Linear Speed Key Performance Indicators with Vicki Bendus

On episode #92 of the Hockey Strength Podcast, Vicki Bendus joins the show.

Vicki is a Lead Sport Performance Coach at Brock University where she works with the Men’s and Women’s hockey teams, as well as soccer teams. In addition, she is the Lead Strength & Conditioning Coach with the Canadian National Women’s Development Team after working with both U18 and Senior programs over the past 3 years. Vicki is currently pursuing her PhD that will be focused on identifying, measuring, and improving off-ice KPIs for linear skating speed.

In this episode, we talk about her PhD research on what off-ice drills and data correlate to on-ice speed.

You can reach out to Vicki @vickibendus on Instagram and Twitter

Full Transcript 

David: Vicki, welcome to the hockey strength podcast thank you so much for being here. 

Vicki: Thanks for having me, I’m excited.

David: So this is your first podcast. So you’re a podcast rookie.

Vicki: It is, so if I bumble along you’re going to have to be a bit forgiving on me.

David: I’m sure you’ll do great. I wanted to start with a little factoid I found when researching that you played on Team Canada Women’s gold medal winning team in 2012. Can you tell our audience where that tournament was?

Vicki: Sure, it was in Burlington, Vermont which I know is very close to home for you. And I’ve got nothing but great memories for Burlington, Vermont. It’s a special place and that was a special tournament and a special team to be a part of.

David: Yeah, I remember I was — I wasn’t that young — probably in middle school and I remember I was a little bit sad when you guys won. But it’s still pretty cool knowing I watched you play. 

Vicki: It was quite the game. I know your team was on the wrong end of it but I’m sure the entertainment value was pretty good. 

David: Did it go to overtime, or?

Vicki: Yeah, it did. I think it was 5-4. It was a crazy game.

David: That was at the University of Vermont where Justin Smith works. Fans of the show will know him as well.

So, after your playing career how did you get your start in strength and conditioning?

Vicki: So because I was an athlete for so long, I got a later start as a coach than most coaches do. It wasn’t until about age 24 that I started to take steps towards working as a strength and conditioning coach. 

And for me, after 2014 that’s when I was trying to decide whether I wanted to keep playing or whether I wanted to turn my focus and focus in on my career. I began my masters here at Brock University because I could continue to play and get my education.

It was pretty early on that year I decided that I wasn’t as passionate about hockey anymore. But as far as the career side of things I wasn’t sure. In my time as an athlete and in my undergrad the plan was to go to medical school. My first year at Mercyhurst I wrote my MCATs. Medical school was always something I wanted to do . But in the last couple years of hockey I realized that maybe I’m wasn’t that passionate about medicine.

So I did my master’s in kinesiology and it was in that top that I started to lean more towards strength and conditioning. I guess two things that spiraled me into that. The first was — as a part of my master’s thesis study I started doing strength and conditioning for the hockey teams as a part of the research. And probably the biggest one was I started to TA (teacher’s assistant). I’d never TA’d, never tutored before and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the teaching aspect.

Then I kind of made the connection, coaching is just teaching. That kind of sealed it for me. And I was always engaged in the training as an athlete. I know we’ve never met in person but I’d call myself undersized. I’m a solid 5’1 5’2 ish. So I was always engaged in training to give myself a competitive edge. I remember in university, that’s when strength and conditioning coaching were started to blog and things like that. And I remember reading Eric Cressey’s blog and just trying to pick up tidbits and make myself better. 

I actually joined strengthcoach.com when I was still an athlete. So I was engaged in the strength and conditioning community from an athlete’s perspective, not a coach’s perspective. Then as I was going through my master’s that’s when I started to get into the coaching side of things. I still wasn’t sure about it from a career perspective, but towards the end of my master’s I decided that I can see myself doing this. But I lacked coaching hours.

Coaching was the thesis. Which was limited. So I knew if this were something I wanted to do I needed time on the floor and to be around experienced coaches and mentors. And we’re very fortunate at Brock, we’re close to McMaster University and at the time — who’s my manager now — the head sports performance manager at McMaster, Steve Lidstone, I had met him as an athlete through hockey Canada. And he ran a summer internship at McMaster. 

So I went and did the summer internship at McMaster as a 24-25 year old, which is probably a lot older than most people are doing those types of internships. And I knew it was just something I needed to do. just kind of the way things worked after that, Steve became the elite sport coach at Brock University, I was already helping out with the hockey teams, and I got hired on here full time about four years ago now. And my role here is with the men’s and women’s hockey teams and the men’s and women’s soccer teams. 

David: What is it originally when you said that “oh I realized that coaching was just like teaching” what was it about teaching and caching that made you realize that this was a career path you might be interested in?

Vicki: Yeah. That’s interesting. I guess part of it is trying to hep in a TA setting — getting those light bulb moments with students and trying to find different ways to get them to that lightbulb moment. Because, you know, there are different ways, different students. And I enjoyed that challenge of trying to frame the same concept in different ways that might connect differently for one person that the other person.

David: I just want to jump off that. I think teaching and coaching are one in the same. And being a coach, you learn so much just talking to people. You don’t really know something unless you can teach it people. 

Vicki: Yeah, and something that I love about my current position — what Steve has done is he’s created a very expansive intern program at McMaster and he’s created the same model here. And we have almost 50 strength and conditioning interns with us here. And each team has a few interns and we run kind of a full curriculum for them. We’ve got them broken up now — the program has been running for a few years — into rookies, juniors and seniors. And each one of them has their own curriculum. We might be doing energy systems for the day, but each group is responsible for getting their own directed curriculum

The last couple years I’ve been in charge of the juniors curriculum. And one of the main aspects of that is coaching. And it’s been awesome. It’s one of my favorites parts of my position here at Brock is getting to run these education pieces. 

And it really forces you to organize your thoughts. I know for you, you write a lot, and that probably helps you organize your thoughts. It’s the same thing with teaching. That helps me organize my thoughts. 

David: 100% I thin that’s just good life learning advice. Any way that can push the way you think, make you clarify, make you readjust, interact with people who’re gonna make you think differently, that’s always a positive. 

Now a few years later, you’re working on your PhD. So why don’t you talk about it, first of all, why you decided to do that and how it came to be.

Vicki: Sure. With the Phd, there were 3 or 4 years in between when I finished my masters and my PhD. I’ve always enjoyed the research side and academia. I’ve always seem to do well in it. When I got to Brock the opportunity came up, because we’re staff members, we can to do either our masters or our PhD as an employee. That really gave the opportunity where I’m able to make it a living PhD, where I’m able to still work full-time, while I’m working here at Brock. You know, we’ve got access to athletes, to technology, to all of these people that is often very hard to come by for application based studies.

So the environment that I’m in has certainly allowed me to begin this process.

As far as the projects themselves. When I was narrowing down on the decision, I knew it was going to centered around the subject of skating speed, and being a bit more objective about identifying what the physical underpinnings of skating speed are.

One of the first things I started to do with the hockey team is measure on-ice speed. Because it never made sense to me as a player or coach why we value speed so much but we never measure it. When it came time to do the PhD I knew that was kind of the direction I wanted to go in.

And how we’re breaking down the PhD: I just finished my first year. The first year is mostly coursework and setting the stage for the studies themselves. We’re breaking it into a three-phase process where the overall goal is objectively identify what some of these KPI’s (key performance indictors) for on-ice skating speed are. Let’s identify these KPI’s and use these as assessment metrics that we track regularly and that we’re trying to improve.

So phase one, we’re taking all of these off-ice pieces. We’re looking at force plates to gather jumping profiles, we’re looking at off-ice acceleration and max velocity. We take all of these off-ice metrics and seeing how well we can predict a player’s skating time from just these off-ice pieces. And we know it’s going to be fast — there’s a physical side to it, there’s a technical side to it (the skill of skating). There’s also things like how were your skates sharpened? What the pitch of the blade? 

All these things go into what makes a player faster over 30 meters. With the model and the machine learning we’ve created, what we’re going to be able to do is two main things:

The first thing is the model is gonna explain a certain amount of variance of the skating times. So with the off-ice metrics, how much of the variance of skating times can we explain? And then we’ll have a reasonable idea of this much of the variance in skating times we can explain with just the physical pieces.

The second thing, is the way we’ve set up the model, is they act as sort of a filter. So we’ve got 60 metrics that go into the model. That’s a lot of metrics. And we know that a lot of them probably aren’t going to be that important, and there’s going to be some redundancy within those metrics. 

And the model filters out a lot of that noise, and only the metrics that remain in that model are the ones that are helping make an accurate prediction of that player’s 30 meter skating time. 

So coming out of phase one, we’ve got a better idea of how much of the skating times we can attribute to just the physical side of things and then we’ve started to identify what these off-ice KPI’s for skating speed could be. 

In phase two we’ve got these off-ice KPI’s. So let’s start tracking them, longitudinally with on-ice skating speed. Because if they’re truly representing the physical qualities that underpin skating speed, then we’d expect them to track in a similar manner. Whereas if we track at several time points across a year, when a player is skating their fastest, we’d expect these off-ice KPI’s to be performing close to their highest values as well.

And then the last piece of it, because at the end of the day I want to make my player’s faster, well let’s train to specifically improve these KPI’s. Let’s train diligently, let’s track them off the ice, and then let’s see if on-ice speed correspondingly.

I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Matt Jordan, he’s a strength and conditioning coach at one of the Canadian sports institutes in Calgary. And I love learning from him and he’s a line, “find what matters, measure what matters, change what matters.” 

That’s kind of how it ends up breaking down. Let’s find what these off-ice KPI’s are. Let’s measure them. And then let’s change them longitudinally in a way that’s gonna improve them and then let’s see if we make them faster on the ice.

David: That’s really great, there’s so much cool stuff to get in there. First off I just want to clarify, KPI is a key performance indicator. So basically just looking at what things correlate with high performance. 

You also mentioned machine learning and sounds like you’re using a lot of technology — so you’re taking all of these 60 variables and you’re running them through a code and it’s sorting out which ones are doing what. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Vicki: Yeah, essentially. I was fortunate this year to a take a really great statistics and modeling course. And before this anytime I heard machine learning I thought of like a factory and I just didn’t have a great idea of that ML was.

But statistics and modeling is basically taking data and trying to make a prediction. With the model that we’ve built, I run it through R — the course we took uses R as modeling — and it was probably one of the most enjoyable courses that I’ve taken probably my entire life. I didn’t think I would enjoy statistics as much as I do. I think most people when they approach statistics it probably makes them a little sick and it did for me at the start. But I’ve really enjoyed it. I realized how little I knew about stats and how little I still don’t know. And the professor who taught that class was awesome. He let me use my own data for the statistics and that’s where we started to built out these models. And he’s going to be a committee member on my PhD committee. So that’ll be great in making sure I’m doing the appropriate statistics and speaking to them appropriately too. Because the last thing I want to do is claim something or overstate something that the statistic don’t show. 

David: I just want to touch on this a little bit more. Basically every guest I’ve had one, there’s always like one skillset or one trait that they have that you wouldn’t expect a strength coach to have. And I think understanding statistics is another one of those things where learning just the framework to understand a little bit can really help you build out experiments like what you’re doing. 

Vicki: Yeah for sure. And it has allowed me to be a lot more dialed in when I’m reading other research studies. Whereas before I might have just glazed over the statistics section and assumed that was good. But now  I can read it much more intelligently and have a better idea of what they’re actually showing with their statistics.

And it’s interesting too because the statistics that usually run in the study don’t match what the conclusions say as far as alignment. And one of the things that I want to make sure I mention is that whatever statistics I run, I want to make sure that I speak to them, I want to make sure it’s accurate and appropriate. 

David: That’s brilliant, that’s awesome. So let’s get back to the KPI’s. I’m not sure how much of the research you’ve done but what are some of things you’re seeing as some of the key performance indicators of on-ice speed.

Vicki: Sure yeah. So we’re still kind of working through phase one. I’ve created the models with pilot data through my teams here at Brock so the models are pretty much done, but we’re looking at possibly adding some more teams just to grow the sample set. 

But remember the things happening in phase one with the models. Number one we’re going to find out how much that variance that we can explain with our off-ice metrics. And the second thing is determining what those off-ice KPI’s might be. 

So when I put in our jumping metrics with the force plates and our acceleration, sprinting, and max velocity data, the model’s able to explain 80% of the variance in the skating times. And that’s significant, that’s more than I anticipated, to be honest. 

But again that’s kind of empowering too to a strength coach, suggesting that we have the chance to impact of to 80% of a player’s 30 meter skating time.

And the second piece of it is the metrics that remained in the model: the ones that came out over and above the others were:

30 meter off-ice sprint. With our 30m sprint we’re getting both acceleration and max velocity.

And then we’re getting take-off velocity associated very much with our jump height.

So we’re getting off-ice speed is very important to on-ice speed. And we’re getting jump height our jump outputs, you’re getting not necessarily how you perform the jump — how fast you jump or your jump strategy — but just the fact that you’re able to produce a big impulse and produce this big output was very much predictive of a player’s ability to skate fast. 

And perhaps that helps simplify the process for us as coaches a bit because it suggests that if we can impact 80% or so of linear skating and it’s kind of these two metrics, sprinting and jumping, well those are very trainable qualities that we can make a big impact on.

David: I’m just curious why did you do 30m when I know a lot teams are doing 10m and flying 10’s. Did you also do those and find that 30m is more predictive or is that just what you did for sprinting?

Vicki: Yeah that’s a great question. For anytime we do 30 meters or over, we’re taking split times as well. So we’re talking a 10m sprints and the 20-30m which is our 10m fly. And both the 10m and the fly time within the 30m all went into the model. And so of those it was the 30m that came out which kind of represent both. That suggests that training both acceleration and max velocity off the ice have value, not just one or the other. 

David: That’s really interesting. I’m not making kids to 30m sprints I’m mostly doing 10’s and flying 10’s so maybe I should start adding some longer sprints into my programs.

Vicki: And that’s a great discussion to have. I have that discussion a lot on where the value on max velocity sprinting for hockey players life. I think if we’re talking about our field sport athletes — our soccer and rugby players — it’s very obvious why the value of max velocity sprints is there.

But for hockey players, it’s a conversation. And one, based not the data, the data suggest that yes, there is value there. But on the other side of it, if we’re looking at training — we’re looking at treating hockey players like athletes. Acceleration and max velocity to me are basic athletic abilities and so I want my athletes to have a basic comprehension of both. But at the same time what do we see when we see a really good sprinter run at max velocity? We see awesome stiffness, rhythm, and this quality to move as fast as you can but with this element of relaxation.

And, YOU know, when you ask somebody to do something as fast as they can what’s their normal strategy? They’re going to squeeze their fists and grip their teeth and they’re going to try really hard. And you know we love them for that, but that’s not a great strategy for trying to move at top speed. So it’s a great avenue to teach that ability.

David: Yeah I want to give a quote. It’s a popular maxim: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I say to to kids all the time sprinting. Another quote is — I don’t know who it’s from, I’m stealing it from someone, but it’s, what would this look like if it were easy? 

So before a set, try to imagine how this set would feel if it were easy. How would you feel? Would you be relaxed? Stiff? I think that question can really help and just reminding kids to chill out for second. 

Vicki: Yeah and it’s a skill and it takes time to train. And I find it especially with hockey players that it’s the squeeze your fist, grit your teeth, and I’m just going hard.

David: I’m curious to get your thoughts on this, the higher levels you get up, the kids work so hard. They’re such hard workers. And sometimes you have to be like, “hey, stop working so hard.” Like maybe you just need to chill out. 

Vicki: Yeah, it’s a double edged sword. Hard work and work ethic and the ability to push oneself is certainly a valuable quality when it comes to training. But that can’t be the only strategy and from a training standpoint we know if we’re talking about intensity and volume, it can’t be hard all the time. There’s need to be that balance and everything has context.

And for players it depends on the team but there’s always the kind of player who want to do too much at the expense of education and recovery. And a lot of that is an education piece. And I was that players. I would do the workout with the team and then I would go to the soccer field and run myself through conditioning so I can very much relate to that player and it’s an education piece and sometimes take time and have to meet them halfway too.

David: I think a lot of strength coaches were that player because we like it. We’re like yeah, let’s go, more workout stuff.

Vicki: Exactly.

David: Let’s move into the future. Now you’re entering in phase two,. So what are you working on the next few months with your research?

Vicki: Sure. At Brock right now we’re planning our return to sport and training for our teams. We’re in a different scenario than a lot fo university teams because we don’t have a rink on campus. And that limits our ability to have free reign of ice. We have an ice budget and a rink off campus we need to book around minor hockey and all these sorts of pieces.

So right now we just confirmed that we do have ice in the fall given that we don’t have games until January. And we’re just now starting to plan out what the off-ice components might be. 

With the women’s team for example, we’ve planned out after building up their on ice loads since a lot fo them haven’t been on the ice much we’re taking a few weeks to build up their load before getting to the on-ice speed aspects. 

But then we’ve targeted Wednesdays as our on-ice speed development day. And it depends on the week and then treating that time as a chance to train on ice speed for the sake of training speed to get faster. No different than when we’re working on max velocity we’re training with appropriate volumes and intensities and we’re trying to get the appropriate stimulus, we’re also working on the technical ability to get the speed side of it.

So we’ve got ice booked now until Christmas. Wednesdays will be our on ice speed development day where we’re building out those aspects. Timing regularly and then working on our speed as just a skill and a stimulus standpoint. 

David: I asked this question to Joel also. Just with not having games until January, how are you thinking about changing your programming?

Vicki: For the on ice speed I’ll get more data points than I would in a normal season. And then off the ice I think it’s a great opportunity because rarely do I have Brock athletes around for the summer. And we know offseason is an important time when you wanna really be developing these qualities and its spent by themselves at a gym.

This is affording me the opportunity to treat Sept-Dec as another offseason and we’re able to hammer these strength and speed quality when we normally wouldn’t be able to because we have such a high practice load and game load and all of these pieces. I’m excited to get to program in a manner that’s all about development.

David: Weird time, of course. But an opportunity to look at some of these blessing’s in disguise. Last topic I want to touch on is to mention that you’ve been looking at jump and sprint times for several months. What have you seen with that data? We kind of touched on it as it relates to on ice speed but any other thoughts on that?

Vicki: From a monitoring standpoint, we’ve been doing weekly sprints and countermovement jumps. And just in the past year and a half or so we got a Hawkins Dynamics force plate set. And as we spoke about we’ve been using that for our performance profiling for the PhD. But. From a monitoring standpoint a set of force plates is powerful tool if we’re looking at readiness and those types of pieces.

And we were using a jump mat before. And going from a jump mat to a set of force plates is like going from a flip phone where you can call and text where you have jump height to a set of force plates where you have every metric imaginable. 

So really over the past — the first year we had them — my approach was as a learn and observer. I wanted to take the time to understand the metrics, the math, the physics behind the metrics. And I think I was emailing the Hawkins Dynamics guys weekly and they were really great about answering my questions.

And I felt like I really needed to do that to use these force plates appropriately. 

The second part is, if we’re using something for a monitoring tool, we’re trying to detect something that’s not normal. And you can’t detect what’s not normal until you know what is normal. Something I’ve been doing with the stats and data is determining the normal variation for these metrics. Because some metrics have a heck of a lot of variation and it’s hard to pick up what’s meaningful out of that. And some stay flatline and barely change. So those ones might be better for more our performance metrics. So if they change there might be more underlying physiological reason for the change. Then there’s this kind of middle ground where it’s sensitive enough to pick up the neuromuscular fatigue that we’re trying to. So the first year was all about that, getting much better understanding behind the math and the physics, and then discovering the normal variation. 

Which ones are appropriate for monitoring? Performance? Which ones are we going to use moving forward?

David: What’s an example of a metric that you’ve found particularly useful?

Vicki: A metric like takeoff velocity for example has really low day to day variation so it fits really well for a performance metric. Because if we see a change is takeoff velocity it means that the athlete actually did get stronger, the athlete did get more powerful and it’s not just a change in readiness..

If we’re talking about readiness — and this goes along with a lot of the studies that have used force plates as monitoring — some of our eccentric type metrics are breaking metrics. And those kind of suggest or give us insight into our jump strategy. So maybe the athlete will change how they’re eccentrically loading. Maybe they’re doing it slower and still able to propel upwards and accomplish the same jump height. So that’s something I’d use moving forwards as one of our monitoring-type metrics.

David: That’s interesting so if you see a player that has a jump a slower eccentric and then they’re slower running, maybe, that might be something to look into. What if we look at their jump is that what you mean there?

Vicki: So it’s a flag. If I see the data coming in and that day they’re breaking that impulse is lower, they’re going slower or maybe the breaking phase is longer, that’s an indication that there’s some fatigue there. And if we’re looking at 10m sprints, that’s one metric. Either they’re slower, average, or faster. And it’s interesting too because from a. 10m sprint standpoint it’s easy to tell when they’re fatigued. Not because the time’s slower but because you watch them and the full effort isn’t there.

With any of this monitoring, if it’s not a full effort jump or sprint that’s not going to be a valid data point. You know how it feels when you have heavy legs.. Just mentally you might hold back. And that’s probably a conversation, “hey maybe your legs are bit tired but I just need you to have this full effort, and if your time’s slow there’s no problem at all.” And sometimes they surprise themselves because often the time will fall in with average.

David: Vicki, I don’t know you super well but one thing I can tell that you’re super good at that I think is important to lesson for strength coaches is: lots of times we can track our data with force plates and everything but if you’re not using it to make any kind of change or at least to learn, then there’s not really a point. 

You’re looking at every metric on the force plate trying to learn what it means what it goes into and I think that’s a good lesson for strength coaches. Look at the data you have and think, “Do I use this? Do I need to use this? Is there a way this can help make my athletes’ better.” 

Vicki: It’s so important to tease out with all the information you’re getting what’s going to be important because we have so much access to so many metrics and if we’re talking about data for monitoring, I’m not a scientist in a lab. I’m a coach and these are athletes and these are their numbers. I have context for every number that I see and that allows me to have a much better understanding of why I’m seeing what I”m seeing. 

Also as a coach I can’t over rely on data. I’m not jumping and sprinting every day. I need to rely on my intuition. And the thing with monitoring as a coach is, it’ll help build your intuition. Every day before my athletes come in I have a prediction for the state of readiness based on their readiness or their schedule and what’s been going on as students, athletes, human beings. 

And I try to come in and predict what their state of readiness is going to be. Are they going to be fresh and ready to go, are they going to be normal or are they going to be fatigued that day?

Once we have them in and warming up I try to see if that data aligns with my prediction. Did I expect them to come in fresh that day and they were? Okay so my prediction was correct. Or maybe it wasn’t. And vice versa. Well, what happened there? Why was my prediction wrong? Did they have a team party the night before that I didn’t know about and that’s why they’re performing low? 

The data are really important and valuable but at the same time as a coach you have to give context to everything and understand why you might be seeing what you’re seeing. 

David: That was very well said. It’s a great example of — it’s kinda cliché but I’m gonna say it anyway — it’s not just the art or the science but it’s both. That’s why S&C catches won’t get replaced by robots because we have the human element.

Vicki: I hope not.

David: Vicki this has been awesome I have a ton of notes I need to reread. Where can people say hello to you on the socials?

Vicki: Twitter and Instagram are both my name @VickiBendus and anyone can feel free to reach out by email at vickibendus@gmail.com. One of the things with the PhD I’ve been working on is the conversations with coaches that it has spurred. I don’t by any means have all the answers or plan on having the answers but I love being able to engage with other coaches and bounce ideas off them and see what they’re seeing. 

They might be seeing the same things or different things. Just because there’s something I’m seeing doesn’t mean it’s something everybody seems. That’s where the learning opportunities are.

David: Absolutely and it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning where learning is about challenging and clarifying your thinking.

Vicki: Absolutely.

David: All right, Vicki. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You nailed it for your first podcast. So thank you once again.

Vicki: Thank you so much I really do appreciate that. All right Vicki, we will talk soon.