One pattern that has stood out to me recently is related to the idea of movement quality. The term gets thrown around a lot, but how exactly is “movement quality” exploited by expert performers? How can a skills coach teach better skills? How can a strength and conditioning coach have gym “movement quality” transfer to performance?
One answer is: teach the “proximal to distal gradient”
WTF is the “proximal to distal gradient”?
In this “Frosted Tips” article, I had the chance to interview my teammate, Anthony Bardaro, on his tips for improving your stickhandling.
Check out this link: HERE
Sometimes I get to watch videos or come across resources that illuminates things that I see, but don’t really recognize a pattern yet. The proverbial “Aha!” moment. This is one of those videos.
Oftentimes you see players that are good stick handlers….they seem to do something different. I wasn’t really able to pick up on exactly what it was they did differently. This video shows what that is. As soon as I saw this video, I went out to my team’s practice and immediately noticed that the best puck handlers on my team had this habit.
Increasing puck contact time while stick handling seems to be a priority of Belfry. If you’ve seen the Patrick Kane stick handling video, you’ve probably seen that he stick handles in a very distinct way. Belfry is his skill coach, so I assume that this was taught to him.
If you’ve ever seen Datsyuk stickhandle, especially in warm up, he also uses this technique. I have video of him in warm up which I’ll post soon.
Train 2.0 Blog by Jason Yee 