ensure he doesn’t lose the puck? All I can hope he does is what comes naturally, and that what comes naturally is that he handles the puck with his eyes up, scanning the ice all around — for open teammates and for fast moving freight trains.