Understanding the Energy Ratio

Last time we covered the three layers inside every shift: Active Time, Time On Ice, and Stride Time – and why each one is a different look at the same 60 seconds.

If you walked away with one thing, it was probably this: Stride Time is the innermost layer. Legs pushing. The actual engine.

Today we go deeper on what that engine is actually telling you, because Stride Time isn't just a snapshot of one shift.

When you combine it with Time On Ice, something we call the Energy Ratio unlocks a completely new way to read the game. And over time, it becomes one of the most honest signals in your HELIOS data.

The Energy Ratio

Once you understand Stride Time and Time On Ice separately, combining them opens up something genuinely useful.

Energy Ratio = Stride Time / Time On Ice.

Of the time a player was on the ice (clock ticking, game happening), what percentage of that time were their legs actually pushing? 

In the example below, the Energy Ratio = 34s / 47s = 79% which is quite high and demonstrates a high-energy shift typical of a Forward.

This means 79% of the player's Time On Ice involves active striding, and the other 21% is gliding on built-up speed or stationary. That 21% isn't wasted as gliding is part of skating, a natural recovery mechanism, and efficient gliding is a skill. But the ratio tells you the balance between the two.

Think of it this way: Time On Ice tells you how long the engine was running. Stride Time tells you how long it was revving at high RPMs. Energy Ratio tells you the efficiency — the quality of output relative to the time on the ice.

Four things that impact Energy Ratio.

Understanding what naturally shifts this number is what separates it from just being another data point.

POSITION

Forwards typically run higher Energy Ratios than Defenders. Forechecking, backchecking, and tracking pucks demands more active striding. Defenders read and glide more by design. 

That's not laziness, it's positional efficiency.

For this reason it's best to compare a player's Energy Ratio to their own baseline and their own position, not to the team average. A defender at 60% and a forward at 60% are telling very different stories.

EFFORT

Move your feet. Play with pace. Every coach says it.

The Energy Ratio is what it looks like in the data.

When a player is genuinely driving: moving with intent, hunting pucks, finishing strides instead of gliding through them, then a higher share of their Time On Ice is active striding. The legs are working. The compete level is there. And the Energy Ratio goes up.

FATIGUE

A player's Energy Ratio will almost always drift slightly lower in the third period than the first. That's normal physiology. The legs do less active pushing as load accumulates. What you're watching for is a dramatic drop, or a player whose Energy Ratio is declining across games or across the season. That's not third-period fatigue. That's something worth addressing.

HOCKEY IQ

This one surprises people. A smart, experienced player can accomplish more with a lower Energy Ratio than a less experienced player with a higher one because good positioning means fewer emergency sprints.

As a player develops, their Energy Ratio doesn't always go up. Sometimes it becomes more efficient by doing more with less, because they're reading the play well enough to not need the extra strides. Don't mistake a declining Energy Ratio for a declining player without checking the context.

What Energy Ratio looks like across a season.

Shift to shift, Energy Ratio bounces around. A hard forecheck shift looks different from a defensive zone shift. A period where a player skates hard for every puck looks different from a shift where they're recovering from a bruising battle along the boards. That's normal. Single shifts are noisy.

But across a full season? The noise starts to clear.

A player whose Stride Time is steadily rising from October to March is doing something real. The engine is getting stronger. More skating work packed into each shift, game after game, without the TOI necessarily changing. That's conditioning. That's development. And it's completely invisible in a point total or a highlight clip.

The opposite is equally revealing. A player whose Energy Ratio is quietly trending down, not because their role changed, but because something else did, is a signal worth paying attention to before it shows up anywhere else. Fatigue. Confidence. A nagging injury they haven't mentioned. Energy Ratio often surfaces these things first, because the legs are the first thing to tell the truth.

For parents, this is the number to watch across a season, not game to game. One low Energy Ratio game means nothing. Three months of declining Energy Ratio means something.

For coaches, it's the number that tells you whether your conditioning program is actually working and if your players are showing up every shift, every practice, every game with their best effort. It's not just whether players look sharp in drills, but whether the physical output is genuinely building.

For players, it's the most honest mirror in the app. More than points. More than highlights. Are the legs doing more work than they were three months ago?

Energy Ratio at practice.

Here's where Energy Ratio earns its place as an important practice metric HELIOS produces.

In a game, Active Time and Time On Ice diverge because of stoppages: the whistles and faceoff setups that the bench clock counts, but real skating time doesn't. In practice, there are no shifts and no long stoppages inside a drill. Active Time and Time On Ice land on nearly the same number per rep.

But Stride Time still varies and drives Energy Ratio. Because the legs are either pushing or they aren't and that's true in a drill exactly the same way it is in a game.

Energy Ratio at practice is how you measure how much a player is actually working in each rep, versus just going through the motions.

It's the number that tells a coach whether the team's conditioning is building or coasting. And it's the number that tells a parent whether their player is bringing real effort to Tuesday's practice – the practice that doesn't have an audience, and doesn't have a scoreboard.

Systems analytics platforms don't cover practice at all. They're built for game film. HELIOS captures this every single session which means the foundation of a player's development is actually measurable, not just assumed.

The complete picture.

Here's how all four numbers work together across a shift, and then across a season.

Active Time tells you how long a player was out there — bench to bench, stoppages included.

Time On Ice tells you how much of that was real game time.

Stride Time tells you how much the legs were moving.

And the Energy Ratio tells you the quality of that effort — the balance between driving and gliding that defines the kind of skater a player is becoming.

Reading them together, not in isolation, is where the story lives.

A player whose Time On Ice is strong but Energy Ratio is quietly declining is losing something in the engine. A player whose Energy Ratio holds steady or rises across a full season, even as their TOI increases, is building exactly the physical foundation that makes a system executable come game day.

HELIOS shows you what it took to make it, whether the player had the engine to sustain it, and whether that engine is getting stronger.

That's the complete picture.