How an NHL Strength Coach Prepares His Team to Play Every Other Day With Mike Potenza

On episode #98 (wow, we’re getting close to 100) of the Hockey Strength Podcast, Mike Potenza comes back on the show to talk about the challenges he and San Jose Sharks have faced, and what he’s doing as the strength coach to adapt and prepare for those challenges.

Mike talks about…

– How he trained his players after lots of time off

– What training the players are doing in-season

– How he prioritizes nutrition and recovery in season

– His go-to people and resources for nutrition.

(John Berardi, Jim Lavalle, Kiley Field)

Full episode transcript

David Rosales: Mike, welcome back to the Hockey Strength Podcast. Thanks for being here amid this busy start to an NHL season. How’s it going?

Mike Potenza: Great, thanks for having me.

David: So you’re entering your fifth game tonight, on the road. What has been one of the biggest challenges this season just in terms of logistics?

Mike: If you don’t follow our team (the San Jose Sharks), we’re one of four teams in the country that got kicked out of their home arena/building/county. So us, San Jose State football, Stanford Athletics, and the San Francisco 49ers unfortunately can’t play in Santa Clara county, so it makes it that much more difficult for us because we’re on the road until further notice. It’s frustrating and kind of daunting to not know when you’re gonna come home, but it is for a purpose and the greater good. As long as the health of the county and the cases, death rate, and ICUs open up, then there’s light at the end of the tunnel for us.

So we are on the road until further notice. It’s like a band of pirates who have to sail the seven seas and they don’t know when they’re gonna hit land.

David: I hope you brought extra clothing, in case you need it. 

Mike: Well you have to pack light because you can’t load up the plane too much, so I guess we’re always scrambling for quarters to do laundry. 

David: If you’re not at your home rink, what is your team’s gym situation right now?

Mike: Great question. That’s kind of the neat things I can share on the podcast. We’re playing an every other day schedule. Everybody does; we’re all challenged with that. So trying to figure out your workouts are really interesting. It’s a combination of getting the hotel gym solidified, getting a bigger conference room space for warm-up/preparation movement and things like that. 

There’s only so much you can do. You can’t go to a local gym even if you’re in a city that has no bans on fitness centers and things, because you have to stay somewhat in this bubble. Even certain zones of the arena are marked off for only player and team access. When we’re getting meals brought to us, they can drop them off in a certain zone, and then I have to go pick them up. So, it’s really strict in that manner.

But workout wise we’re doing a combination of in the locker room during practices days, at the hotel gym which is sanitized — there’s a 30 minute waiting period and then we can use then they resanitize it, then whoever’s in the hotel can use it. So very unique, limited on equipment.

As fellow strength coaches we can borrow from each other and we try to lean on each other as much as possible. It was such a scramble at the end that we wanted to solidify a set of equipment from the home team to the visiting hotel rooms, but it was just almost impossible to accomplish in the short time where we said, “all right, we’re playing.”

David: With that short term around, your team the San Jose Sharks hadn’t played since March, so that’s ten months in between games. What did you see with players coming back into a training camp after so much time off? 

Mike: In a really good way there were a lot of guys who elevated their fitness and conditioning level, body composition, put more muscle on if they were young. It did them really good. Nobody really overtrained. They were really under-hockey’d if you will. But I guess guys came in really good shape.

It was just a matter of the tempo. Guys didn’t have the tempo on the ice that we really wanted so we kind of built in — our head coach Bob Boughner and I — two weeks of what we really needed to focus on and what was a really good schedule for having us not played in ten months and knowing in the season the workloads were gonna be super high. We really needed to manage those and manage different qualities that we want on the ice. You can’t just go in and start battle drills all of the sudden; we wanted to work up to those things.

But at the same time, introduce workloads and high speeds because guys — as you know — they say they’re going as fast as they can sometimes that doesn’t get to as fast as you want it to be. 

David: And what training qualities did you end up needing to focus on in those two weeks and which ones that you normally might focus on more in a standard training camp did you have to ease off of. 

Mike: I was really worried about tissue tolerance at any high speeds that we were going to achieve. I looked at each day and saw that volume is going to accumulate and we looked at length of practice and how we thought volume would accumulate there. But also measuring heart rate above 90% [max] and the time spent in that zone for a practice.

We looked at those factors and said, okay, knowing we’re going to start with speed and knowing that those other workload factors are going to increase automatically by default, then when can we insert the days off, the recovery days, and then come back to speed, right? 

And it worked out really well. We had to also include some scrimmages there because our had coach had to know, okay, who’s our team gonna be. We hadn’t played any games so we wanted to introduce as a workload factor, game-type formats to practice and scrimmages.

So we held those and we assumed, okay, there are going to be some high speeds achieved in there, so that could be  like a 1b speed day. Rather than 1a being we’re going to set drills that are tactically appropriate for what we want to do but also speed-driven — true speed driven drills. 

It worked out really well. And it’s funny, the body language of the guys told you when they were tired. You could see it after such a long hiatus we knew when we should definitely give them an off day or start to shorten practice up. 

David: As you talked about needing to prioritize speed.. That’s always one fo the dichotomies of this start of a season is you need to ramp guys up speed-wise but you also need to be careful with tissue tolerance and making sure guys aren’t getting hurt and going too fast. So how do you balance those two factors. 

Mike: Again, when we say it’s going to be a speed day, we really truly look at distances that cover from, as a starting point, goal line to the blue or goal line to far blue line. Right so kind of like a up the ice attack kind of format. So those two zones of speed if you will, so those our speed days. 

If we work on in-zone offense or defensive zone coverage it kind of becomes almost like quick feet/change of direction training. You know, if you take 4 quick strides up the ice you’re out of the zone already. So in-zone offense has become a sort of change of direction day.

Those are the days, our non-speed day, we can look at those things as kind of a mode of practice if you will and then I was kind of particular about the scheduling of the days to hit those longer striding and opening up and moving at high speed days with our head coach.

And then the battle drills are highly anaerobic. Some of the highly specific game drills whether that’s forecheck into regroup or backcheck into attack, those become anaerobic. Those are very much anaerobic drills we’re going to see in a game so those acted as our conditioning drill. We didn’t really do any stops in starts; we didn’t really have to. 

The 15 guys that had already been in San Jose conditioning, I had already put that in anyway. Then it was funny because the other guys, the other 25 guys, were in Arizona before we got there skating together. So I would send one of the veteran guys on our team that was down there I would send them  the on-ice conditioning to take the guys through. 

You know, very creative. You have to be very creative when you’re not in your home rink. 

David: But what ended up happening is everybody came into camp in some kind of condition, so you didn’t have to deal with, oh these 15 guys are ready and these 15 guys are just bags of milk right now. 

Mike: There’s really no excuse. Sometimes you try to get away with being a bag of milk for two months, historically. But now you can’t get away with it for ten months, there’s no way. It has been an eye-opening experience, even in programming, playing every other day… we say that a lot as strength coaches but it’s literally for 56 games averaging every other day. 

There are three 5-day periods that are open where you don’t play. And those are set for if your team gets shut down and you need to make up games, so Nashville, Carolina, Washington, and Dallas are now dealing with that. So they use those days to make up games. 

David: As if training in-season wasn’t hard enough before, now what adjustments that you literally have to play every other day for the entire season. 

Mike: And with limited equipment. We’ve had to go to as heavy loaded possible dumbbell work or kettlebell work and single-leg fashion. The only bilateral movement we really can do is borrowing a trap bar from our fellow strength coaches as the visiting team. 

Even upper body pressing becomes kettlebell or dumbbell action with benches that we have and are borrowing. So those true Olympic lifting pull with a bar, we can get there — we’ve been borrowing Olympic bars. But in terms of front squatting and supine bench pressing or incline pressing, we’re really not getting it.

But I don’t think that’s not going to not win us a Stanley Cup. So we’re doing what we need to do to get those types of movements in and provide some sort of stimulus. 

David: Is there anything that you think — I guess you’re only 4 games in so it’s hard to say — you would take from your in-season programming and apply to a normal schedule?

Mike: Well I’ll tell you what I really like. I feel like I’m back in college because we play two game series. You play back to back and you’re in the same city. That’s pretty cool, that side of it. 

If I had a suggestion box and wrote some notes down for Gary Bettman I’d say let’s keep the series format. You can kind of get comfortable for a minute and not live in the bag and get comfortable and then go to the next city. 

But I would say, you know what David, nothing yet. The two things I want back now are the weight room at the practice rink and I want our home locker room back because we can train after a game because we had the resources to do that. Right now it’s a challenge to do those two things.

So kind of an indirect. I’ll keep the schedule but I want my gym space back in San Jose. 

I’m the only one going through it because we don’t get to play at home. 

David: So when are you training? If game, day off, game, day off, what does that 4-day span look like?

Mike: Well we have a day off every 7 days, however that maps out, that’s mandatory. So we’ll train on the practice day. And right now with COVID protocol is you can only have groups of ten. So this gets interesting.

So we’ll workout the veteran group before practice, as a group of ten, and then we’ll workout the non-veterans as a group of ten after practice. However, you can carry 29 on your roster this year as a taxi squad. So the normal roster is 23, you can carry 29, the six extra guys are the taxi. Those guys are in our COVID protocol, they’re getting tested every day like us so it’s an easy call up.

If you would have to have called up a guy from the American League that would’ve been impossible right now in terms of seven day quarantine and getting everybody tested. But still, how do you get them here. You can’t drive them in some cases. You’d have to put them on a commercial flight and then their risk factor goes up.

So we have this taxi squad and they workout while the guys are on the ice during practice. And then when they’re done with me and the guys come off, the coaches skate them. So THAT’S like we’re back in college too because I have 29 guys again. 

I push them a little bit more. It’s almost like your concept in football with your 3rd or 4th string guys — they may get an extra lift day in. I push them a little more with volume, the same intensity, and then an additional movement or speed/skills day. So yeah, that’s interesting. 

Another thing I do like is that through camp we HAVE to go through this in small groups. So something myself, my assistant Stephen DiLustro, and Marcello Martinelli, our American League strength coach, we only have ten guys at a time. So it was awesome. Except for the warm-up where we had two different teams of twenty guys. So we’d warm them up as a team — 20 guys here 20 guys somewhere else — but the lifting groups we had ten. So we had a smaller player:coach ratio which was pretty cool. 

I was waiting for more guys to come in and I was like, wait a minute we only have ten guys. So I would keep that next year, if we had training camp in San Jose. Because we can have two gyms in our practice facility, which is pretty cool. 

David: And did you pick the groups? Like is one group a force-specific group and one group more power or…

Mike: No, we didn’t. We still kind of went through our qualities for everybody and made our adjustments where we needed to mechanically and injury history-wise. But I just put all the veterans together and then all the younger guys.

But it was good because when you put the younger guys together, those two and three-year NHL players can kind of become the leader of the young group, you know? So it worked out well.

That’s for the in-season one. For training camp, our coaching divided the team equally, balanced them out with veterans on team one and team two. So when we worked out we stayed in that group until the beginning of the season. 

David: That’s a cool tidbit for other coaches too. I like how when you’re picking groups, you’re also thinking about who it’s going to instill confidence in and how are they going to interact socially as a group of ten, not only the physical qualities that they’re going to develop. 

Mike: I’ll tell you. We might have talked about this on a different podcast. But in the last 7-8 years, I was always thinking who would be my next leaders. When Joe Pavelski and Patrick Marleau and Joe Thornton had been gone I was thinking who was going to carry the reigns. So I guess in my coaching now I always think about how do I harvest and foster the younger players to think that way and not just kind of be there. 

David: If you don’t mind sharing is there an example of a player who you’ve seen grow into a leader in the weight room and become a leader on the team. 

Mike: Tomas Hertl, and Logan Couture. I think those two guys have been awesome. They both have varying abilities of strength and fitness in the weight room but I don’t really care, you know. We had a guy like Joe Pavelski who had to work his bag off just to get whatever he had.

So the prerequisite is not speed or strength. It has to be that you’re working the hardest both on and off the ice. And those guys you. And that maturation process is pretty cool to see.

David: That’s awesome. Any other lessons that you’ve learned these last four games. Any other craziness you want to share with us?

Mike: I always share something like, if you were Old Mike Potenza, what would they tell you, Young Mike Potenza. So I’ve always dabbled in a lot of the nutrition stuff for our team.

I like learning about nutrition, and supplementation, and everything to do with that process, you know? As a tidbit, I like to cook myself. I was blessed with aunts, great aunts, and grandparents, and my mom was a great cook so I guess it just falls on your lap as an Italian that you kinda have to learn to cook.

But uh, I’ve done more on the nutrition side in this setting more than I ever had. Planning meals, it’s a bear. Because it’s just different. So I should’ve went back and got my nutritional degree or worked as a chef or something and thing came backwards and became a strength coach for chrissakes. So that’s been tough.

That takes a lot of time because you’re going into every city and you’re planning lunches and breakfasts and dinners and then you got the plane to worry about. What snacks are on there? How do you hydrate on the plane? Do we have Biosteel on the plane? It’s pretty cumbersome. 

David: I remember in juniors we dealt with the same thing. When I was a captain I’d take to my coach and be like Coach, we gotta find like a good dinner spot for the guys. Every team goes through that so it’s really cool you’re going through that. 

Mike: Oh we used to just eat Jimmy John’s.

David: And are you in charge of finidng all the places ahead of time and where you’re going to eat and how to get it into the bubble and all of that?

Mike: There was an element of that but the buildings have really good catering. The buildings are under a lot restrictions so we have to work with them. Our team services coordinator is awesome because I just tell him what I need and what the menu is and then he’ll do all the payments and scheduling and all that stuff. So it works out good.

David: What about the nutrition… Have you made any adjustments?

Mike: I guess tactically because we’re playing every other day and we do have a lot of back-to-backs that means you can play a lot of 3 in 4’s (3 games in 4 nights). From a beta-alanine and citrulline standpoint and lactic acid buffering, I’m using more of that as a strategy than I ever had. 

The foundation is still there between what we offer for electrolytes and what we offer for protein and things like that, but everything has to be grab and go. 

So the only person that’s aloud to go into a tub scoop stuff out is me. And I have mask and gloves and all that stuff just to keep it as sanitary as possible and not have a lot of hands and germs in there. All those touchpoints are being minimized as much as we can. 

So we went to a lot of grab and go, pre-made protein shakes in training camp. Now that we’re on the road we have separate packs of protein for guys who want to take it back. Everybody has an individual shaker bottle that they’re responsible for. Vitamins are pre-packaged in a ketchup packet thing.  Even electrolytes are just single, individual sticks that I just hand out. 

The cost has gone up, so sorry to management. But, it’s COVID, so. 

David: Last question on the nutrient side, is, because you don’t have a nutritional degree, and most strength coaches don’t have a nutritional degree, but it’s still something we need to learn about. So who are you go-to resources to learn more about supplements players should be taking. How they should be eating around gametime, who are your go-to resources for all that?

Mike: I think John Berardi’s (Precision Nutrition) work is an awesome place to start and study. How he expands it and markets it, it’s awesome; he does such as a good job. As you know my relationships with Jim Lavalle has been tremendous and that’s been, from a learning standpoint, like a high level course anytime you talk to him. Not only for some of the specific nutrients on performance but on health is even more important to me and learning.

Even on the diet side, him and I have been talking more about that and timing for our athletes and what they eat based on their schedule. And what could be more acidic-promoting to the already acidic environment players are trying to get out of after the game. So he’s unbelievable. 

So I guess those are my two go-to’s. I have some really good friends that are good sports nutritionists and I pick their brains a lot about how they’re managing and setting up the meal and things like that. 

We had a part-time nutritionist named Kiley Field and now she’s one of the nutritionists with the New York Rangers and the Liberty and the Knicks. So they have two full-time nutritionists with that team in Westchester County, New York, their practice facility. 

She did a great job for us, and managed all the meals, and came up with some great strategic meals like anti-inflammatory meals and vegetarian meals for guys who go that route sometimes. It’s been really good. So those are my go-to’s that I lean on. 

David: I think that’s something that’s very important to think about for anything. Anything you want to learn think about who you want to learn it from. And I think that’s its own skill is knowing who trust and knowing who knows this topic. 

Mike: Yeah for sure, absolutely.

David: Well, I know you have a team bus to catch for a game in a few hours. Any last thoughts? Thanks for taking the time, I know it’s a busy time.

Mike: Yeah I’m just happy to share a little bit of what we’re going through. And I guess the moral of the story is even when you have a lot of challenges you have to find a way to get what we do in. It doesn’t mean check a box it just means okay how do we effectively get what we do from a performance and planning and a ‘how much is enough’ thing. And where do we inject nutrition and recovery and training in a crazy-ass schedule that’s not going to end until May.

David: Yeah, you’re just at the beginning.