It's all uphill

We all realise the often excessive repeated sprint activity demands of hockey necessitate an interval-heavy periodised conditioning plan of the coaching staff. Those with a flare for the novel and an appreciation of the resistance element will throw in beach running. If, like me, you live near the Alps, and you can persuade a local landowner to give you access, you inject plenty of snowshoe running into the winter conditioning blender. (1)  compared responses from a snowshoe training program to a similarly designed run training program.  Following baseline measurements in VO_2max, running time to exhaustion (RTE), and anthropometry, 17 subjects (10 snowshoers and 7 runners) participated in a six week conditioning program. Both groups exercised for 30 min at 75-85% age predicted maximum heart rate, 3-4 times per week, for a total of 18 sessions. The results? VO_2max improved significantly in both running and snowshoeing groups, 6.3 and 8.5%, respectively. Run time to exhaustion also improved significantly in both groups, 23.3 and 33.5%, respectively. The bonus of snowshoe and sand running is that impact micro-traumas to he muscular-skeletal systems of the athletes are minimised. If I were running an elite squad I would not hesitate to include a block ( shifting from base to speed) of 3 weeks snowshoe training at altitude. Clearly, not all hockey clubs have access to snow or beaches. Is there anything else that can be done to improve running efficiency, running economy, strength and with it speed? Unlike sand and snow, hills can be found in most places and should form an integral part of your conditioning program.

What are the benefits of hill training?

Like snow and sand, hills provide a resistance to the locomotion of the athlete; to run uphill you need to overcome the resistance of your own body weight.

Benefits

1. Increases your aerobic capacity 
2. Promotes strength endurance
3. Improves your running economy so that you use less oxygen to run at a given velocity
4. Increases strength of the gluteals, quadriceps, gastrocnemius (upper calf), and soleus (lower calf) muscles, providing a base for potential speed increments.
5. Improves stride length and frequency and with it running efficiency.
6. Increases your ankle flexion to help reduce ground contact time and thereby improve efficiency and speed.
7. The downhill phase helps improve control and stabilisation of the target muscle groups

Different hill lengths and gradients impart different training effects. A hockey player is perhaps best served with mixing up the hill lengths throughout their program but perhaps leaning towards mid-sized hills in base phase and short hills closer to pre-competition phase through to season start. One person's short is another person's long; most of the content available is skewed to distance runners. For the field hockey player, these are my personal definitions

Short hills

15 to 35 degrees less than 30 metres

Medium Hills

10 to 25 degrees 30 to 70 metres

According to (2) short hills of 5 to 10 second duration will help improve the Adenosine Triphosphate and Phosphate-creatine (ATP+PC) energy system and hills of 15 to 30 second duration will help develop the ATP+PC+muscle glycogen energy system.

I'm not here to prescribe a free 12-16 week program but I will share a favourite session I use for a microcycle prior to transitioning from base and temp work to intervals; I call it "round and round and up and down." Find a grassed oval of 400-500m+ that features nearby grassed slopes of 10m-30m. Warm up- 2 km steady with stretches and wind sprints of 20m slow 20m jog 20m striding x 5; do 4 to 8 x3 laps sets as follows:

lap one zone 2; lap 2 zone 3; lap 3 zone 2; hill reps max.speed x 5 to 10; walk down slope

References

Connolly, D. a. J., Henkin, J. A., & Tyzbir, R. S. (n.d.). Changes in selected fitness parameters following six weeks of snowshoe training. Journal of sports medicine and physical fitness, 42(1), 14–18.

Mackenzie, B. (2007) Hill Training [WWW] Available from: http://www.brianmac.co.uk/hilltrain.htm
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