It’s not going to be accurate like a bike power meter. I’m guessing that your FTP also isn’t 125 watts.
Honestly, you just need lots of endurance riding. You can do that by heart rate or by feel (5 or 6 out 10 effort). Or, just go out and ride and have fun.
You are talking about threshold and vo2 intervals. That is all the icing on the cake after you develop aerobic fitness. But in your case, all you need is aerobic fitness for skating, not bike fitness. Take all the newb gains you can get with easy aerobic pedaling. I posted before but I’m guessing that you get plenty of intensity on the ice. A threshold workout plus a VO2 workout every week should certainly leave you tired enough that you won’t skate as well as you could.
If hockey is the priority I would definitely embrace this advice. OP will get plenty of intensity on the ice. Focus on Z2 or even Z1 on the bike and get as many hours in as practical.
I have a colleague who is into crossfit that was in a similar situation. I recommended her to do some low intensity running and that has helped her a lot during competition; Now she can perform until the finish and not just die half way there.
I’m a former hockey play and very fit cyclist. They are very much different, and your cycling training won’t directly help your hockey. However, using cycling to build general aerobic fitness will increase your endurance, making your more fatigue resistant.
For example, you’re a 250lb guy, so spinning on the bike for 1 hr is a lot more accessible than going for a 1hr run. It’s just way easier and your way less likely to get an injury from it. But doing 10-15 second running sprints is way more specific to benefiting your skating than a similar workout on the bike, since skating is full body like running/sprinting as opposed to a bicycle sprint.
Lastly, nothing will make you a better skater than just skating itself. Ice time is expensive, so buy some roller blades and do your aerobic training and/or sprints like that, weather permitting. If you’re not already doing this
Nils van der Poel, the 5k and 10k world record holder, and gold medalist in speed skating might disagree! He did all of his aerobic development on a bike.
I read that and enjoyed it. But ice hockey is nothing like speed skating, which is an endurance sport. Ice hockey is essentially 45sec-1min shifts on the ice which consist of 5-10 second bursts from a dead stop, then glide, change directions and accelerate again. It’s essentially acceleration from a zero over and over for that minute, then go sit on a bench doing nothing for a few minutes to recover.
So training for ice hockey ‘off ice’ is much more like training for the short sprints in track and field than anything else (acceleration work, strength and power lifting, etc). But for OP, who plays beer league, doing some general aerobic fitness is what’s going to make him be overall much healthier and athletic. It’s just not really going to specifically benefit is hockey-fitness
Former hockey player here. The demands of hockey are really high, it’s basically constant on/off sprinting for an entire shift. First thing I saw is that your shifts are 1-2 minutes, that’s brutally long. Anything over 1:00 is usually a super long shift, and it means either you’re hemmed in or are hemming someone in. I’m thinking you might be blowing yourself up with those early long shifts.
General fitness will help alot, and trainer road is amazing at that. I’d also recommend trying to go to some open skates. When I was in minor hockey, I did tons of power skating; my parents knew nothing about hockey and that this was really important. It made me an extremely good skater, unfortunately I have hands of stone so it didn’t help my hockey career!
glad to hear there are some other hockey players here! I only play shinny these days, I had a brutal slash on my calf at the end of my last season that had me sore for a week, so that made me bail. Miss it alot, but dealing with some beer leaguers taking it to seriously soured me on it.
Indeed, but this is beer league. I play D, and quite often (at least half the games), we have only 3 D for the game, which means two shifts on, one shift off. That’s where the 1-2 minutes comes from, with 1 minute of rest. On a good week we have 4 D and I can limit to 1 minute pretty easily.
However I see a lot of people in our league (which is an intermediate league: no new players, but not the best either) who can do this without too much effort. I’m pretty strong for the first part of the shift in the first period, and it goes downhill from there, where my legs can’t support the starting and stopping so I skate upright and do a lot of coasting (e.g., I do the best I can).
The game last night is the first game where I made it through the first period or two without feeling like I was sucking wind, and was able to (mostly) stay with the play. This is after the 6th week of (mostly) zone 2 work.
I’m starting to come around to the idea presented here of focusing on aerobic fitness for now, until I can get all the easy gains in FTP increase, because it helps with all of the “not sprinting” periods of a game, and in recovery between shifts while sitting. In keeping with the recommendations of the TR podcast, “Always focus on your biggest weakness first.”
You’re making me want to play again. I took last season off bc the stopping and starting is so tough on my hips. Figured I’d be having hip surgery in the future if I didn’t hang up the skates!
There is NO WAY the general public knows hockey players are only on the ice for a minute or two before getting a break. I bet they think they get on the ice and leave only for injury.
So I just completed the first two months of training (25, 1 hour sessions ), and what I’ve noticed:
My heart rate at a (nearly) constant 125W of power over 1 hour has dropped from an average of 139 BPM down to 118 BPM. In order to get back to the top of Zone 2 (for me, about 138 BPM), I need to be averaging 150 to 160W of output.
The HR recovery time from max effort 160+ BPM down to the bottom of my Zone 2 range (about 125 BPM) fell by half, from about 1:30 down to about 45 seconds.
Resting heart rate in the morning is down from 72 BPM to 60 BPM.
In terms of feeling on ice: I have to push much harder before I hit my transition zone where my HR shoots up and I begin breathing hard. In fact, at moderate intensity (just basically keeping up with the play, not all out skating), I can complete an entire shift without ever feeling like I’m breathing hard, even for over 1 minute. In the shifts where I’m doing a lot of stopping and starting and sprinting, my heart rate peak is far lower than it used to be, which means the recovery time on the bench is much faster. I also don’t feel anywhere near as beat-up after games, since I’m in a (more) aerobic zone for most of the games now.
Based on the data I took with a HR monitor on ice, before I started zone 2 training, over 20 shifts, my average heart rate was 152 BPM, and I would be breathing hard and weak exiting the ice after each shift. Now, the average BPM is 139, with only 3 or 4 of the 20 shifts exceeding Zone 1 of 150BPM, of which I can completely recover within the 1 minute of rest time.
This is all a long way of saying, this type of training is completely transformative, even for mostly HIIT-like sports like ice hockey. I had read for many years that Zone 2 type training for HIIT sports was a complete waste of time, but focusing exclusively on HIIT training never gains any of the anabolic benefits that Zone 2 provides.
Hopefully this helps anyone reading who might be on the fence about these types of workouts.
I play D, and quite often (at least half the games), we have only 3 D for the game, which means two shifts on, one shift off. That’s where the 1-2 minutes comes from, with 1 minute of rest. On a good week we have 4 D and I can limit to 1 minute pretty easily.