The Beer League Plateau: Why You’re Stuck (and How to Break Through)

THE_BEER_LEAGUER:
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Hockey players at all levels, but especially beer leaguers and particularly beginner to intermediate level Beer Leaguers hit a plateau on their hockey development. Now, this might come six months It might come six years in. So how do you get through it and On this episode of the Beer Leaguer podcast, we're talking all about plateauing as a hockey player. So this time around, we're going to look at figuring out, are you actually plateaued as a hockey player? And if you are, what are some things you can do to identify what you're actually plateaued at and how do you bust through those? So first we're going to talk about what isn't a plateau for hockey development, not scoring as much as you want or not being able to pull off fancy moves like a Michigan or something like that. That's not really a plateau. Maybe if you're a high level person and you know you're playing hockey for a long time, and you're not able to pull off some new skill moves that you're trying. Possibly. But for beer leaguers, just not scoring doesn't mean you're in a plateau. See, a lot of people think, hey, a game or once every two games But I haven't scored in like two Something's wrong. Not necessarily. Sometimes, you know, it just It's hockey. It's not the most linear of So not scoring whenever you want or not being able to pull off fancy stuff does not mean that you've plateaued in your hockey development. Not necessarily. Maybe. Honestly, this is a harsh truth. Maybe you're just not as good as You think you should be doing a That's not a plateau. That's just having unrealistic Never practicing, but expecting Game to game to game to game. That's just not practicing. So you're not going to get any you play a lot of hockey. doing the same thing every game, moves, the same everything, and or not having different results. Again, not plateauing. That's just being an idiot and doing the same thing over and over and expecting something new to happen. So have you plateaued in your development or have you just hit your peak? Peak hockey player for everybody Uh, you know, it's kind of hard to tell if you're someone that started off later in life if you've hit your peak now, if you're someone that's been playing for a really long time, you probably should know if you've hit your peak as a hockey player because it probably happened already. If you're in beer league. So what actually is a legitimate and break through if you don't evolving if you're not, like I and over again, but you're not you're not having other parts of game to game, but chunks of that, and you're actively trying And it's not. That's a plateau. If you have specific skills that you're trying to work on and they're not getting better after you practice them, that's a plateau. Okay. So you've determined you hockey skills development. What do you do? Step number one determine what This is going to set up This is super important. Really what you want to do is you want to break it down as much as possible into the smallest bite size thing you can. So you can figure out everything So for instance, if you're skating is plateauing, that's a and fix at once. Whereas if you say, hey, I'm it's a little bit better. You know, that's something a can work on. But if you say, hey, I'm losing speed when I'm transitioning from forwards to backwards skating, okay, that is a small, very tangible thing that you can use to try and improve that on and see improvement on and maybe build up other skating things from that. So that's that's like a bite That's where you want to be. So you want to break it down as much as possible because smaller goals easier to see progress on progress. Always good to see and really You know the whole how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time thing. It's kind of like that. And when you're trying to at and trying to break it down, yourself for it. Some people, this is easy. For some people, it's not, uh, yourself play hockey. I know, I know, it sucks to It looks like you're in slow seen it or get somebody who can game and tell you something to on, hey, like I said, like to get better at skating, but particularly to look at. If you have somebody that can go to, hey, I want to get better at skating, can you tell me something very specific to work on? It sucks to hear about things No one likes it, but you kind of If you want to bust through on that plateau and get better at it. Now, this is a little bit of a Stick with me on this. But there are different types of plateaus, and they all kind of work differently for how you see stuff plateaued, what they do to you, and they all have different ways to try and break through them. So I'm going to explain those as best as I can and give, hopefully give some context that you'll understand of what I'm talking about and different ways you can try and break through these plateaus. So just trust me. Listen, it'll make sense as we All right, first off, you have someone that's, quote, just playing games. Uh, and by that, I mean you You're just showing up and better from that. Uh, games are not a great way to practice any kind of skill stuff. Uh, a lot of times you will fall comfortable with, and you'll good at during games. That's a very natural thing to So how do you break through One, you can either just accept and be like, hey, you're going at, you're going to mess up. That's okay. Or if you can get the thing this will be a running theme It's a lot easier to try and work on one really small thing in the context of a game versus something larger. So again, going back to that I'm just trying to get better at you're going to work on that Yeah, you skate, but you know, again, to the back and forth, uh, transitions. Just start doing them a lot Maybe you suck at them, but that's something you can work on during a game while you're playing in the context of the game and try and get better at it. All right. The next one, uh, we'll call illusion that some people have, overestimates their hockey IQ. And really, you have to know that there's understanding hockey and there's being able to execute it. Those are not the same thing, And the game looks very different from like what you watch on TV or if you're playing video games or anything like that, to understand what they're supposed to be doing versus your first person perspective of what's on the ice and what you can and can't see, it's always a lot easier to see top down and see the entire rink or half rink at once versus your field of view, because you know you can't see everything, you can't see all around you, you can't see behind you, you can't see people behind other people and stuff like that. So a lot of people have the thing where they think, hey, I know hockey, I have a great hockey IQ. I should be able to do this If that's one of your issues What's the solution for that You can watch yourself and as not you playing and try and take So again, going back to watching yourself on video, uh, again, same thing I talked about before. Talk to teammates or somebody that's watching games that will give you an honest evaluation about things and knows someone knows what they're talking about, hopefully to tell you things that you're doing wrong or, uh, that you think you're doing correctly, that you just don't see. And another thing you can do that you can actually totally do yourself, and this helps a lot with this type of thing, is concentrate on how you're playing when you are not near the puck. A lot of people that kind of in quotes, uh, are real good with the puck, but not great Uh, because that's not what they That's usually what people, when you're watching the game on TV or even live, that's a lot of times what you're not paying attention to. So if you pay more attention to can really help. That can make a big difference. Another thing that people do, another plateau that people hit, is falling back into comfort zones. So it's doing the same thing It's kind of your safe plays Uh, it can be anything from you because you don't want to carry know, shooting to someone that better player, anything like a very comfortable space all the out of that. And how do you how do you bust Well, one. Concentrate on breaking the Remember small goals, small things that you're trying to do you're trying to improve A lot easier to concentrate on something big while you're And really, when you're doing notice you are always falling comfortable with, it's important trying to do something that's a zone, and not necessarily how You know, for the example of pucks into the zone and you Look at how many times you tried Not how many times you through, you know, five other How many times did you get the You know, it all moved forward without just throwing it into the zone. Look at that stuff versus kind to get to. Again, small goals, small little achievable, easily achievable goals that you're trying to set for yourself. There you go. Another type of plateau that a that having better teammates or Uh, really being the weakest strongest player on a team is usually not great at all. Uh, you wind up then using other people's skills to, you know, handle things that you're refusing to improve at from yourself. And that's not good. That's not going to help you at So if you're doing that, what Listen, if you're the weakest player on your team, Play your role better. Don't try and do everything Find what your role on that team And that helps you define what you break down again, smaller can try during a game to get be better at hockey. If you're the strongest player on the team or one of the stronger players on the team, you're still trying to get better outside your comfort zone. Do things that you don't I mean, hey, if you're one of try and do a lot more shooting, actively try and help the other in any way you can. This really goes to a lot of having ringers that people don't no fun out there. The ones that just sit back and, you know, play defense and don't let anybody get by them, That's not fun. That sucks to play against. No one likes that. You're not doing anybody any But the ones that you know, hey, I'm gonna take the puck up and, you know, try and get a good outlet to someone so they can maybe get a breakaway or get, you know, get the puck in the zone and try and set someone up really nicely for a great shot, or really trying to work something in the offensive zone and work the puck around or defensively. We're gonna talk a lot more than I normally would to try and involve my teammates and tell them what I'm expecting them to do, or what they should be doing. That kind of stuff might not be you improve as one of the while also helping other players Another category type of plateau that people hit, and I think this is a super common one, is you don't want to look dumb, you don't want to fail in front of everybody. Uh, this is especially with big as adults, kids, they don't care Usually they just get back up Adults are way more self conscious about this stuff for some reason. You know you don't want to fail. You don't want to look dumb, you So you kind of just stop pushing Don't. It's beer league. I mean, the end of day, it You know, it's not life or death out there, so you should push yourself. You have to separate your ego learn from the things that And oh, I hate this term, but Fail up. And by that I mean, when you something from that so you get So even if you continually fail not good at, you incrementally little bit better, a little bit A lot of times as adults, just in general in life, you don't do that. So you're definitely not going But hockey is a place to do Hockey is a place to fall down to look dumb, especially beginners. One of the best things in the beginner class when I took it is they would stop drills if nobody was falling, so we would be doing skating drills and if nobody fell, they would stop the drill and go, okay, I guess we have to make it harder and either go faster or do some something more extreme of, you know, a skating drill or stick handling drill to really push people. Because if you know you weren't falling, you weren't trying not saying that everybody had a fall, but if nobody did, that meant the drill was way too easy. Everybody could do it with no And I think that's a good lesson when you're trying to get better I'm going to keep reiterating Adults don't want to look dumb in front of other adults for some reason, especially when they're trying something new like hockey. It's difficult. There's a lot of things going on Uh, you've heard me talk about it with, like, Mike Steiner when he's been on the show, that a big difference between low level and high level beer Leaguers is high level. Beer leaguers started skating so they don't think about it. It's like walking. They're just worried about doing Whereas people that started as think of skating. It's still very much on our It's not something you do So when you try and do other circuiting because you're trying You're going to fail at it, Who cares? Especially if it's in front of Who cares? I get it, you don't want to do it in the middle of the game, but if you're not in the middle of a game and you're in some kind of learn to play or skating practice or something like that, or stick and puck, who cares if you look like an idiot, fall all over the place you're wearing pads, you're not going to get hurt. Okay? I think that made my point. You know, and on that note, I'm Skating, I think is kind of its own thing, because more so than any other skill in hockey, skating can limit everything you can do. You can be an amazing stick terrible skater, that's going to But beginners especially seem to stop working on getting better at skating. Once they kind of get basics just kind of forget that you like you've hit this level and a And there's so much more to do very basic, I don't fall down Usually. Speed is not the issue with Uh, you know, you have kind of it's usually more a problem with So maybe you skate really fast, away, so quickly from it, more Or you can skate fast, but you're not at all agile, so you can't, you know, change directions or anything or really do anything else besides go straight line. So straight line speed. Not the be all, end all. It's agility and efficiency are as if not more important than that. And really, honestly, most plateaus that you have with skills are probably a skating plateau that's holding that back. So you can't do those other So what can you do to try and Like I said, break it down into Find small things in your skating that you can get better at, uh, get better at your skills, the mechanics of your skating. It's not really like a fitness It's the mechanics of skating. I'm sure we've all seen kind of that totally look out of shape business being out there with a out somehow they're always going They always get there. They're out skating people because they have amazing mechanics that have, like, stayed with them since they were kids. You know, you can work on things and other stuff. That's not necessarily just Small Area Games is a great help We have a rink that has like a and it is the most tiring hockey because it is almost nothing but It's like you skate a stride, maybe to stop, change direction, stride, or to stop change direction. Like because it's a small like So when you play that with like two goalies on it, it is insanely exhausting. But it is a great way to work on agility because there isn't a you are constantly kind of and jump around and stuff, more And finally get a skating There's tons of power skating skating coaches that will help hockey players that will help They're out there, you know, join a class, get a couple people together and hire somebody to do a couple sessions with you. Do a private session if you want, but they are definitely out there. There's lots of ways to get better with your skating. And then also use that to need to get better with. Your skating can really help a Okay, back to the regular All right. The plateau of I just want to That's the thing you hear a lot is someone just goes, well, I just want to get better at hockey. I'm reiterating it through all You need to pick something The smaller the better. Okay, I think I've reiterated Hopefully for everybody there is the people that are playing on the wrong level, causing a plateau. So when you play at too high of a level, you're just kind of like in survival mode the whole game. You know, you're not getting to You're just trying to survive And when you play at too low of probably not even trying. You're on autopilot the whole So what do you do? I mean, obviously change the level you're playing at, change teams you're playing on, you know, maybe mix it up and play on a higher or lower level team occasionally, you know, if you have like fill ins or reserves that you can get on at a different level, maybe do that to help out, try and find some pick up games or stick and pucks or something like that to get in. That's at a different level than what you're currently playing at and, you know, see if that can help you maybe assess the things that you're not doing as well and find the faults in your game. You know, you can think you're doing pretty good and you don't know why you're not getting better. And then go play a couple step or two above where you Not huge jumps, but like step or And those faults in your game the things that you're not good to improve at. And you can take those back and go through the rest of this list, hopefully find ways to improve those things from that experience. And finally, the last thing I have to talk about plateaus are people that don't practice at all. I mean, come on, if you're not form, not doing anything off but then complaining that you're know how to help you. I don't know how. Hopefully that makes sense. Hopefully no one's doing that. Hopefully that makes sense that you need to do something to try It just doesn't magically I'm sorry. It really doesn't. I wish it did. All right, so hopefully you have some generic ideas of what you can do to try and bust through a plateau. Things you can do to try and get How can you measure the success you are working to get better? That's actually doing something Like I said in the beginning, like that aren't necessarily the Are you doing things like you're situations because you know how You know how to go around them. Are you finding yourself in Maybe you're not having to skate as much at certain times because you're getting to better spots for stuff. Are you doing things like having fewer turnovers or touching the puck more, and that's helping out? Again, if you have small goals, you're doing something better. You know, like, hey, am I I don't know, maybe hey, are my, forward to backward skating. That very small particular thing beginning is that getting better Why yes. Yes it is. I can tell that is getting That's a lot easier to do. See see guys. It all it all intertwines. All works out here together. All this stuff. All right, so to wrap this whole You think you've had a plateau? What can you do? If you know something you want Try and break it down as small Like I've been saying through Smaller goals. Easier to see, easier to Plateaus are not a dead end. They're just a sign that you've current approach to hockey. I'm hoping that that helps give a little bit of insight in how to get better at hockey, especially if you've hit some kind of plateau, especially for your beginners out there that started off. You're skating and you're not Hopefully this helps you find on, and some ways you can Are you currently sitting in a busted through that plateau? Or did you just listen to all this and go, I don't really know what I'm not doing right and I'm lost. I'd love to hear all those if we can get other people to You can drop a message down in There's a link for text the show message to the show. Or you can also, as always, go can email the show from there I'd like to hear about all that worked for you. If this is something you're you're stuck on what the next improve is, let me know. As always, thanks a lot, Catch you in the next one.