The Missing Piece
Structured off-ice development for the hours a player trains without a coach.
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Age-specific
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Difficulty levels
on core drills
on core drills
Structured off-ice development for the hours a player trains without a coach.
Most players already train at home. They shoot in the driveway, stickhandle in the basement, and mess about in the garage after dinner. The time is not the problem — it already exists, and most kids are willing to spend it.
What that time lacks is direction. There is no coach in the garage, no plan for the session, and no way to tell whether tonight's hour built anything. So it defaults to whatever feels productive, which usually means shooting: the same shot, from the same spot, at the same target, until boredom or dinner intervenes.
The hours are already being spent. The only question is what they are building.
Underneath most home training sits a single assumption: that volume alone is the answer, and a player who takes enough shots in the driveway will eventually become elite. It is an appealing idea. It rewards effort, it is easy to measure, and it asks nothing of anyone but the kid.
The research on skill acquisition does not support it.
Volume still matters, and it grows with age: from about 20 shots a day at U7 to over 100 at U18. But every shot has a target, the shot types are mixed, and they are spread across short blocks through the week rather than piled into one session.
That is the gap this program fills. Not more time — better use of the time a player is already giving.
A structured 24-week off-ice program, written separately for each age band, that a player follows on their own phone. Every day is laid out drill by drill, with the coaching cues, the timers and the reasoning built in. It runs in a browser, works with no internet, and needs little more than a stick, pucks, a stickhandling ball and something to shoot at.
Many home training plans repeat the same session for months. Here, the core drills in every program carry four difficulty levels that a player earns by doing the work — six completions at a level unlock the next one. A level changes what the drill asks for, not just the numbers.
The 24 weeks are shaped into four six-week blocks — Base, Build, Sharpen, Maintain — that shift the emphasis and the volume as the season goes on. The program builds through the autumn, sharpens toward playoffs, and eases when the game schedule is heaviest, rather than grinding at one intensity all year.
Seven benchmarks are tested in weeks 1 and 3, then every three weeks to week 24, in identical conditions. Ticking off drills tells you the work was done. These tell you whether it worked, which is the question a player and a parent actually want answered.
“Off-ice training” has quietly become a synonym for shooting practice. But there is far more a player can build at home — and shooting is only one strand of it.
Stride length and acceleration rely on single-leg strength, hip power and lateral push. Most training loads the body front-to-back; we train the sideways plane skating uses.
A nervous-system quality, trained fresh with full recovery — not by adding conditioning. From U11 up, speed work is separated from fatigue work.
Stopping and changing direction are a big part of game speed, and easy to leave out of training. Controlled deceleration is trained explicitly, as part of the landing and movement work shown to reduce knee injuries.
Third-period effectiveness depends on how well a player recovers between shifts. Built with repeated short, hard efforts and easy recovery, like real shifts, rather than long, slow runs: two sessions a week from U9, three at U15 and U18, and chase games at U7.
Nordic hamstring and Copenhagen groin exercises have some of the strongest injury-prevention evidence in sport, and groin strains are among hockey's most common injuries. Standard from U13 up, with landing and balance work throughout and neck strengthening from U15.
A stickhandling block every training day that grows with the player: from keeping the puck in front and going around a cone at U7, to a line of cones on both sides, the weak side, tight space and game-speed changes of direction. Plus stickhandling under pressure, puck protection, and structured video study with a specific job attached — not passive watching.
On the ice, a player has a coach. At a skills session, a specialist. In the gym with a team, a trainer. At home — in the hours that make up the bulk of their training time — they have a stick and their own judgement. It means the most available hours in a young player's week are also the least directed.
The gap is not effort. Players will happily spend an hour in the garage. The gap is that nobody has told them what that hour should contain.
Injury risk in young athletes rises around peak height velocity, the fastest point of the growth spurt. Bones can lengthen faster than muscles and tendons adapt, coordination can temporarily dip, and growth-related conditions at the knee and heel become more common. In most programs this is invisible: the plan does not change, so load stays high exactly when it should ease.
Our program tracks height monthly. When a player grows 0.6 cm or more a month (about 7 cm a year, the rate research links to more injuries), the app tells the player and the parent plainly — jumps and sprints are cut to about two-thirds, or to about half above 1 cm a month, with full rest, strength and skill work carry on, and knee or heel pain means stop and tell an adult. It also tells the player that feeling slower right now is normal and temporary, which is something a thirteen-year-old genuinely needs to hear.
Leaderboards. Rankings. Fragile.
Personal bests. Week-over-week progress.
Every metric is self-referential — personal bests, accuracy trends, streaks and week-over-week comparison against the player's own previous week. There are no leaderboards, no team rankings, and no way to see another player's numbers.
That is deliberate on two grounds. Research on motivation in young athletes favours a focus on personal improvement over comparison with others, and it holds up better when a player is not winning. And more practically — a player alone in a garage will attempt things they would never try in front of teammates. They will fail, repeat, and get better at them.
Play-based. Games, coordination and puck touches. No loading, no fitness tests, no comparison — just a few beat-your-own-score challenges.
Real exercises introduced, bodyweight and bands only. Learning the patterns properly while it is easy to.
A complete program. Speed, hands, shooting volume, bodyweight strength, passing, 1-on-1 play and hockey IQ.
Light external load. Growth tracking and spurt-aware load management through the vulnerable window.
Two full-body strength days. Hamstring, groin and neck work as body contact enters the game.
Heavy progressive lifting, power development, repeat-shift conditioning and a full lift log.
Times are the full training day, including a short shooting block that can be done any time of day. The other days are deliberately lighter: play days (U7 to U11) are for other sports plus a short shooting block, easy days (U13 to U18) are easy skating, balance and mobility, and rest days have no physical training and no shooting, just 10 to 25 minutes of video, visualisation and journaling. Shot totals are the full weekly target, which the first weeks build up to.
This is a training program, not medical advice. Every program says so plainly, tells players to stop if something hurts, and carries an explicit list of injury red flags — sharp pain, joint pain, one-sided pain, pain persisting after warm-up, limping, and growth-related knee or heel pain. Each recommends a doctor or physiotherapist where appropriate, and states that training should be supervised by a responsible adult.
Every drill has to earn its place. Where the evidence is strongest — hamstring and groin injury prevention, landing and balance training, strength training for young athletes, and sleep — we follow it closely. Where it is still developing, such as managing load through growth spurts and how varied practice carries into games, we follow the current consensus and stay conservative. Where youth-specific research is thinner, we reason carefully from the adult literature and stay conservative, particularly on loading. And where we have made a judgement call, we tell you it is a judgement call. That standard is why we will not promise outcomes we cannot evidence.
No off-ice program substitutes for ice time, coaching, or playing the game. What it does is make the unsupervised hours count for something — and stop them quietly building habits that have to be undone later.
Licences run for the full season and cover a single age group. You will receive an access code and a setup guide for every purchase.
Licences are available for an entire team for the full season, and for individual players. Get in touch to discuss pricing.
info@off-ice-hockey.caThis program is provided for general reference and information only. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for guidance from a doctor, physiotherapist, or qualified coach. Check with your doctor before beginning any new training program. Training should be supervised by a responsible adult. Use is entirely at your own risk.