The 2022 hockey season is back to being active, whether you are just starting your hockey journey or at the elite level, it’s all about taking your hockey skills to the next level: your physical abilities, your understanding of plays and in-game tactics, plus your mental power to improve your overall player development to become a complete player and even better teammate.

It is said everyday: sports is 50% physical + 50% mental.

We all know year-round training is a lot to ask any athlete. But if players can balance commitment and manage their training time between competitive seasons, between changes in weather, or between upper advancement in leagues and age groups, they are on the path to achieve that 50/50 balance.

Over the last few decades, the athletic training model has added many new alternatives. Since sports started, players have always had the option to work on the physical abilities. For cardio: running, cycling, swimming, jumping rope. For strength: free weights, machines, resistant bands, body exercises (pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups). More recently strength coaches, personal trainers, and families have turned to AI software, mobile apps, smart watches, and other data-driven solutions to take physical training to new levels.

As sports continue to evolve and take advantage of advances in science, research, and distribution of data – hockey is one of the few sports that has already embraced the need for players to develop the multiple skill sets of physical, strategical, and just as important: mental. Hockey is so much behind this forward-thinking of “training the brain”, the mental side of development, it even coined a term to help promote it: Hockey Sense. 

The Hockey IntelliGym was designed and developed to be an important off-ice training partner:  it works around your schedule, you train at your own pace, you can train all year long or in shorter blocks of time, each session is only 30 minutes, plus training is anywhere you have your laptop. 100’s of customized drills and mental exercises help increase and improve all-important Hockey Sense.

IntelliGym’s training software has been scientifically researched and proven by NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the University of Delaware’s Kinesiology Dept and many other leading institutions. In 2021, The International Journal of Exercise Science published another paper on the importance of IntelliGym and it’s benefits in reducing hockey injuries and avoiding unanticipated hits.

Adding the Hockey IntelliGym to your 2022 training schedule will help any player achieve total training balance that reaches the goal of complete player development: increased on-ice awareness, improved anticipation, better position, faster reactions and superior spatial vision.