How do I make my players stronger when we don’t have a gym?

Quick answer. Use bodyweight, holds and whatever the pitch gives you, and do it every week. The strength coaches on this site build it from a lunge held still, a push against the fence, a heel up on a step and calf raises on a bench, then add a partner pushing back or a band for resistance. Ten minutes of push-ups, squats, lunges and planks before training, twice a week all season, does more than a few hard weeks. Get the movement right first, then move from two legs to one leg and into rotation, because that is how hockey loads the body.

That is the short version. Here is how the strength and conditioning coaches on The Hockey Site actually approach it.

You don’t need a gym, you need to get creative

Matthew Eyles, who has worked with Hockey India and the Dutch national teams, was asked in Injury Reduction Training Methods what an ordinary club coach should take away. His answer starts here: “if you don’t have a gym, get creative. Get do it in the clubhouse. Do it in the field. Do it over Zoom. However you wanna do it, get creative with it. Body weight is great, especially if we’re talking about youth athletes. Body weight is great, and and isometrics are great.”

Glenn Turner says the same about teams with no strength coach at all, in Hockey Conditioning Made Simple: “you can simply fit it in, in between your trainings and I just think fit body weight movements in.”

Holds are the easiest place to start

An isometric is a hold: the muscle works without the joint moving. Eyles demonstrates how little it needs: “get into a lunge position, hold it for thirty seconds, you’re probably gonna feel something… All you’ve done is use your body weight”. Wouter Blondeel, in Mastering Physical KPIs, makes it the point of the method: “the advantage of the isometrics is you don’t need a lot of, you you don’t need to be in the gym.”

Both of them use the pitch itself. Blondeel: “every hockey pitch has, some kind of fence around it. You can push against the the fence, for example, in some kind of accelerate position… ten seconds as hard as possible, and then you rest.” While players do it, he watches posture rather than effort: the pelvis, and “You don’t drop the shoulders”. For the calves, he puts players on a bench beside the pitch and asks them to stand on their toes for a minute or two, and says some can’t manage twenty seconds. Eyles adds a heel up on a step, held, for the hamstrings, and has players drag one of the flat markers in with their foot as they lunge out from the sideline. For younger players: “Just put your your heel up on the on the couch at home, lift your hips up into a nice straight line. Hold that for thirty seconds.”

Adding load doesn’t need equipment either. Blondeel holds players in a lunge and asks “for another guy to push a little bit, and they have to push a little bit backwards, with a little bit of extra resistance.” Turner’s next step is bands: “everyone has bands now or clubs you can do a lot of stuff with, with bands that adds that extra resistance but not like that total weight stuff.”

Ten minutes before training, all season

Turner’s practical answer is a short block before players get on the pitch: “You do 20 seconds on 10 seconds rest push ups four times. You pretty much can’t do many more push ups after that. So that’s two minutes. Two minutes push up, two minutes squats, two minutes lunges, maybe shoulder push ups or plank.” Turner includes the lower back as well, with what are often called Supermans.

The reason it works is the repetition, not the intensity: “If you did two trainings a week with warm ups of some lunges, some squats, some push ups… you’d be surprised at the end of a season how much stronger the players would be.” Doing it for a few weeks and stopping is, in Turner’s words, “not going to really help”. The trick is to make it easy enough that players “don’t feel like they’re doing much”.

Eyles’ version for clubs that can’t spare pitch time is to split the squad: one coach on goal scoring, one on passing, and one section of the field for physical work. And his warning applies to anyone keen to start: “be progressive. So don’t go out tonight… and you’re gonna go crazy and smash your athletes. Start small, build up, but just start.”

Move well first, then go to one leg and rotation

Phil Moreland, in Pre-season Physical Programme, puts quality first: “Function before force, speed, or volume… Let’s get them moving well.” Eyles makes the same point about lifting: how well comes first, how much comes second. Turner’s version is depth. Lunges and squats need range, so that the long stride and the lunging tackle in a game are not the first time a player has loaded that position.

Then progress the way the sport loads the body. Moreland describes hockey as “I’m on one leg, I’m flexed, I’m rotated, and I’ve got lots of violent forces going through my body that I need to be able to manage… at some point in time, we need to put them on one leg. We need to think about how we we put force through them in rotation and in anti rotation.” Blondeel starts underneath that, with stability: “if you don’t have a a solid core stability, if you don’t have solid knee stability, if you don’t have, solid ankle stability, that’s an issue.” And for a no-kit squat that is harder than it looks: “Go down eight seconds and then stay there and then move, explosive up.”

Don’t forget the upper body. Turner’s marker of an all-round strong player is pulling: “the players that can do the more chin ups and pull ups are probably much stronger all over their body players than the ones that can’t.”

Juniors: start early, keep it light and fun

Turner would start “as early as possible”, with bodyweight rather than machines, “Like not to the stage that they hate it or anything like that but make it sort of fun.” For junior teams, ten minutes before they get on the field, “So you’re not wasting turf time”, with planks, push-ups and band work. Blondeel’s addition is to tell young players why: core work matters “Because it’s the transfer between the legs and the upper body.” Eyles’ caution is to hold back the advanced jumping and landing work: one of his single-leg drills is something he “definitely wouldn’t be doing… as your first exercise with your, under 14, group”.

So, before your next session, the useful question is not “what would we do if we had a gym”. It is “what can we do in ten minutes, twice a week, with a fence, a bench and each other”. Start with holds and good bodyweight reps, add a partner or a band, move to one leg and rotation when the movement is clean, and keep it going until the end of the season.

Two questions this usually raises

What should players do first if we have no equipment at all?

Holds. Matthew Eyles and Wouter Blondeel both start with isometrics that need nothing but the pitch: a lunge held still, a push against the fence for ten seconds, a heel up on a step, calf raises on a bench. When those are easy, Blondeel adds a teammate pushing against the hold for extra resistance, and Glenn Turner moves to bands.

How often do club players need to do strength work?

Little and often. Glenn Turner’s block is about ten minutes before training, twice a week, kept going all season, and Turner says players would be surprised how much stronger they are by the end of it. A few weeks and then stopping does not really help. Mick Beunen also says relatively short strength sessions give reasonable gains.

The sessions below are where these coaches go into the working detail. Every masterclass opens free so you can see what it covers; the full session sits in the Coach subscription.