Jake Hugessen – Hockey Training Success
Chapter Overview:
0:00 Intro
0:08 Off-season Training with LPS
2:19 Performance Improvements
5:54 What Dominate means for Jake
7:33 Culture Experience at LPS
I’m Jake Hugessen. I’m a hockey player from Toronto.
This is my first off season training at LPS. I’m heading down to Boston next week. Played in New Jersey in the EHL last year. And I’ll be playing in Boston in the EHL this upcoming season. I’ve always had some doubts about how I’ve been training and preparing for these past seasons. So I felt like at the end of last year I needed to…
To find somewhere where it was going to make it easy for me to put the work in and succeed. I did a little looking around of places in Toronto near where I live to work out. And LPS just ended up at the top of my list after a couple of phone calls where I ended up.
It’s my first off season training here. I’m super excited to see what year two is going to bring. So, I remember coming in, I actually remember my first week here, we were doing some hurdle jumps, and there were a couple guys who were jumping with me, and I remember looking at those, thinking like, wow, I can’t even like, I wasn’t even close to jumping over those, and just using something as little as that.
Like, nowadays, it’s basically a warm up. So, yeah, definitely the training cycles, the way they were set up, allowed me to work up to my maxes, and then start back again the next week, with higher reps. It takes a couple of months for sure. The first couple of months, I remember, I was sore when I woke up, I was sore when I went home, I was sore when I trained.
And then, you just give it a couple of months and eventually you wake up one morning and you’re like, Oh, my knees don’t hurt. My back doesn’t hurt. But yeah, so I could definitely feel physically and mentally as I progressed throughout the summer and never felt better heading into this season.
So as a goalie, a lot of people overlook the need for strength and explosiveness. Since the first day I was in here, I was working with Clance just making sure that first step was explosive and strong. And I’ve never felt better on the ice with my core stability, my legs.
I feel smooth and controlled all the time, which is definitely a big improvement. And it’s actually been what I’ve been trying to fix in my game for years now. And I guess I never realized that it started in the gym and being stronger and being more controlled starts with just getting stronger.
So especially as a goalie, I’ve always dealt with groin and hip issues and some knee pain pretty much my whole life and my whole hockey career, to be honest. And I’ve always thought it was based on being too tight or not stretching enough or not warming up. That definitely helps.
I felt the most improvement through training, through the full range of motion. Everything we do here is full and range of motion. And even if it’s not directly working my groin or my hips, the stability and the strength that I feel there is never, I’ve never felt that before. So the biggest results that I’ve seen and mostly felt have been on the ice.
I feel stronger. I feel quicker. I feel way more in control. And I just think in general, I can get from point A to point B a lot quicker and most importantly, more efficiently. No more wasted movement. I feel like one of my biggest issues has been a lot of wasted movement, not a lot of efficiency in moving on the ice.
And just getting stronger in here, from basically head to toe, has helped me stay calm and quick on the ice. Few years, I’ve started to try to take my training seriously. I say try because looking at that, I’d almost laugh at what I was doing last year, I’d show up to a public gym.
One day I do push, the next day I do pull, and the following day I’d do legs. And just looking back at that, I was, I got bigger even than I was now, but I felt slow. I felt just clumsy, like clunky. Everything felt slow and was not high intensity at all. I’d go in and I’d say I had trained to failure on bench or squats or whatever it was but nothing compares to showing up to LPS and getting on the platform and still having to go through your five sets of Snatch, five sets of clean and then you still got a squat. Some days you still got a bench.
So definitely a big difference from what I was doing the last few years, even though, my goal has been to train hard for a few years now. That’s why I came here was to have someone to push me in training here. You sit down, you got someone yelling at you to get up and do your next site, even if you just.
out six reps on back squat at ten kilos below your max and all of a sudden they got you right back up there. It’s definitely built my cardio and I feel like my legs are fresher longer on the ice. And I played a few games this summer, And heading into the last period and I’m feeling great.
I’m feeling fine. And, that translates mentally as well. Knowing that you’re more prepared than everybody out there, knowing that you are what you say you are and you put the work in definitely makes it easier to succeed on the ice. And especially as a goalie, a very mental position, just having that real confidence. I’ve always thought I had confidence, but when you’ve worked at LPS your entire offseason, you go into that year more confident, really confident, more confident than you ever have.
DOMINATE to me, is, every day, you wake up and you dominate whatever you got on that day, you show up to LPS and you get your workout done, and by then you’ve already done more than… More than half of your competitors have done by the time you finish that workout. Dominating just the little things, like I learned this summer.
It’s more than just learning how to lift and like on the platform of what to do, but I really learned how to eat. I learned how I needed to sleep to perform in this gym. And I think dominating starts with that, with the little things, with eating right the night before, sleeping right the night before, waking up, having a good breakfast, and then, you show up, and it’s not the easy part, but the hardest part is preparing yourself to get in here, and get in here, you just do the work.
The culture here is definitely a family. I felt that from week one, for sure. From day one, even, you come in here and you’re just surrounded by people, whether it’s in the gym, on the ice or wherever, that want to see you do well for yourself. And I remember driving home one day and just thinking that this is where I want to be because, I got people around me who want to see me do well.
And you don’t really realize how big of an effect that has on your training and performance. But when you want to come in somewhere because he’s there to push you and he may be yelling at you, but it’s coming out of a good place. It makes it a lot easier to come in here and work out every day.
And I’ve definitely met some friends that I’ll definitely have for the rest of my life. From the first day I got in here, I remember, they, the coaching staff, Clance changed up almost everything that I’ve ever been doing. I came in here, I started warming up with my bands. I was telling him my foot was hurting.
He asked me why. Oh, I’ve been training for a half marathon. Looked at me like I had three heads. And he told me stop doing that, but he also told me why he explained why. I remember actually that day I had about a 45-minute conversation with him just on this floor, just talking about why what I was doing was wrong, who he’s seen done that and how.
How that affected their career. And it makes it a lot easier to listen to someone and to follow what they preach when they explain why, and are always happy to help, make sure that you understand, because, when I really started to understand why I was doing what I was doing here, that’s when I started seeing the most results and wanting to come in here because, progress is addicting.
When you start seeing that progress, you want to be in here every day. There would be Thursdays and Saturdays and Sundays when I’d think, damn, I can’t go in and lift today. So just seeing all that and knowing why it’s helping is definitely a good thing in your training.
I’d say for any younger athletes coming up in hockey, in goaltending especially, I can speak on that better. Trust the process. I was never the best. I was probably… Growing up, you just got to trust it. If you love what you do, you’re going to get further than 90 percent of people.
And Clance loves to tell me this, but the hard work becomes easy work once you’ve been at it. The hardest part is mentally showing up and it becomes a bit of a grind. The dog days of August, it’s 30 degrees. You’re waking up and you just know you’re going to go in there and lose 10 pounds of sweat. But yeah, just trust the process because it’s all going to work out if you put the work in and if you truly love what you’re doing.
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