Hockey dryland stickhandling training is a great way to maintain and improve your shooting skills on your own time. Getting started with basic dryland drills for hockey players is easy if you approach it with a plan. Here are a few tips.
All Shooting Practice Is Good Practice
Time spent practicing is time spent improving, as long as you’re continuing to develop good habits. When dryland training at home, remember that your setup doesn’t have to be perfect. Work with what you have. If you don’t have the space or tools mentioned below, adapt your setup to make it your own. Your work will improve your shot, regardless of your setup.
Stickhandling Equipment: The Basics
Start by tooling up with some basic hockey training aids. If you’re going to start with just a stick and a flat surface, the first thing you need to do is protect your stick from damage. Asphalt, cement, or even tile can rough up the bottom of your stick blade. A hockey blade protector attaches easily to your blade, and it’s light enough you’ll hardly know it’s there. It also makes whatever surface you’re practicing on feel more like real ice.
For the most effective shooting training at home, you’ll want to shoot at a regulation-sized goal. With a full 6’ x 4’ goal, you have nearly endless options for dryland shooting drills with an array of choices in magnetic targets and shooting screens that attach to the goal frame. But not everyone has a regulation goal or the space for one. In many cases, a mini goal or skill net can be better for more focused training, especially in tight quarters. In a pinch, use what you have: An empty box, a bucket, or a storage bin can become a makeshift goal, or get creative with indoor or lawn furniture flipped on its side.
Keeping with the theme of “use what you have,” use what you have the most of to shoot, or even a combination of pucks and balls. If you have a hard, smooth shooting pad, like dryland training tiles, a standard puck will work well. If you’re shooting from a rougher surface, a low-bounce street hockey ball or an inline hockey puck is a better option.
Choosing Your Space, Surface & Backboard
Space
Finding the right space will be the biggest challenge. Hopefully, you have a hard, flat surface at home that’s at least 10’ x 20’ (a standard two-car garage is about 20’ x 20’). Bigger is better, but this will give you space to work on shots from different angles and effective distances. When working on shooting from the side, move your target/goal to the base of the long side, so you’ll have more room on the sides to practice from an angle. When you’re working on head-on slapshots, move the goal to the short side so you’ll have more shooting distance.
A garage, driveway, or yard might not be available to you. So how do you practice shooting drills when you’re stuck in your apartment or maybe even a dorm room? While you might think of mini or knee hockey as just a game, breaking down basic shooting mechanics into focused drills can help develop your skills, instead of the free-for-all that describes most mini-hockey play. And mini hockey fits well in even a tiny shoebox dorm room (if your beds are pushed to the sides.)
While you may not be able to pull off a full slapper inside your small walk-up apartment, practicing wrist shot and snap shot mechanics is certainly possible. Make as much room as you can around your practice space, set up a small target (following the backstop guidance below), and work on the fundamentals of a wrist shot.
Surface
Next, it’s time to create a shooting surface, which you’ll want to be as realistic as possible. If you already have a shooting pad, you can use that; with a shooting pad, your range will be limited, and you won’t be able to practice stickhandling away from your body. Your best bet is building a surface to your specifications with dryland hockey floor tiles. Whether you can create a full mini-rink with dryland shooting tiles, or just a small square to set up your shots, adding an ice-like surface to your home training space is well worth the effort. Depending on your available space and budget, you can cover just enough space for your workout, expand the training area to allow you to move around, or create a wall-to-wall indoor ‘rink’ in your basement or garage.
If you’re stuck with whatever surface your home comes with, the harder and smoother the better. Poured concrete (like a garage) is best, but blacktop, asphalt, or even hard-packed dirt can work, if that’s all you have. From there, you can improve your shooting surface with a DIY hockey shooting pad made from any hard, smooth material found in your garage or at a home renovation store. Preferred DIY shooting pad materials include:
- High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) sheets
- Flooring tiles
- Linoleum sheets
- Roll-up plastic
- Whiteboard/markerboard
- Flattened cardboard boxes (in a pinch)
Backboard
The ideal backstop is soft so that you don’t get dangerous rebounds firing back at you or flying off and hitting a window. It should also provide ample coverage to catch your missed shots (although you rarely miss). Even if you think you have thoroughly covered the area behind your target with a backstop, consider what would happen if your puck or ball is redirected: What could it damage? Then adjust and compensate.
What to use for backstops:
- Large netting, like a golf net or fishing net
- pare goals or goal netting
- An old mattress
- Garden fencing or chain fencing
Bad Ideas for Backstops:
- Home siding
- Decorative fencing
- Garage doors
- Anything placed in front of or near windows or vehicles
Use Hockey Stickhandling Practice Tools
Once you’ve got your basic gear and a training area set up, there are numerous training tools that you can use to help hone your stickhandling skills. The only way to continually improve is to challenge yourself with increasingly complex hockey drills. One way is to lay a bunch of pucks, cones, or other obstacles in front of you and practice stickhandling around them. Some call this game ‘minefield.’ Your goal is to move the puck as quickly as possible around the obstacles without hitting them or losing control of the puck. This can be fun, but it might not teach you some of the subtler moves required for great stickhandling, such as toe and heel drags.
By adding more advanced tools into the mix, you’ll be able to amp up your training sessions and see better results. A home hockey stickhandling training station is a great way to spend off-ice time to work on puck control, and the work you do in your garage will pay off when you next lace up your hockey skates. There are endless drills you can do to improve your hands and develop better puck control. The great thing is that you’ll never outgrow your stickhandling setup; you’ll need to continue working on these skills for as long as you play hockey.
Shooting Drills: High, Low, Left, Right
Now that you’re ready for practice, it’s time to train. Make sure you talk to your coaches about the best off-ice hockey drills you can do to improve your performance. If you’re looking for a more general training plan, the High, Left, Low, Right shooting drill is a great place to start. In fact, we consider it to be one of the best dryland training drills for hockey players.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have skateable synthetic ice tiles at home, your shooting drills will be confined to accuracy drills from the standing position (not moving) on a shooting pad. If you have a full-sized goal or even a mini goal, add smaller targets to improve your accuracy. Combine your position relative to the goal with target placement to create a variety of shooting situations representing the holes a goalie may leave open in real play. The easiest way to do this is by breaking down the goal into several half-circle zones around the goal’s frame:
- Left, Low Angle
- Left, High Angle
- Center
- Right, High Angle
- Right, Low Angle
Set up your shooting pad in each of these and shoot reps of 10 before moving to the next (or however many pucks and balls you have on hand before needing to retrieve them). If you have more space, add distance to each of these zones (near and far) for twice the number of shooting zones.
Move your targets each time you shoot from one of these zones. Do one set of all five or ten zones, shooting only at targets that are in (or represent the area of) the upper right (one-hole) corner. On the next set, shoot from each zone at the upper left (three-hole) corner, and so on.
Keep Track of Your Progress
If you do 10 reps from each of the five zones, targeting all five “holes” each time—that adds up to 250 shots! How will you know if you’re improving your accuracy unless you’re keeping track of your hits between each set? Each time you move to a new zone, make a physical or digital note of how many accurate hits you had in the zone before and tally them at the end.
For even more help with shooting, check out our hockey stickhandling drills for on- and off-ice training advice.