Everyone needs training for their sport. It doesn’t matter how talented they are or how long they’ve been playing, nor does it matter if they’re playing hockey, basketball, or even football. Training is important for ensuring that you have the skills you need to win against the other team, no matter how the odds are stacked. Sometimes training can be made a whole lot easier if you have the right tools, and for hockey, there are few better tools to have at your disposal than a hockey passer. Not only are they easy to use, but they can give you a great edge during training that you may not have had otherwise.
These devices are known by many names by avid hockey players. Hockey passers, hockey rebounders, and puck passers are the three most commonly used words. Adding this to your training routine can help you out immensely, but there are also a few tricks that you can use to increase the value of your training and make sure that you come out the other side of the training session feeling more confident than ever before. That might sound like a tall order, but let’s see exactly how a hockey rebounder can help you.
What Exactly is a Puck Passer?
You might not have seen one of these little contraptions before, and if you haven’t that’s perfectly ok. Let’s just make sure that you have a basic understanding of what we’re talking about today because we start getting into the more involved pieces of information in this article. A puck passer is a small metal triangle that has rubber wrapped around it. It is used to simulate what it’s like to pass a puck to someone and have them pass it back.
There are many, many drills that can be run using one of these hockey rebounders, and each will have you practicing basic skills that you need to be effective in any hockey game. It’s small enough to provide an adequate accuracy challenge for most players but heavy enough that you don’t need to worry about it sliding around the ice too much. It’s an excellent training tool that can be used by players of all experience levels and ages and, as you’ll see, you can get some rather creative drills going if you think about it a little bit.
Start Small and Build Up
Of course, when you’re new to hockey you might need to be sure that both you and your puck passer are in one unmoving place. That’s easy enough, just stand in your skates and hit the puck as the rebounder. Once you get the hang of that, you can move around when hitting the puck at the stationary target. This is a great way to start building up your accuracy whether you’re moving or not. Once you have that down, you can work your way up to something a little bit more challenging that may even require the help of a friend.
One of the most common things that people do when they’re doing incremental puck passer training is to have someone move the rebounder after every hit. That means that the person hitting the puck has to be aware of what exactly is going on around them so they can find the puck passer and pass the puck to it. Being used to having to survey your surroundings can be a much more important skill on the ice than one might think at first, but it can make or break an entire game pretty easily.
You can also do things like setting up obstacle courses to make it harder to hit. Most people just use whatever they have lying around the house, but make sure that you’re thinking of safety when you get it set up. Towels, cones, stacks of magazines or newspapers, and blankets are all good ideals. You probably won’t want to use things like knives, large chairs, or anything of that sort because it could be dangerous if the person practicing messes up and crashes into them. With that in mind, constructing obstacle courses is a great way to train for hockey.
Enjoy Some Multi-Person Training Sessions
There are a lot of different ways to conduct a group training session. Ask your coach, they definitely know all about it. It can take a lot of thought to make sure that your group training session is going to help everyone out as much as possible. After all, you’re looking to get everyone there to be a little more skilled at least by the end of the training session. It can be incredibly hard work to make sure that everyone is getting the training they need to help them improve at the things that they aren’t so great at.
This is another great use of the hockey rebounder. It has three different sides so three people can train using a single hockey rebounder at one time. That makes it an ideal choice for multi-person training. This is especially useful if there is more than one person on your team that needs some help training for accuracy. You can save time by having all three of them work on it at once, meaning that your entire team can save a great deal of time overall. The less time spent on improving a single skill, the more time your entire team can spend strategizing.
Many parents that have multiple children playing hockey especially love this device. You can use the same puck passer for more than one child, and even have the older child give some tips to the younger child so they can learn as much as possible incredibly easily. It can also save you some money on training gear because it can be used by more than one child over time. Those are just a couple of the reasons why parents love hockey passer s so much in general, and more and more hockey parents grow to love it every day.
Use More Than One Puck Passer
If you’re feeling really courageous there are some drills that you can do with more than one puck passer that is sure to improve your hockey skills a lot. It can, once again, take a bit of creativity, but you wouldn’t want to pass it up just because of that. Getting these skills down to muscle memory can make or break an entire game pretty easily. If you’re looking to bring home the gold year after year, you’re going to need to get more than a little creative with your practice sessions.
Using more than one puck passer in a single session means that you can rapid-fire practice your passing skills. One of the most common ways to do this is to have a pattern that you pass to. Maybe you have three out so you go top, left, bottom, and repeat until you’re tired. That can be great for getting used to having to pass the puck to multiple places on the rink, which is much closer to what will actually be happening during games. Little things like that can make a whole world of difference when it matters the most.
You could combine multiple puck passers with an obstacle course to really increase the challenge level. That means that you would need to practice navigating a crowded rink while keeping the puck in your possession. Many people that do it this way will even make different puck passers worth different amounts of points depending on how difficult the shot would be to make. Getting that ingrained into your brain makes playing a lot easier in general, and that’s a good thing for everyone on the team including you or the hockey player that’s in your family.
Some people will even take it a step further and get extra gear to help out with their training. It’s not uncommon for people to get puck launchers so they can get the full experience of passing around a puck without needing another person, while some people will use an all-terrain puck so they don’t need to do this on the ice. Really, the possibilities are limitless. You could even use a stick weight to make your hockey stick weigh more, and thus provide you with a little extra weight training on top of your accuracy training that you’re already doing.
Getting Creative With Your Training
Hockey training can be just as fun as it is rewarding if you have the proper tools and a little bit of creativity. Whether you want to use the latest and greatest cutting-edge hockey training tools to help improve your skills or you just wanna do it the old-fashioned way, you can accomplish some pretty great feats if the proper training is done. You never know what you’re capable of until you try, and using the proper tools will help you laser focus your skills so you can get better at the things that you might not be so great at.