One shift. Three numbers that HELIOS is actually measuring.

There's a moment every hockey parent, player, and coach knows well. The game ends, you pull out your phone, and the numbers are right there. Active Time. Time On Ice. Stride Time.

And the first question is almost always the same: what's the difference?

It's a fair question. They sound similar. But each one is measuring something distinct and understanding all three changes how you see the game.

Here's the complete picture.

Skating is two things.

Before the numbers make sense, one idea has to click first. Skating isn't one thing.

It's two: striding and gliding.

Striding is legs pushing: the explosive, high-effort part. Every stride a player takes requires muscle, conditioning, and intent. Forwards, backwards, crossovers are all included.

Gliding is the coasting that happens after: built-up speed being used, not generated. Both are skating. But they are not the same work.

Keep that distinction in your head, because it's the key to reading every HELIOS number correctly.

Active Time: the full shift.

Active Time (Bench-to-Bench) starts the moment a player leaves the bench and ends the moment they return. Everything that happens in between – skating, gliding, standing at a faceoff, waiting through a stoppage – all of it counts.

Active Time doesn't edit. It's the full, uncut version of the shift. It's the shift the bench clock sees.

Total Active Time is just this number added up across every shift including stoppages in the game. The whole night's deployment in one figure.

Time on Ice: the honest shift.

Time On Ice takes the same shift and cleans it up. It removes the long stoppages: the whistles, the icing calls, the faceoff setups, and keeps only the time a player was genuinely out there playing with the game clock ticking.

Why does that matter? 

Because hockey stops. A lot. A typical shift has roughly 25% standing time once you factor out stoppages. Two players with identical Active Times could have very different Time On Ice numbers. One was caught out for two icing calls and a long scrum while the other barely stopped moving.

Time On Ice is the fairest answer to the question every coach and parent actually wants answered: how much did a player really play?

It's also the number most affected by what systems analytics platforms struggle to measure accurately. Video-based tools estimate time on ice from camera angles and jersey numbers and their accuracy degrades with video quality.

HELIOS reads it directly from the sensor, on every shift, at practice and in games, instantly.

Stride Time: the engine.

Stride Time goes one layer deeper. It's not the full shift including stoppages. It's not even the clean skating time. It's only the moments when a player's legs are actively pushing, stride after stride.

Gliding doesn't count. Coasting after a sprint doesn't count. Only the actual drive.

This is the number that says the most about how hard a shift was physically worked. A player can have strong Time On Ice and modest Stride Time. This would be that they were on the ice, moving efficiently, gliding into position. Another player might pack the same Time On Ice with significantly more Stride Time, but forechecking hard, tracking back, grinding every second.

Neither is automatically better. They're different roles. Now you can see them.

So within any single shift, the relationship is always: Stride Time ≤ Time On Ice ≤ Active Time

Each nested inside the next. Each a stricter view of the same 60 seconds.

What these numbers mean to each of you.

For parents: Time On Ice tells you how much your player actually played. Stride Time starts to tell you how hard they worked while they were out there. Watching both across a season, not just one game, is where real development becomes visible.

For coaches: The gap between Active Time and Time On Ice tells you about deployment quality. The gap between Time On Ice and Stride Time tells you about effort and role execution. A player with lower Stride Time isn't loafing. They could be gliding and reading the play.

For players: These numbers are a mirror. Not a judgment, but a mirror. They show you what's actually happening in your game, separate from points and highlights. A rising Stride Time across a season means the engine is getting stronger. Watch it over time, not shift to shift.

What film alone can't give you.

Video platforms break down what happened on the ice: shot locations, zone entries, passing sequences. That's valuable. But they can't break a shift into these three layers. They can't separate striding from gliding. They can't tell you how much of that shift was live skating versus stoppages. And they can't do any of it at practice, where the foundation actually gets built.

HELIOS does all of this, directly from the sensor, from the first drill of the first practice to the final whistle of the last game.

In the next email we're going deeper into what Stride Time specifically reveals about effort and fatigue, and the single metric that ties everything together: the Energy Ratio.

START STRIDING