Hey everyone, I want to say I am super pumped that you're here and watching this video and excited to learn how to play hockey. It is one of the greatest sports in the world and it's going to be so fun to show you how to get started. I'm Adam from Vital Hockey, the first live online training program in the sport.
All right, this is a three video series and in this series I'm going to show you the six key fundamentals to getting going with the sport. Today I'm going to specifically focus on the grip and our body position. Field hockey is really really fun sport. It's really fast, it's frenetic and it's very technical.
So you need a certain amount of skills to be able to play and have fun. That's why it's really important that you pay attention and get the fundamentals right at the beginning and that's going to let you improve. a lot faster and get way more enjoyment out of the game.
Now I know some of you are thinking, you know, why should I be listening to Adam about how to play hockey? Well, for a start, I've been coaching 20 years and I know what some of you are thinking, 20 years? there's no way that guy looks way too young to be coaching 20 years but i promise you it's true i am quite an old man and i've been coaching hockey my entire adult life in fact i've coached under 10s i've coached high school i coached college i've coached under 21s i've coached club level and i've coached international masters international level at a world cup so all the way through one of the awesome things about hockey the many awesome things about hockey is this truly global game i've been fortunate enough to work with players from South Africa, from the Netherlands, from Belgium, from Germany, from Hong Kong, from India, Pakistan, Ireland, Australia and of course England. Now that's given me an awesome view into how the games played all the way around the world. I've seen different skills and different approaches to hockey but the great thing is I've been able to see how good players from all these different regions what's common about them what What do they all do well that makes them a good hockey player?
And boiling down all those commonalities into the absolute fundamentals of learning how to play. That's what I've got for you right here today. Okay, first up the grip.
How do we hold our hockey stick? And actually there's two important base grips that we want to use. One grip for when we have the ball. Okay and then another grip for when we don't have the ball and we're trying to win it back.
So first up when we have the ball, how do we want to grip it? it? Well with our left hand we want to make sure our thumb goes down the back side, the curved side of the stick.
Alright you want your left thumb running straight down the back of the grip. Hold it nice and firm. Alright you should be able to hold the weight of the stick pretty easily and have that thumb on the handle.
That gives you a lot of great feel and touch for the hockey ball. So this is our left hand. The right hand goes in a circle like this, very loose.
Alright almost no pressure and so this is how we're going to hold our stick and the ball is outside our right foot so there we go we have our we have our grip now how do we practice well we use a very complicated and scientific practice aid to help us with this it's called a toilet roll right a used toilet roll all right you're going to pop that on your stick and that goes down at the bottom of the grip So we use our left hand grip as we just said, left thumb down the back and then we hold on to our toilet roll. So this means we don't apply too much pressure and we're using mostly the left hand to control the stick. So practice, we're going to have two cones a couple of yards apart and we're just going to try and move the ball around the cones.
So we can start on the open side and we're just going to move. and then maybe go back the other way. Let's get our feet round the ball. One important thing to know when you start to play hockey, the most important rule, the ball's not allowed to hit your foot.
Okay, so when we're moving with the ball, we're practicing our grip, when we're practicing anything, we can never let the ball hit our foot. So that's our on the ball grip, and to practice that, try going around the cones about 10 times each direction, and that'll get you more used to moving with the ball. Now, when we don't have the ball, what is our grip like? I like to call this the frying pan grip. And that's because we hold it like a frying pan.
So you're going to have your left thumb this time going down the flat side of the stick, right? Not the curved side, the flat side. And then our right hand just supports that underneath. And this is how we We're trying to jab the ball away from somebody like this.
So we have our stick like this in this frying pan, and we're going to protect our feet when we don't have the ball. We don't let the ball hit our feet like this. And then we can go forward and try and nip the ball away from the opposition player.
So this is our grip when we don't have the ball. So we switch from this to this, depending on whether we have the ball or not. Now, to practice this grip and to practice our jabs a little bit, I want you to find...
a wall or a board anything you can knock the ball against all right make sure you get permission from your parents first and then you want to get the ball about just a meter away from the board we're going to get our frying pan grip we're just going to jab at the ball and move it into the board all right and then just practice that okay And that is really the first step in defending, the first step in tackling, and but mainly the first step in using this grip, the frying pan grip. Okay now we're going to talk about body position and just like with the grip they're kind of two main types of body position depending on whether we have the ball or whether we're trying to win the ball. Now, if we have the ball, the best way to think about our body position when we have the hockey ball is...
Apologies, there's a little bit of a toilet theme going on in this episode. I'm going to make sure that doesn't bleed through to the rest of the channel. But, on a serious note, this is where we want to be. We want to have our knees bent and our back straight.
Okay, this allows us to... see the ball and a lot of the field at the same time. We want the ball outside of our right foot. We have our grip.
All right. As we just talked about. And now I can see the ball.
I can see passing options and I can see my teammates because my chest and my back is. straight, my knees are bent. A lot of the mistakes that beginners make and even advanced hockey players make as well is our legs get straight, we bend at the waist and we look into the floor and that reduces all of our game options. So we've really got to make sure that we're nice and squatted, our bent knees straight back, this is how we want to play hockey.
So let's get back to our two cones. We're going to do the same thing we did before but we're going to make sure that we're in the right position. position with our knees bent on our back straight.
So we're going to go around those cones in both directions. And again that's a great drill if you're just starting out, just moving in between the cones, keeping your knees bent, back straight. And lastly we're going to talk about our body position when we don't have the ball and we want to try and win it.
So the important thing here is not to be chest on, we want to be sideways, okay, with our hips pointing at the ball, and then we have our frying pan grip. So we have it in our left hand, we have a, we still want really nicely bent knees, but this time, instead of being kind of straight on. we're going to be sideways and the way we move with the ball is we move in two different directions at 45 degrees.
So we always want to stay sideways which means we kind of sidestep back as the ball comes towards us and if the ball changes direction we can flip our hips and go back the other way. The ball's coming down your left side then you switch to the hips and you're going to be open like this but going back sideways. If the ball comes down your right then you flip this way okay sideways again So that's the key to defending without the ball is to always be sideways instead of front on.
We do some zigzag runs back and forth to get our body and our hips used to this kind of strange movement. First off we can take a couple of steps diagonally back to our right then we switch our hips and then we take a few steps back to our left. Switch again and we come forward the same way. That is the art of defending and that's what we want to really get used to when we start playing hockey. So moving sideways, left foot forward or right foot forward, but never both feet forward.
Try doing about 10 of those little hip shuffles. and you're going to get used to the movement pretty quick. So that's it for today.
Quick recap. When we have the ball we're going to have this strong left hand, thumb down the back, loose right hand. We're going to bend our knees back straight, have that ball outside the right foot.
our hockey position. When we don't have the ball, front hand grip, sideways on, alright left hand coming forward with a nice little jab to get the ball. Thanks for joining in, thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it.
Please click subscribe button if you want to find out when the next two parts come. We're going to be working on the other four fundamentals of learning how to play hockey. If you enjoyed it, I'd love a thumbs up.
Hope to see you soon. Keep getting better, bye!