Weightlifting

[kovalchuk71 212]

I am starting weight lifting and I need to know what are the most important machines to use for hockey related activity.Squats? What arm exercises? etc.

[gman 0]

Stay away from machines. You are an athlete, not a body builder. Do squats with a bar and a rack. If you have no rack, clean the weight and do front squats. Do sandbag clean and presses for everything else in your body.

Buy an old duffle bag and fill it with sand. Pick it up off the ground and press it overhead. Drop on the ground and repeat. When it is easy, add sand. Or, add one handfull of sand a day or per workout. This will work hands, wrists, forearms, biceps, triceps, pecs, traps, lats, and deltoids. Also erector spinae muscles, obliques, deep abs, butt, hamstrings, quads and also your calves when you lose you balance and have to catch yourself. Did I leave anything out? It also looks pretty cool in a very hardcore sort of way. If you do not have sand or are worried about getting sand on the floor, use rocks. Rocks are cheap and are even more hardcore in a very oldschool sort of way.

If you are REALLY tough, you can do full front squats with the sandbag on your front delts/collarbones.....

In the real world you are not going to have to pick up something that has a 1.2875" knurlled chrome handle. Train for functional strength and everything else will improve.

[Rebels Ice hockey 0]

Machines are good if you wanna isolate muscles to get cut, but if your lifting for sports, all you really need is a squat rack, bench, and some free weight.

In my opinion, squatting is the single most important excersize for hockey, seeing as it works your legs and lowerback for faster skating, as well as throwing a hit and keeping your legs when you take a hit.

For arms I do Bicep curls, Hammer heads, wrist curls, and sometimes i just squeeze a tennis ball while i watch TV to work my forearms.

Abs can be worked out everyday. I do a set of curl-ups till i burn out, then leg lifts till i burn out, and plank till i burn out.

For chest I do flat/incline/decline bench, and sometimes chest flys.

Deltoids/Traps - Shrugs and dumbell raises.

Upperback - Chest rows or reverse flys.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask

[Jason Harris 31]

Stay away from machines. You are an athlete, not a body builder. Do squats with a bar and a rack.

That's interesting you would say that, because properly designed machines provide greater range of motion and lead to better flexibility, which should be the goal of all athletes.

Machines and weights each have benefits, and both should be included in your workouts if possible.

[Flyerguy91 0]

theres merit to both schools of thought. while the flexibility is true. free weights also take use of supporting muscle fibers, while machines isolate. depends what your goal is.

[kovalchuk71 212]

Buy an old duffle bag and fill it with sand. Pick it up off the ground and press it overhead. Drop on the ground and repeat. When it is easy, add sand. Or, add one handfull of sand a day or per workout. This will work hands, wrists, forearms, biceps, triceps, pecs, traps, lats, and deltoids. Also erector spinae muscles, obliques, deep abs, butt, hamstrings, quads and also your calves when you lose you balance and have to catch yourself. Did I leave anything out? It also looks pretty cool in a very hardcore sort of way. If you do not have sand or are worried about getting sand on the floor, use rocks. Rocks are cheap and are even more hardcore in a very oldschool sort of way.

If you are REALLY tough, you can do full front squats with the sandbag on your front delts/collarbones.....

In the real world you are not going to have to pick up something that has a 1.2875" knurlled chrome handle. Train for functional strength and everything else will improve.

Can you explain more? Im new at this so I pick it up and then what? What do you mean by "press it overhead"

[gman 0]

Pressing overhead just like a military press. You grunt and groan to get the bag up to your shoulders just under your chin. then you use your legs and arms and every other muscle in your body to push it straight up over your head. I have seen so many good athletes waste their time on machines. If you want to train yourself for huge ROM (rang of motion) on a machine that is great. But that rarely translates into real world functional flexibility.

i wish I could cite the specific studies, but there have been some research that suggests a healthy and hydrated muscle has more natural elasticity than a stretched and machined muscle. If you want to pump up and look like Coleman or Arnold that is fine. But if you want to have a purely functional and strong body, look to old school full body work.

Then most equipment I can imagine buying is like the stuff that www.ironmind.com has. Do some google searches on Brooks Kubik, and something called "dinosaur training". These guys do heavy stuff with dumbells and barbells, but not machines.

try these, I hope they work:

http://www6.mailordercentral.com/ironmind/...asp?number=1400

http://www6.mailordercentral.com/ironmind/...asp?number=1342

http://www6.mailordercentral.com/ironmind/...asp?number=1392

http://www6.mailordercentral.com/ironmind/...asp?number=1276

These books are a good place to start. There is also more grip stuff here than I can possibly tell you about.

Good Luck

[kovalchuk71 212]

so is the dinosaur training good for hockey or no? I dont wanna be a body builder, I just want to get stronger

[gman 0]

Dinosaur training is good for absolutely every athlete and every person who gets out of bed in the morning. YES it is good. The only dowside is that you may see your waist thicken up with muscle. If you are trying to oil up and preen in front of a mirror at the local chrome and fern health club you may not be very happy. But if you are playing, or rather dominating, a combat sport like hockey, everything you do will be more explosive, stable and powerful.

[chippa13 1844]

Stay away from machines.  You are an athlete, not a body builder.  Do squats with a bar and a rack.

That's interesting you would say that, because properly designed machines provide greater range of motion and lead to better flexibility, which should be the goal of all athletes.

Machines and weights each have benefits, and both should be included in your workouts if possible.

Especially when almost every one of the exercises he listed has a machine specifically built for it. Not to mention, machines are often designed so that you can do the exercise using the proper form to not only help you work the correct muscles but also to avoid injury from cheating motions.

[kovalchuk71 212]

everything I need for it would be at the gym correct?

[Gongshow11 1]

do free weights at the gym. machines are hack jobs as they concentrate solely on one area. an exercie like free weight squats works all lower body, whereas smith machine doesnt.

plus machines can lead to improper form with one side doing all the work.

[LetsGoWings13 0]

you should be doing a mix of free weights and machines.

[gman 0]

When you play hockey are you strapped onto a machine and forced into "correct form"? Or are you having to respond to little changes in the puck, ice, your opponent? Everytime you use a machine for "proper" form without "cheating" you are doing yourself a disservice by not allowing your body to respond to varrying stimuli. I put myself through college as a certified Nautilus trainer. There are no machines that are more highly "engineered" and "perfect" and restrictive than the Nautilus line. Then I evolved to free weights and now I am progressing again to purely functional exercises and leaving conventional stuff behind.

Freeweights are fine if you stick with squats, cleans, snatches, and deadlifts.

Squats are the absolute KING for all sports that I can think of. Deadlift is a close second. For an athlete, the bench press is the court jester :D

The reason that isolation exercises and machines are so popular with body builders is that they allow you to isolate a muscle and work the bedickens out of it. The trouble is that you do not work supporting tissues. You can make a small muscle or muscle group simply huge and overdeveloped and I suppose pretty strong in the limited ROM that youare training it on. The trouble, again, is that you are not working any of the supporting muscles so you are greatly INCREASING your chance of getting hurt once you do anything outiside the ROM that you have trainined your muscles to expect. The myth that you get hurt by using freeweights because you use cheating motions is just that: a MYTH.

In any real activity your motions are constantly variable. You will never run into the endzone and see a bench and a bunch of weight on it and the rules offering an additional point for a 500lb rep. Football palyers, at least the better ones with a good strength coach, work on squats,cleans and overhead presses, and much less on bench than most people would expect. The whole body is worked. For a moving athlete, machines are a disservice.

Here is another site that may offer some help. There are weeks worth of reading here, so take your time and digest it all:

This is the home page: http://danjohn.org/

This is the page with all the articels: http://danjohn.org/getup.html (scroll towards the bottom and hit the links to the various letters. Much of the stuff may be "skippable" as it pertains to throwing events. But the weight training and the training philosophy itself are very pertinant.

[gman 0]

sorry nothing new on this one, but can't delete it...

[chippa13 1844]

For an athlete, the bench press is the court jester

Right, because strong pecs and shoulders in conjunction with strong legs and core would never help you move someone out of the slot or battling in corners.

[Smith 0]

The message here is do what you want to do, If it's free weights, Machines, or lifting 100 Cats a day. Just do what you can without hurting yourself. If you lift weights every day You will not turn into a "body builder" What they do is very differnet kind of training.

[Edge 0]

Stay away from machines.  You are an athlete, not a body builder.  Do squats with a bar and a rack.

That's interesting you would say that, because properly designed machines provide greater range of motion and lead to better flexibility, which should be the goal of all athletes.

Machines and weights each have benefits, and both should be included in your workouts if possible.

I agree. I use both in my workouts, but tend to use machines more just because they dont take away as much energy as i usually have some sort of sport to play soon after.

[gman 0]

From Chippa: "Right, because strong pecs and shoulders in conjunction with strong legs and core would never help you move someone out of the slot or battling in corners. "

Take the position that your arms are in when you're moving someone out of the slot or battling in the corner. Now, stand up straight. Are your arms straight out in front of your or are they slightly to very much above your shoulders?

If you are using bench press to strengthen sports specific muscles, you need to be in a sport where your shoulders are pinned against a hard surface, your low back may or may not be arched and all your force is going directly in front of you or even downwards. The only way to do this in hockey is if you are standing perfectly straight up and down, and you are pushing straight out in front of you. How many times does this happen??? Hopefully not at all....

Strong arms and shoulders are obviously crucial. My point is that there are about 20 better ways to get there than bench pressing. If you really feel the need to lift weight with a hard board at your back, then at least switch to steep incline/military presses. Of course that does nothing whatsoever in connecting your strong shoulders and arms to the rest of your body that has to do at least half the work you mentioned in your above post.

[gman 0]

Edge,

perhaps you are training too hard during the season. If you are worried about training taking away from your performance, maybe you need to concentrate on the performance and then train hard in the off season. If you are just going through the motions to kill time between games, you could probably find better things to do than pumping on a Universal gym.

You statement actually proves my point. Machines do not tax you enough to affect your performance later, whereas free weights do. Which one do you think does you more good from a strength training perspective?

Please do not take anything I write as an insult, it is not meant that way. ;)

[LetsGoWings13 0]

Not to steal the topic or anything but is it true that squatting,deadlifts and hang cleans will stunt your growth. Im 15 and 5'7 and I deffinitally do not want to stay that height the rest of my life.

[chippa13 1844]

From Chippa:  "Right, because strong pecs and shoulders in conjunction with strong legs and core would never help you move someone out of the slot or battling in corners. "

Take the position that your arms are in when you're moving someone out of the slot or battling in the corner.  Now, stand up straight.  Are your arms straight out in front of your or are they slightly to very much above your shoulders?

  If you are using  bench press to strengthen sports specific muscles, you need to be in a sport where your shoulders are pinned against a hard surface, your low back may or may not be arched and all your force is going directly in front of you or even downwards.  The only way to do this in hockey is if you are standing perfectly straight up and down, and you are pushing straight out in front of you.  How many times does this happen???  Hopefully not at all....

  Strong arms and shoulders are obviously crucial. My point is that there are about 20 better ways to get there than bench pressing.  If you really feel the need to lift weight with a hard board at your back, then at least switch to steep incline/military presses.  Of course that does nothing whatsoever in connecting your strong shoulders and arms to the rest of your body that has to do at least half the work you mentioned in your above post.

Easy fella. I was merely supporting the exercise you essentially called "useless". I wasn't saying that is the only exercise necessary but strong pecs can come into play even if your back isn't pinned. Having your back pinned against a solid surface allows you to bring the true power of your pecs into use but they can be quite useful on their own. If you couple the bench press with militaries, lat pull downs, and upright rows you will get most of the results you need. Toss in some curls and a tri exercise. Add to that some leg strength work and ab work and you are good to go. Now you just need some endurance work and viola, a strong body ready to hit the ice.

[chippa13 1844]

Not to steal the topic or anything but is it true that squatting,deadlifts and hang cleans will stunt your growth. Im 15 and 5'7 and I deffinitally do not want to stay that height the rest of my life.

There are opposing schools of thought on the effects of power lifting on growth and body development of the still growing body. Some will say to stay away, others that it does no real harm.

[gman 0]

No problem Pal, I am a pretty easy fella anyway. You can support bench if you like, and that is fine. I am saying that there are a ton of other and better exercises for the arms, shoulders and pecs. I guess it was your rolling eyes and sarcasm in your original rebuttal post that pissed me off.

As far as the young kids lifting heavy, I think that it is probably not a good idea until after puberty. Until then there are myriad exercises that will kick anyone's butt using just bodyweight that kids can use.

Are we cool??? ;)

[LetsGoWings13 0]

one other thing i know that a good exercise for biceps and forearms is a curl bar but what is good for deltoids and triceps besides pushups and things like that.