Planning Tonight’s Hockey Practice
Pardon me if I reflect back on an afternoon in Massachusetts when I was readying for my team’s second on-ice practice of that summer, when it struck me that member coaches — and even hockey parents — would like some insight into my practice planning process.
At the same time, I have a chance to explain an important principle of motor learning, this usually referred to as the Mass versus Distributed Method.
To begin, I generally view the Mass approach to training as having to do with older athletes with longer attention spans. And I’ll usually apply it when a single problem needs to be dealt with. Perhaps the best example is when I do a private lesson with a player who is at least of high school age. (Actually, I try to avoid doing one-on-one sessions with younger players.) In most cases, a parent will call me to ask if I can solve a given skill problem their guy or gal seems to be having. With that, we’ll schedule an hour of ice-time for me to work with that player. And, although I’ll give him or her some mental breaks — and tell them to occasionally head-off and shoot some pucks or whatever, we’re able to spend a good portion of our time together working on that one problem area. If you can appreciate it, the older player is usually able to focus better — and for longer — than a real young one. So, this Mass approach works okay for that age group.
That said, most players — and especially most young players — tend to do best with a Distributed approach to training. And, quite simply, this method has me distributing short bouts of work at a given skill over numerous practice sessions. Said yet another way, this suggests that 10 separate practices at a given skill for 5-minutes per practice will be more effective than if we have the players work at that skill for 50-minutes in a single session.
And this brings me to my planning for that night’s practice… For, what I’m doing is using our last practice as an outline for the new one. In other words, I’ll begin with exactly what we did last week, and then I’ll just make some slight adjustments. In some instances, I’ll ditch a past progression of a skill and move on to the next one. Sometimes I’ll substitute a drill that does close to what another had previously done for the kids. And, at yet other times, I’ll repeat the previous step, and then quickly move on to the next progression. Not that I’ll change every single drill on the list. No, some will need more work before we move forward.
If you get what I’m attempting here, you’ll see that I’m gaining good continuity from practice to practice. At the same time, each practice should bring my guys from Point A to Point B in a given skill (with the next week hopefully bringing them to Point C).
I hope coaches are also sensing how easy it can actually be to develop lesson plans. I mean, if we begin with a pretty good one the first night, it’s usually fairly simple to just slowly up the ante for the next practice, the next, and the next.
PS: Having just mentioned the need to first start with a good plan, I promise to provide plenty of help towards that aim as our season nears.
