This article suggests some easy ways you can practice to improve your balance for playing hockey from developing supporting muscles, to practicing ice skating and other activities to balancing on beams with your eyes closed.

How to Improve Your Balance for Hockey

                Performance in hockey comes down to a lot of different factors and is certainly more than the sum of its parts. In order to be great at hockey you need to be fast, you need to be a great aim, you need to be able to outsmart your opponents and work as a team and you need a range of other physical and mental abilities.

                While it is getting these abilities to work together that's important though, it's also possible to train each of them individually and to hone each skill to the point where you will be a lean, ma hockey machine.

                One of these physical abilities is balance, and it's highly important to be able to balance well in hockey not only to avoid falling over on the ice, but also to ensure that you have a stable base from which to tackle and aim. Here we will look at how you can train your balance without a hockey stick in sight.

Practice

 

                Of course one way to improve balance is to practice... well balancing. There are many ways you can do this, but the most obvious is to try balancing on beams and on posts. Not all of us has space in the garden for an assault course though, so if you want to improve your balance from the comfort of your room look into using a balance board or even just practicing on the Wii.

                Want to get even more from this balancing? Then try balancing with your eyes shut. This way you can't use your eyes to right yourself and are forced to rely solely on your internal sense of gravity.

                Meanwhile a range of activities that involve balancing can all also help you to improve your ability. This includes bike riding, gymnastics or even using a pogo stick. Take up any of these activities and they will serve as a brilliant supplement to your ice hockey.

                Of course another thing to practice is ice skating itself, and the more competent you get at skating (roller blading would work very well too and can be practiced on your front drive) the more stable you'll be on the ice and the more agile the moves you'll be able to pull off when you're playing.

Strengthen

 

                Balancing really means engaging small supporting muscles in your body and using them to adjust your position and prevent you from tipping. To improve your ability to balance then, particularly on skates and when being tackled, try training those smaller fast twitch muscle fibres by developing your core and doing compound leg exercises such as squats and deadlifts. Using a balancing board again is a particularly effective way to build those useful core muscles. One way to make the most of this for instance is to try standing on the balance board while you do curls which will force you to engage the stabilizing muscles while you work out. Another great way to strengthen these muscles is to do curls with uneven weights which will mean you need to work harder to stay upright and stable.