Groin Injuries are Preventable

By Jack Blatherwick

The NHL has had a rash of groin injuries earlier this year, and there have been several articles written about the causes — none of which hits the nail on the head.

The major cause of groin (or hip-flexor) injuries is that hockey players don’t train in the summer like they want to be hockey players. They don’t skate enough.

There are other extenuating circumstances.  For example: 1) The ice in NHL arenas is horrible in all but a couple buildings, but this has always been true, because they’re used for other events.

2) There are more penalties than ever this year, so players who are not on the penalty kill or power play units will often sit for several minutes, getting stiff and cold.  Then they jump on the ice and play at full speed.  So don’t sit.  Stand up once in awhile, do a couple squats. Keep the muscles active and warm.

3) The third extenuating problem is warmup.  If coaches from other sports observed NHL game warmups, they’d question our collective IQ’s.  First, most players start some kind of light off-ice activity 30-60 minutes before the on-ice warmup.  This is 60-90 minutes before the game, and it’s value is certainly questionable, given that we sit around twice after the off-ice activity, doing nothing more active than dressing.

After the first lengthy sit, there is a 15 minute warmup on-ice. Ironically, the very first thing we do on the ice is kneel and stretch.  This one is worth repeating, because it might sound like a joke, but it’s not. We stretch on the ice and call it a “warmup.”

Some players defend this unique hockey superstition by claiming the shin pads insulate much of the cold from their joints. Perhaps some of the cold — but regardless, stretching is not a warmup.  We cause more groin injuries by this on-ice stretch than we prevent.

Fact to remember: Stretching is not a warmup.  Fact 2: ice is not warm.

After the skating warmup there are another 25 minutes of inactivity while the ice is resurfaced.  Then — just to show that we are different from any other sport in the world — players are not allowed to skate around the ice for a final warmup.  Compare this to basketball and football, where they are allowed — even required — to warm up after coming out from the locker room.

Then we stand motionless for five minutes during the national anthem — longer if it’s one of those melodramatic opera singers.  And finally, the puck is dropped and competition starts at full speed.  Players are stiff, cold, and removed from the first warmup activity by 90 minutes.  Try telling a serious track sprinter to follow our routine: light activity starts 90 minutes before your event.  Sit and cool down two different times for 20-30 minutes each.  Stand motionless while singing your school song and finally, after doing nothing active for the last 25 minutes, you’re ready to go.  Step up to the starting blocks and sprint.

Duh?

4) An evolutionary complication or two: the core of our body (hip/abdominal area) is — at very best — not capable of maintaining a symmetrical strength relationship.  For example, the small groin muscles (adductors) cannot possibly match the strength of the extremely large hamstring and gluteal muscles that extend the leg backwards at the hip and to the outside (abduction) during the skating stride.  This is especially true when we add muscle mass to these primary movers with intense strength training.

Charles Darwin never claimed that natural selection should prepare our hips for skating — only that the “fittest” will survive until they are just barely old enough to pass on their genes.  “Core stability” is a myth, really, given the impossibility of muscular balance.  This is not meant to imply there is nothing we can do to protect groin muscles from the explosiveness and the unique, wide range of motion in skating.

Biological note: I checked at the Smithsonian Institution, and there is no evidence of skating as a past-time among other species. The hip structure of other animals simply does not accommodate this wide range of motion — and perhaps this is somewhat true for us as well.  We are reaching positions while skating that simply are not matched by any other animals in history or by humans in other sports. Keep this in mind when you are tempted to over-stretch.

Groin problems have become a greater problem in hockey in the last three decades, as we’ve developed super-intense training for the quadriceps, gluteals, and hamstrings in order to achieve more powerful extension in the skating stride.  However, the downside is that the muscular imbalance in our hips has been multiplied.

Certainly, we must continue to strengthen groin muscles, but their strength or mass can never match that of their antagonists.  So, our training plans should include exercises to prepare groin muscles to accommodate this imbalance plus the explosiveness and extreme range of motion in skating. This is accomplished best in the most obvious way — skating more in the off-season.

5) Our biggest mistake in hockey, and the heart of the groin problem is that we don’t skate enough in the summer — nor do we incorporate enough skating-specific dryland exercises.

The best way to prevent groin injuries is to skate. It is also worth repeating a thousand times that skating improvement is the highest priority in the development of every hockey player, so we are accomplishing two very high priorities with each skating workout.

Why not practice agility on the ice, rather than the football field — quickness on skates, rather than on the track.  Work on fundamentals first, then skate fast with quick changes in direction. Add stops-and-starts, and all-out races after building up to this high intensity gradually over several weeks,

Try telling a young speed-skater or figure skater they shouldn’t skate for six months.  We might have the same success telling Lance Armstrong not to ride a bike — or a world-class swimmer not to swim.

Basketball, football, and soccer players train by sprinting — not biking.  We’re gullible in hockey, and when personal trainers tell us not to skate, we don’t.  Then we wonder why we have groin problems when we return to training camp.

There are many other explosive, athletic exercises that simulate skating, and these should be added to every off-season program: slide board intervals, side-sprints uphill, skating treadmill, in-line rollers, and many others. Unless groin muscles are used explosively in a skating range of motion, there is no exercise that will — by itself — prevent muscle strains.

Considering the loss of playing time in the NHL at the beginning of each season, we might someday conclude that if we want to be hockey players we better train like hockey players.

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