Hockey Not a Game For Fitness

According to one author, hockey is not a religion or a way of life.

I’m still having trouble comprehending that statement but let’s humour that thought and consider what else he has to say.

Games, he says, are not useful for increasing or maintaining physical fitness

In the league I play in now, we have 35 regular season games spread out over 8 months. This calculates to approximately 1.5 games per week over the season. Our team is seriously beer-league meaning that there is no such thing as practice time, and no one but our goalie and our “franchise” player make a habit of sparing for another team. The issue here is other life commitments, not laziness or lack of passion. For most of our players these games, unfortunately and obviously, are the sole source of exercise that they receive.

Sure there are stories bandied about the dressing room of attempts to create and stick to a self-imposed jogging program or the like, but after a few weeks when questioned about the success of their commitment… the responses are usually a quiet shake of the head and any verbalization is drowned out by the crack-and-hiss of an opening beer can.

Santa, nicknamed for his not-so little red jumpsuit, jolly attitude and Pere Noel figure described his fitness program as purposely laying down on the couch when watching TV so that when he gets up he has to do one crunchy.

And we wonder why were not getting in shape. But does it really have anything to do with hockey being a… a… game?

I’ve included remarks from his article “in quotations” and added my rebuttal (in brackets).

“During these activities, no static stretching occurs, so they can’t improve your flexibility.”

Bullshit. That cooler is no more than 14 inches from the ground, and the ice level doesn’t come all the way to the top. And when you take into consideration the couple of inches for the skate blade you’re reaching far past your feet. You could be down there for a 4 or 5 seconds finding the coldest can.

“Powerful muscle contractions against fairly heavy resistance are virtually absent, so there is little strength training accomplished.”

This guy has obviously never tried to navigate his author-conditioned body along a slippery surface while perched on top of 9 square centimetres of sharpened steel while fending off a defenseman nicknamed ‘Hudson’ after the 2860 CPR steam locomotive weighing in at 293,770 kg.

“Finally, sports are rather ineffective forms of cardiovascular exercise because your physical activity is not maintained steadily throughout the game. Instead, things fluctuate from brief periods of high intensity down to no activity at all when the ball goes out of bounds, is passed to another player or when a time-out occurs.”

(Idiot)

“To derive the same cardiovascular benefit from 30 minutes of sustained jogging, biking or swimming you’d have to play several hours of these sports.”

Yah but…jogging, biking and swimming suck and a hockey game lasts about 60 minutes with intense physical exertion, and…and…jogging, biking and swimming suck.

To be fair I’ll provide you with a link to his article, but I can guarantee it won’t be useful for increasing or maintaining your physical fitness.