Key performance indicators of ice hockey sprint performance

• Ice hockey is a physical demanding sport with high intensity and repetitive start and stop movements. Hence, players need to have excellent physical condition and ice skating skills with good acceleration and sprint capacities. However, little biomechanical research has been conducted on elite ice hockey players to analyse applicable key performance indicators of skating acceleration and short sprint performance. The aim of the study was to collect plantar forces data of elite ice hockey players during short sprints in order to analyse and identify plausible performance indicators. With institutional ethics approval, twelve professional male ice hockey players, (Age 22.8 ± 5.2 years, height 185.6 ± 5.0 cm, weight 86.9 ± 6.2 kg) from the Swedish Hockey League participated in the study. Following an individual warm up, each player performed three maximal sprints (18.4 m) from a stationary position, with three minutes of rest between each sprint. Sprint time was collected with timing gates (Brower Timing system, USA). The best trial for each player was chosen for further analysis. Plantar forces were collected at 100 Hz with pressure insoles (Novel GmbH, Germany), placed in both skates (Buckeridge et al., 2015, PLOS ONE, 10, 5). Analyses were made for stride rate, symmetry left-right, contact time, force production and impulse. Only the step frequency, 3.35 ± 0.38 strides/s was correlated to skating performance (r = -0.6, P < 0.05). For the second to seventh step, the mean contact time was 0.26 ± 0.04 s, the mean force was 844 ± 152 N and the mean peak force was 1335 ± 224 N. The mean impulse was 230 ± 52 Ns and the group showed greater force production for the left leg compared to the right leg −2.07 ± 9.08 %. The present study is the first study to analyse plantar forces on professional ice hockey players. The significance of stride rate is in line with previous research (Renaud et al., 2017, Sports Engineering, 20, 255–266) whereas the plantar force production is higher, compared to findings by Buckeridge et al. (2015). This is likely explained by the use of higher skilled players in the present study. Still, plantar force production is not significant for performance which points to the importance of skating kinematics and/or shear forces. Hence, the combination of kinetics and 3D kinematics on ice is important to enhance the knowledge about skating performance of elite ice hockey players as well as developing a kinetic measurement system to measure shear forces in combination with plantar forces.

Ämnesord

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Hälsovetenskap -- Idrottsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Health Sciences -- Sport and Fitness Sciences (hsv//eng)

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