Training on a balance board for hockey is a healthy, versatile way to build thousands of parts of the body at one time. Core muscles, leg muscles, arm muscles, and even calf muscles. It is hard to imagine that just by throwing your body off balance enough to make it regain its balance can be so beneficial.
Balancing on the Board
Once you pass the initial shock of learning how to balance on the board without falling on your face, you might get a little bored with just standing there on the board holding yourself up. When you get to this point, it is a good time to push yourself to learn new tricks and to train your body to become even stronger when it comes to remaining balanced. Here are a few tricks that you can do while you are balancing that will help you to gain powerful core strength and keep you from being bored to death as you balance.
Right Left Shift
When you are balancing on a hockey balance board you should have a roller that comes with the board that you balance it on. The traditional way to balance on the board is to have the roller in the center of the board while the feet are on opposite sides of the board as you balance.
From this position, you can learn to shift your balance board from the left to the right by rolling it across the roller and staying balanced as you do. You simply shift the board towards the right or left and bring one end where your foot is to where the end of the board is resting on the roller, and the other end is outward without any resting place.
You might have to lean your body one way or the other to accommodate the shift, but once you get the hang of it, you can experiment with the way that you hold yourself balanced.
Full Balanced Squats
Doing a fully balanced squat while holding yourself up on a balance board may sound a bit difficult, but once you build your core strength and get your body use do it, squatting on a balance board is not such a hard thing to do.
It is not a good idea to just pop yourself onto a balance board and expect to do a range of crazy tricks and feats without a least a little bit of training. However, some people that are in decent shape have enough core strength to learn how to squat very quickly.
All you have to do in order to do a full balanced squat is to make sure that you put your feet about shoulder-width apart on the balance board, then slowly squat down and make your way back up again.
Lengthwise Balanced Stance
This kind of stance may be a little tricker than the others if you are not prepared for it. The way you do it is instead of having the board crisscross the roller like a teeter-totter, you position the board lengthwise across the roller to where the board runs the same as the roller where there is not an extra amount of space on both ends. Balancing like this is kind of like balancing on a skateboard that is built like an inline skate.
Conclusion
No matter how you train on your balance board, be safe. Make sure that the area that you are training is free of objects that you could fall on and injure yourself. Balance boards are a powerful and fun way to build the core of your body.
***Sniper’s Edge Hockey loves Canada! We proudly ship all of our products to Canada and offer the same return policies as we do for everybody else. We realize the exchange rates for the Canadian dollar are not the best right now, so we’re trying to help by giving you free shipping and no customs/duty.***