Season Starting Part 1

There's nothing like the energy of the first few weeks back.

Players are excited. The rink is loud again. Everyone wants to make a statement: more ice, more reps, more intensity, right out of the gate. And there's a real coaching instinct behind that. Work them into game shape fast, get conditioning built before puck drop, treat the first few weeks like cramming for opening night.

That instinct isn't wrong. Players do need to get game-ready, and the first weeks back are when that happens. The real question isn't whether to push hard early. It's how to build that intensity in a way that actually pays off by the time games matter instead of working against itself.

Here's what the research says.

For years, the assumption in team sports was simple: more training load equals more injury risk. But a large body of sports-science research, much of it from performance scientist Dr. Tim Gabbett, found something more useful. It's not hard training itself that raises risk. It's how fast that training ramps up relative to what a player's body has recently handled.

In fact, well-conditioned athletes who build load gradually tend to be more resilient, not less. Gabbett calls this the "training-injury prevention paradox": properly progressed hard training is actually protective.¹ The risk shows up when load jumps too fast, not from training hard in general.²

That's genuinely good news. It means the goal for these first few weeks isn't to hold back. It's to ramp up with intention. And the research says that's one of the most effective ways to help a team peak when it matters most.

What "ramping with intention" actually looks like in practice.

It starts with building total practice volume gradually across the first few weeks, rather than jumping straight to full intensity because everyone's excited to be back. A team that goes from two sessions a week to five in a matter of days is asking a lot of bodies that haven't done that work in months. Giving that jump a runway of two or three weeks instead of two or three days is what actually lets it stick.

Total practice volume isn't always something a coach controls. Ice time is often locked in well before the season starts. What is controllable is what happens inside that ice time. Starting the first sessions with lower-intensity skating and skills work before layering in the harder, more competitive drills lets players get their legs and hands back under them without piling on cumulative fatigue in week one. The ice time stays the same; what changes is how hard that time is spent.

It also means mixing in lower-intensity or lower-volume days between the hard ones, so the work a player just put in actually gets absorbed instead of piling on top of yesterday's fatigue. A hard Tuesday followed by an easier Wednesday isn't losing momentum; it's what makes Thursday's hard practice possible.

And it means watching the trend across a full week rather than judging everything by how any single practice felt, since one great or rough session tells you a lot less than five or six days looked at together.
None of this means easing off. It means building the way the research shows works best. We want the player who's flying in October is the same one who looked great in Week 1.

Coming up in Part 2: How to actually see this ramp-up happening in real time: reading a full week of Load and Energy Ratio together so you know a player's training is building them up the way it should.

See you next week,
Team HELIOS

¹ Gabbett TJ. The training-injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder? Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):273-280.
² Hulin BT, Gabbett TJ, Lawson DW, et al. The acute:chronic workload ratio predicts injury. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(4):231-236.