What hockey asks of your body
- Repeated sprints in a crouched position, with the stick low to the ground.
- A long-held forward bend that loads the lower back and hips.
- Sudden changes of direction and lunges to reach or block the ball.
- Hits and slaps that twist through the trunk.
Hockey has almost no injury-prevention research of its own: the same review found a single prevention study, a youth warm-up. The advice here borrows from football, the closest sport with strong evidence.
The evidence hockey can borrow
- Nordic hamstring curls: programmes that included them cut hamstring injuries by about half in a meta-analysis of 8,459 athletes across sports (van Dyk, Behan and Whiteley, 2019).
- Copenhagen adductor work: an adductor programme made groin problems 41% less likely in male football players (Harøy et al., 2019).
- Strength training in general: it cut sports injuries to about a third across 25 trials with 26,610 participants (Lauersen, Bertelsen and Andersen, 2014).
- One heavy session a week in-season held strength and sprint speed for 12 weeks in professional football; one every two weeks did not (Rønnestad, Nymark and Raastad, 2011).
A session for hockey players
- A hinge: Romanian deadlift or trap bar deadlift, 3 to 4 sets of 4 to 8, for hamstrings and the back muscles that hold your stance.
- A single-leg squat: Bulgarian split squat, 3 sets of 6 to 10 per leg.
- Nordic hamstring curls, 2 sets of 4 to 6, lowering as slowly as you can.
- Copenhagen adductor side plank, 2 sets of 15 to 30 seconds per side.
- A row and a press for the upper body, and a side plank or Pallof press for the trunk.
In-season, keep the same exercises with fewer sets, and put the session at least three days from a match. The match-week planner shows the day for your schedule.
The low stance and your back
A sport played bent over keeps the lower back working for the whole match. The answer is not to avoid bending but to make the muscles that hold the bend stronger: hinges such as the Romanian deadlift train exactly that position under load, with a straight back and the movement coming from the hips.
If your back hurts during or after play, have it checked by a physiotherapist before loading it in the gym.