Why Off-Ice Skill Development?

“Hockey is played on the ice and we train for it on the ice.”

This is old-school thinking which remains reasonably true today, but it is time that we rethink this belief…

There is no logic to taking our methods for preparing to play the game of hockey 100% off-ice. In this day and age, however, both off-ice athleticism development and off-ice skill development have a role to play. Off-ice athleticism is fairly intuitive and well understood, but what drives this shift to an increasing role of off-ice skill development training? The answer is economics (in this case the economics means cost savings for essentially equivalent training). The video below fleshes out the reasons why off-ice can offer cost savings to the hockey training consumer: