PODCAST – On Ice Speed Testing with Joel Jackson

Joel Jackson and David Rosales – August 05, 2020

In episode #91 of the Hockey Strength Podcast, Joel Jackson joins the show. Joel is the strength and conditioning coach at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta and the co-founder of Competitive Thread, a company that provides on-ice speed testing technology.

In this episode, we discuss:

– Programming strategies for a cancelled season (and lots of uncertainty)

– The value of on-ice speed testing

– Strategies for on-ice speed testing with basic technology.

Chiu and Barnes Fitness-Fatigue Model 

David: Joel, welcome to the Hockey Strength Podcast

Joel: Very good, very good. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity and all the good stuff you’re doing with the website and really rejuvenating it.

David: Thank you, I appreciate that. I want to start off with — I tend to start off topic, we’re going to start off topic today. Tell me the first album that got you into pop-punk/emo music.

Joel: Oh, it would have to be blink-182 Dude Ranch. The album with Dammit on it. That was the one, the one that made me fall in love with that genre of music for sure.

David: How did it end up in your hands. I’m sure at that time it was a physical CD.

Joel: Yeah, that was a purchase. I — this might be a little bit before your time, but I’m sure some people listening will remember it… it was the Columbia House. It was like a record club where you could get 12 or 14 CDs free if you signed up for the year or something like that. So everybody convinced their parents to let them to do it and you could go on and it was like this posted stamp. And that’s how Dude Ranch came to my house.

David: Very nice, okay: Favorite song off Dude Ranch besides Dammit, Josie, and Pathetic, anything that’s not a single.

Joel: Apple Shampoo

David: Apple Shampoo. That’s a good one. I’m a big fan of Waggy. That’s a super slept on blink song.

Joel: Yeah, honestly that whole album… it’s a front-to-backer. There are a lot of good options on there.

David: Yeah, it’s a gritty album, right before they started to get more polished and stuff. Who else are some of your other favorite bands in the genre?

Joel: I’d have to go with NOFX, Rancid, Millencolin, and then to put in a couple of newer ones, the Story So Far, and The Menzingers 

David: Old school pop-punk, love that. Enough indulging my music tastes, but I’m sure a lot of people in hockey are fans of the genre. I remember I played NHL Hits 2002 on my Playstation 2 and the intro song was Rollin’ by Limp Bizkit and that was the moment I was like, “Yes, this is my genre of music.”

All right, moving on. Why don’t you start by sharing the story of the first weight room you ever built.

Joel: I’m in Edmonton, Alberta right now and I’ve been here for eight years but I’m originally from a town in Manitoba called Snow Lake. I’m sure there are few Canadian listeners here… or people who know where Winnipeg is. Snow Lake is a 7.5 hour drive north of Winnipeg. So I’m way up in the middle of the bush, it’s a town of about 1000 people. 

And in terms of a weight room… When I was growing up around bantam midget age I started to train and workout and we didn’t have much. So what we ended up doing is there was an empty unused classroom at the school that we were allowed to start training training in. So what we decided to do was grab stuff from home that our dads weren’t using anymore and put the call out into the community to donate equipment they weren’t using. 

I wish I had more pictures of this place but it was all old, Weider weight, small diameter bars… it was pretty gritty. But we had enough in there to make it work.

One of my favorite memories from it is we didn’t have anything to squat with, it was just benches and dumbbells and barbells, so my dad ended up making us a squat rack out of just 2 by 6’s and bolted it into the ground and onto the wall.

Kind of like we were talking about before, the homemade gym equipment has really caught on the last few months with the shutdown but I have feeling that might have been one of the original homemade squat racks. And, it served its purpose for sure. We definitely used it a lot and did a lot in that small space to make it usable to us.

They ended up getting some government grants to spice it up. They painted it and put some rubber flooring in and made it more of an acceptable gym space for people in the public to use. 

One of my biggest claims to fame is that the teacher that got that grant and putting it together named it after me. So it’s the Joel Jackson Community Weight Room. So if we ever had any icebreaker things when I was teaching classes and you have to the two truth and a lie I’d usually throw that one in there.

David: I love that and the reason I wanted to start with that story is because that’s going to be a theme of this episode and probably of our lives as strength coaches for the next hockey season, and that theme is: Making it work. Why don’t you explain what’s going on in your situation up in Alberta right now.

Joel: Yeah we’re in a similar situation as the rest but it took a turn for the worse. About two months ago the two teams that I take care of — the pandas are the female team and the golden bears are the male team — they play in the Canada West Conference of U sports, which is the university athletics conference. Canada West announced that they were going to condense the season and have ti starting no sooner than January 1, 2021.

After that, our athletic director made the decision to shut down all team sports including hockey, soccer, football, et cetera. Obviously that was a tough decision and now we’re in kind of a tricky situation where the provincial government had to cut funding to the major institutions. I won’t go too much into that, but long story short nobody’s in too good of financial shape right now. 

Tough decisions, obviously quite hard on a lot of the athletes. But moving forward we just have to look at it as an opportunity to get the athletes better, get the hockey players better on the ice and off the ice. That’s how it stands right now in terms of the situation.

David: As strength coaches, there’s so much to think about with this. Of course, we’re going to have to throw our programming plan out the window and start from scratch. But we’re also going to have to check with our athletes, figure out who’s coming into a gym, who has access to what equipment. So, what’s the first thing you’re taking action on, given this news, to help out?

Joel: One of the biggest things for me during this shutdown was to keep a constant line of communication with all my athletes and making sure their programs were individualized based on what they do have available to them. And I’m still continuing to have to do that. 

As it looks right now, most courses will be online but there will still be lots of in-person stuff in smaller cohorts for classes that have like labs and that stuff. So I think most if not all the athletes will still be here training full-time by the fall.

I think the biggest thing currently that I’m trying to do right now is communicate with the coaching staff for both teams and just try to get them aware of where my mindset is in terms how I’m planning and structuring the works and trying to do my best to help the practices compliment — or have them compliment each other.

David: A clarification question: Will the teams still be practicing on the ice?

Joel: Yes. As far as we know right now with the restrictions in place currently, and as we all know things can change pretty quickly in terms of if cases shoot up or anything like that. But right now in our gym space we’re allowed to have 50 people. It’s 10,000 square foot space so it’s a pretty large space. And it’s the same for on the ice.

As of right now ice sheets are opening up and players are getting on the ice for sessions and things like that.

So, for practices it’s looking like things will hopefully be status quo, I’m not going to see it’s going to be 100% normal but they should be able to run a pretty good, structured practice. 

David: How are you thinking about your programming? Are you even thinking about it months ahead? Are you taking it month by month?

Joel: The biggest thing right now is that I’m talking to the coaches and just trying to make sure that they understand that with there being no games or competition that that can’t mean that athletes just get pushed as hard as possible every single day.

And by no means do I think our coaches will just start doing that but I’m just trying to get a plan in place to look at their microcycle or their week and just trying to get them to follow a pretty consistent mesocycle-focus too, just kind of a 4-week phase.

So what I’ve pitched to them is kind of a high-low model, mirroring a lot of the periodization ideas from track and field there. What I’d like to see, ideally, moving forward come the fall is that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday be their hard days, their push days. So, being on the ice all three of those days with a fairly high intensity practice with a higher volume push towards the end of the week, and have their lifts on those days as well. Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays they wouldn’t be in the weight room and if they are on the ice it was be lower intensity, skill-focused work.

Obviously that’s not something that’s written in stone especially because I think there will be some opportunities to have some competition, even if not in the immediate future or the fall. But I think come January 1 there will be other universities in the Edmonton area they could potentially set up exhibition games with. Same thing on the female side

So I’m pitching that to them: Keep the high days high, and the low days low. That way you’re not just spreading it out throughout the week and flatlining the training stimulus.

That’s something that I’ve pitched before during normal times when we have bye-weeks and the coaches seemed to grasp it pretty well so I think I have a good foothold there already.

In terms of the mesocycle or a 4-week phase, I’m just trying to go with the build-build-crash-recover model. So let’s say they have four ice sessions in week one and two gym sessions. Week two bump it up to five ice sessions and three or four gym sessions. Week three three gyms sessions and then that fourth week, that deload week, just kind of dropping things down, maybe 2 ice sessions, 1 team builder and 1 to 2 gym sessions and let them realize benefits of their training and then start them back up on the next four week phase.

David: I want to underscore a couple of things there. Number one, I think it’s really smart that you’re only moving four week blocks. We did expect to be here in July back in May, let alone February, so I think trying to plan out a 16-week phase is…. I don’t know, let me know how it goes but I can’t imagine you’re going to get past week 7 or 8 before things change. 

Joel: I totally agree. And typically the way I’m programming, normally I’m just pretty strictly planning the next four weeks ahead. That gives me some freedom and wiggle rom to adjust things as they need. But I think during the fall and winter semesters that coaches looking at their practice plans from a 4-week standpoint could be a really beneficial strategy for them in terms of realizing some benefits out of the training.

And the other thing I’m trying implement in these trainings is some focused one-ice conditioning Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as well. And the idea there would be to have some structured speed-focused training earlier in the week. Middle fo the week would be focused on more repeated sprints with shorter amounts of rest and then having more of an aerobic focus on that last day of conditioning so they can have that high volume day and going into the weekend with two days off to recover from it.

I’ve talked to other strength coaches about this before and hockey coaches as well and what I try to follow with that microcycle — the structure of a week — is that fit-fatigue model. And I’m sure a lot of coaches have heard of it or read about it before. There’s actually a researcher here on our university that wrote a very good article about it that outlines it quite well in terms of a typical microcycle structure and how you should periodize your power, strength, and high-volume days. 

David: I actually don’t know the fit-fatigue model, so could you elaborate a bit more on that?

Joel: Basically it’s a restructuring of the GAS model — the general adaptation syndrome. For everything you do there’s a fitness aftereffect and a fatigue aftereffect. A day where I was really focused on speed and power, that type of day would have a large fitness effect, and there would be a large fatigue effect immediately but it would dissipate pretty quickly. Right, so it’s the idea that a power day would be better suited earlier in the week so they can bounce back. Because if that was Monday they’d be ready to go for their Wednesday. 

In many ways Anthony Donskov’s new book, The Gain, Go, Grow, follows this pretty much to a tee in terms of the fit-fatigue model where he has the high-volume day at the end of the week. That’s the kind of thing where he goes Gain with the strength day, Go with power, and Grow with that volume that follows suit as well. 

With the higher volume work, you’re looking at the same thing. The fatigue aftereffects of that don’t dissipate as quickly and potentially negatively affect proceeding training sessions. So it’s best to put that work at the end of a microcylce where you know you do have up to 72 hours of recovery before you get after it again.

That’s a very brief description of it. Again, if you to put that in the show notes I can definitely send you that article and anybody that hasn’t dug into it before can take a look but it is very good. It’s something myself and a few other coaches here teach a fourth year resistance training class at the university and it’s one of the cornerstone pieces of material that we cover on planning and organization of training. And it’s something we’ve made essential in a lot of the things that we do here.

David: Let’s definitely put that in the show notes. I want to bookmark this so I don’t forget that you teach strength and conditioning. That’s cool and I don’t want to forget it.

But I want to underscore is how much you’re communicating with your on-ice coaching staff. I think this is super important, especially right now when kids haven’t been on the ice and coaches might be prone to make up for lost time and skate them really hard, when really we need to ease into things.

Joel: That’s one thing I’m really fortunate for here is that I have an excellent relationship with the coaching staffs on female and the male team and they’re both amazing at their jobs as well. Howie Draper is the coach of the Pandas team and he’s the only coach the program has ever had. He was the first coach when the program came to be and he’s still going. 

That’s not to say he’s an old man or anything. People listening will probably think I’m making him seem old. But he does a lot of coaching with the Canadian national team programs on the female side and he has a wealth of experience and is always communicating to me about how the structure of practices should look at different times in the year whether we have these bye-weeks or different times during Christmas breaks. So he’s kind of in my ear about how his week’s going to structured.

On the male side, Ian Herbers is the head coach and he, again, a ton of experience… he worked with the Oilers for three seasons and he was technically on a leave so he came back to the Golden Bears two years ago. So two guys that are very very well-suited for those roles. So I’m definitely blessed to have those relationships with two great coaches.

David: Yeah, that relationship is super important and I’m wondering how that strong relationship formed a lot of your interests in doing on-ice speed testing. So why don’t you talk about how that stared.

Joel: With the on-ice speed testing… I think of one of the biggest things that has always stuck with me is how they DON’T have any of it at the NHL combine. That’s something that always, still, flabbergasts me a little bit.

The biggest thing with the on-ice speed testing is I have a side company that I’m part-owner of that we purchased a bunch of on-ice testing equipment seven or eight years ago now. And that’s how I really gained an interest in it, is kind of through using it as a business opportunity.

I would definitely have a bit of a biased opinion on that side. But seeing that and going out and testing teams is where I really started seeing the value in it. Just to give you an example of we use it here at the U of A…

Last year we had one day that was kind of their off-ice testing and the second day was their on-ice testing to start their training camp. And what I do when I analyzed those scores is a used Zedd scores. What that allows me to do is weight different tests differently. So I can look at, say their vertical jump, so I want this to be 10% of their fitness score, their on-ice sprint is going to be 15% of their overall score and I’m just slotting that out until it gets so 100% so get a total score for every player and then rank them in terms of where they’re falling within their team and position and so on.

When you add the on-ice component into that and you rank the players, there are guys that creep up towards the top that you’d never expect to be there. And that’s the thing if you solely looked at your off-ice fitness testing scores they’d be somewhere near the bottom. That really lets it stand out how quickly these guys are on the ice, how agile they are on the ice and that’s really the most important thing, right? Well the most important thing is how many pucks they can put into the back of the net but that on-ice comments is huge. 

So you really see different players that you wouldn’t expect just from what you know about them and their off-ice conditioning habits and their profile that you wouldn’t expect them to come in towards to the top. But when you add that on-ice comment in there it really sheds some new light on it.

David: How do you use that to help them improve? I’m going to use a hypothetical example. Say you have a player who has a really high vertical jump, he’s got a 39” vertical jump and he’s running a fast 10yd sprint off the ice, but he’s not that fast on the ice. What does that say to you and what do you and the coaching staff do with that information?

Joel: Yeah that’s a question that I’ve often thought about and I can’t remember where I heard him say this. I think it was at the NSCA Hockey Conference but Kevin Neeld did a presentation on this and he talked about exactly this. Say you have a guy that has a great deal of power of the ice, but he’s fallen into the middle of the pack in the on-ice testing. That’s probably telling you that kid or athlete needs to have a conversation with the skating coach because there’s probably something in their mechanics that’s holding them back.

And then if you flipped it, and say you have a guy who’s flirting with the top in terms of his speed on the ice but his power numbers are pretty low in terms of the rest of them then it’s a good example of a good opportunity to develop some power off the ice with that athlete and it’ll most likely translate to inching that on-ice speed up higher closer to the top. 

David: That’s why I think it’s so important because it help a player identify what their limiting factor is in their speed.

Joel: Definitely. And we talked about this little before we came on.. The kind fo thing is that a lot of players, with the Golden Bears, a lot of them are coming off of 4-5 OHL careers, some of them are drafted in the NHL, they’re all very good hockey players but a very small percentage of them have been test on the ice in terms of their speed. 

And one thing that will often come up is that coaches have a perspective of a player and they’ll think, “Yeah this guy’s slow, he needs to get faster on the ice.” And then you’ll get him out there with the lights, and you’ll find he’s not as slow as you thought. He might look a little slow, he might not look like the greatest skater but you need to put some numbers behind these sprints and their on-ice performance in order to make a sound, well-informed decision on it in terms of plans of action and what you can do to improve that player.

David: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. I want to give a shoutout to your company Competitive Thread. Maybe at some point if you to write an article, or I can help you write an article if you want to learn more. But I want to give people some ideas to time speed without these fancy technologies. If you Browers you could probably take those on the ice and do your speed tests. What low-budget suggestions would you have coaches who want to start testing their athletes on the ice.

Joel: Yeah, 100%. The Browers are awesome and that’s what we use in the gym off the ice, and if you have those, go for it. 

Hand timing still has value. And it’s not going to be the most reliable tool, but it’s somewhere to start. And you know on the ice, off the ice, just give numbers to the athletes. If anything, it’ll just increase engagement, increase motivation, and that’s huge. We know that.

And the thing with the on-ice testing is it can be huge from a return to play standpoint as well. If we these them and get these numbers at the start of the season and you know we come out with all these fancy lights and stuff like that. But, if we have a guy who’s injured and he’s coming back, you know it’s obviously not going to be a concern this year. But, if you want to see how close he is to his baseline it’s fine to just bring the Browers out onto the ice and just have that one player run through a couple sprints just to see where he’s out. 

It’s pretty easy to check in with. You know, all you need is a measuring tape and those timing lights, or you know, a stopwatch if you don’t have the Browers. 

But I think one fo the biggest things is to just figure out what you can do and just start there. Start collecting some data and it’ll just really help your decision making process.

David: Yeah I want to give a few suggestions with the stopwatches. I do a lot of remote training and so kids have to time themselves. And that only really works if — you’re not going to be able to do a 10 yard sprint on or off the ice because its just not going to be as precise, or is it accurate. I don’t know, my high school chemistry teacher would be mad at me right now. One of those two. So make the test a little bit longer.

Maybe you should go goal line to blue line then back to goal line instead of just to blue line because the longer distance will make it a bit more accurate. Any other suggestions along that line if you’re just going off of the stopwatch?

Joel: I think you hit the nail on the head there David. Just try to make it so it will complement the validity and the accuracy of it. So something super short probably won’t work that well but just a simple stop-start could be an excellent start. And that’s kind of the on-ice combine that we do with these players is we do:

• Start away sprints backwards and forwards for distance
• Stop – Start for a 12 meter distance
• Transition agility where they start go up 12 meters to a top cone, pivot and goes back to a bottom cone, come up stop and sprint back through so it’s giving them an idea of their transition form backwards to forwards skating. Obviously that’s something that’s going to be more important for a defensemen. 
• Repeated-sprints test. Seven 15-meter sprints every 15 seconds. This one my supervisor and I for my master’s degree will publish a paper on that in the next mont or so.

We changed this from the RIOT test, which absolutely terrible, you’re going to have guys puking over the bench. It’s both physically and mentally exhausting for the athlete and we found that no more matter how you explained it, there were pacing strategies that would happen. If that’s happening, that data’s not going to tell you much. A goal line to blue we’ve found the total time is probably the best indictor of their repeated sprint ability.

Again, just like anything, the more we do it and the more data we collect on it the better in will help our decisions.

David: How often do you test players on the ice. And this coming do you plan on doing more of it since you won’t have competition?

Joel: Yeah so the plan is to do the initial tests right off the start of… I don’t even know if we can really call it training camp this year. But either way when they come in the plan is to do a full fitness test on and off the ice. 

And then my plan is, every four weeks in that mesocycle I was talking about, in the deload week I want to test both teams int he 30m sprint on the ice every fourth week. We have a bit of a unique opportunity here to check in with them more often. I know Mike Boyle is a huge proponent of the timed sprints, and he’s talked about how if you can get on the ice with them that’s great too. With me logistically that won’t work, so every fourth week will work a little bit better. The reason for that is, where we are at the U of A the sports performance center is on our south campus and the rink and dressing rooms are on north campus and they’re not really that far apart. We have the transit system that runs and they’re only a stop away. But no matter how you look at it, it’s still inconvenient. It would be nice if the trainer center were right with the rink, but obviously that’s not really the reality. 

So, in terms of getting on the ice logistically it can be a bit challenge, but I’m going to do my best to make it work once a month.

And then, in a normal season, what we do is a big pre and post season test. Definitely for the off-ice stuff, and we recently started implementing the full on-ice testing battery. But definitely testing on the ice one a month moving forward.

David: Yeah I think you hit it perfectly. If logistically you can test once a week you’re only going to get more data points and then it can be training stimulus with the athletes getting a full-speed sprint in. But yes, on the ice logistically it becomes more difficult for sure.

Joel: Yeah, and I’d imagine most coaches with the coaching staffs they’re dealing with.. coaches are going to hold that ice time close to their chest. And it’s completely understanding. If you’re working with minor hockey team, ice team is expensive. You’re looking at upwards of $200 an hour. And it’s obviously going to be different at universities when you have your own facility but that’s still the coach’s time, and you definitely need to convince them of the value of it.

David: And if you’re in the private sector — I have my clients and I make them do it every now and then on the ice. Just make them going to stick and puck and spend six bucks or whatever. And there will be kids playing pick up games and they’ll be like who’s this loser timing his sprints, but if you want to get better, those are the kinds of things you have to do.

Joel: Definitely, definitely. Or even get on an ODR. You might have some wind resistance but you can make it work.

David: Yeah, that would be fun too. I want to end with a little offhand comment that you teach strength and conditions at the University of Alberta? 

Joel: Yeah, it’s unfortunate that I won’t be this semester because my contract has changed with COVID stuff and I’ve gotten cut back. But, for the last four years, I’ve taught in some capacity. The last two semesters it was myself and two coaches and we took it on together and we lectured for 1/3 of the semester and we each had an assignment we put out to the class. But yeah, it’s been a good experience and just in terms of having to check-in and pick up some of the more basic stuffy might have forgotten but haven’t looked at in a while. The lecturing was by far my favorite, I really enjoyed it. Marking assignments I could go without. But it was a good experience and moving forward the coaches and I will be on in a guest lecture capacity which is nice for me and one of the benefits of being at a university is I get to guest lecture in other 100 level 200 level courses in the kinesiology department.

David: You don’t truly know something unless you can teach it so I’m sure that’s been a cool experience.

Joel: Definitely.

David: Thanks a lot for doing this Joel. Maybe another podcast or article about Competitive Thread. Maybe this is the year coaches can add more on-ice speed test to your program if you’re not going to be playing games like you are. 

Joel: Yeah, 100% David. I’d love to continue to contribute to the site and help you with the good thing you’ve got going on here, so.

David: Thanks. Once again I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, and we’ll have to geek out about emo music another time.

Joel: Thanks again David and keep up the good work.