The Simplicity of Training

A few weeks ago I rode my bike up a mountain road near my house. Nothing fancy — no interval sets, no heart rate targets, no plan. Just a simple road and a long climb. By the time I got to the top I was cooked. Legs burning, lungs working, completely gassed.

And I loved it.

Here's the thing: I wasn't thinking about hockey once. Not edges, not hands, not save selection. I was just trying to get up the hill. But afterward I got thinking about how it applies to what I tell the goalies I work with, and I want to pass it on to you too.

Not every day needs to be gym-specific or hockey-related.

Goalies especially can fall into a trap of thinking every workout has to look like training. Lateral movement drills. Reaction work. Butterfly slides. Explosive power sets in the gym. All of that has its place — I'm not knocking any of it. But if that's the only kind of training you ever do, you're missing something. Your body needs variety. Your mind needs a break from the sport.

Go play a racket sport. Go for a hike. Get on a bike and ride somewhere with no real destination. Swim. Play pickup basketball badly. The specific activity matters a lot less than the fact that you're moving, working different muscles and different energy systems, and — maybe most importantly — not grinding on hockey for a couple hours.

Thoughtless conditioning is still conditioning.

That bike ride wasn't programmed. I didn't design it to build a specific quality. It was just hard, and my body adapted to hard. That's the part that gets overlooked. You don't need every rep of every workout justified by a periodization chart to get value out of it. Sometimes the simplest, least "optimized" activity — a long ride, a hike with some elevation, a pickup game — builds real fitness without adding to the mental pile of "this is hockey training."

Outside interests aren't a distraction from the grind. They're what makes the grind sustainable.

This is the part I really believe in, and it's the biggest thing I try to get across to the goalies I coach. If your entire identity and every hour of your training time is wrapped up in the sport, you'll burn out — physically, mentally, or both. Having something else you're into, something you do just because you enjoy it, actually protects your ability to lock in when it's time to work. You need somewhere for your competitiveness and your energy to go that isn't hockey, so that when it is time to be in the gym or on the ice grinding through the hard stuff, you can actually be present for it instead of running on fumes.

So get creative with how you train. Mix it up. Ride the bike up the mountain with no plan. Play the sport you're bad at. Go for the hike. You'll show up to the rink with fresher legs and — more importantly — a fresher head. And the conditioning will still be there.