The expert throughout is Matthew Eyles, an Australian strength and conditioning coach who spent years with Hockey India before becoming the physical expert for the Dutch men's and women's national teams.
When a squad starts picking up hamstrings, the instinct is to take things away. Cut the hard running, keep the sessions tidy, protect the legs. Matthew Eyles goes the other way, and he's blunt about it:
"Speed once a week. Absolute non-negotiable. I will make sure that at least once a week in training, we're opening the athletes up and allowing them, giving them the opportunity to sprint."
His argument, in one line: most of the injuries you see in hockey are soft tissue injuries, and soft tissue gets hurt by things it hasn't been exposed to often enough.
This isn't a plan to copy. Eyles works with national teams and force plates and weekly hamstring testing, and he says so himself. What travels down to a club Tuesday night is the thinking, not the kit.
TL;DR:
The injuries that cost you most are hamstrings, groins and calves, and they come from sprinting, from stopping, and from load that jumps around. Strength is the base, but the phases most teams never train are the ones that protect players. Sprinting isn't fitness work, it's a dose. And the warm-up, the fifteen minutes nobody is fighting you for, is enough to fit almost all of it in. Three ideas below.
The full session, Injury Reduction Training Methods with Matthew Eyles, is on The Hockey Site. It was recorded back in 2022, when a lot of squads were still finding their legs after long stretches without training.
Strength is the base, and the phases most teams skip are the ones that protect
Eyles is a strength and conditioning coach, so a bias towards the gym is no surprise. What's worth borrowing is where he puts the emphasis. Not on the number on the bar.
"I think in some cultures, and I say cultures as a broad term, we get very focused on how much are we lifting rather than how well are we lifting it, and how well has to come first. Otherwise, you're going to end up creating injuries in the gym, and that's the last thing we want."
He describes three phases in every lift. Lowering, holding, and lifting. Take a squat: down is eccentric, the pause at the bottom is isometric, standing up is concentric. His observation about the players he works with in the Netherlands is that they're very good at the fast, explosive part, because that's what gets trained, and much weaker in the other two. Which matters, because as he puts it, when you plant your foot to cut and change direction, that's a big eccentric and isometric moment.
So the shopping list is short and specific. Single leg work, so the joint has to stabilise. Full ranges of motion, plus some deliberately held joint angles. Something knee dominant for the hamstring, the Nordic, and something hip dominant, a single leg Romanian deadlift. Something for the adductors, the Copenhagen side plank. Those last two he calls non negotiable, on the strength of the research he showed in the session rather than on preference.
None of it needs a gym. He spent a good chunk of the masterclass translating his own exercises into things you can do next to the pitch: pushing into the fence, a heel up on a step and hold, a diagonal lunge dragging one of the yellow markers you use for small sided games back in with your foot. His challenge to the audience was to stand up, hold a lunge for thirty seconds and notice what happens. And for youth players in particular, he's relaxed about it: bodyweight is great, isometrics are great.
This is also where the series gets interesting, because the three experts don't fully agree. Glenn Turner leads with the aerobic engine and consistency, and would rather see ten honest minutes done every week than a clever programme done occasionally. Mick Beunen puts strength underneath everything. Eyles lines up closer to Beunen on that point, and he's openly unenthusiastic about long slow running as the way to build hockey players, preferring longer intervals run at a speed that means something. Three good coaches, three different entry points. That isn't a problem to resolve, it's the reason you get to think for yourself.
Sprinting is a dose, and "fast" is not the same as sprinting
The part of this masterclass that most changes a club week is the way Eyles talks about speed. He isn't trying to make players quicker. He's trying to make sure their hamstrings meet high speed often enough that they stop being surprised by it.
"It's not enough to only allow the game once a week to expose his hamstrings to those sorts of demands."
He repeats an old line in the S&C world, that sprinting is a vaccine for the hamstrings, and he's careful with it. You don't become immune. You become better prepared, because the body adapts to what it meets regularly.
The practical shape of it, in his own numbers: adults sprinting somewhere around thirty to forty metres, and a session total of roughly one hundred to three hundred metres of high speed running, often inside a fifteen or twenty minute warm-up. If a squad has done none of this, he says start with two sprints after a good warm-up and build from there, because three, four or five genuinely fast efforts is already a dose.
The catch is intent, and this is the bit most sessions get wrong:
"Fast running is not sprinting. There has to be intent there if you want to expose the hamstrings in particular, to those sorts of forces. So seeing someone run across the field at 80% is probably not enough."
He makes the same case for the other end of the movement. Stopping. Deceleration is where a lot of knee and quad problems show up, and it's rarely trained on purpose. Run to a point and stop dead. Then stop dead on a call, so a decision is attached to it. Then add direction changes that are reactive rather than pre-planned, forwards, backwards, shuffling, turning and accelerating out. Nothing elaborate. He showed a drill where two players work their way round from one side to the other, and on a called number they chase each other to a line, so whoever has the line behind them has to turn hard and go. A bit of competition in it, and as he says, they like it.
One more piece that sits between tactics and physical work: the size of the pitch you train on. Eyles sees it in GPS data. Coaches pick a small area for a good tactical reason, and the players then never get the chance to open up. His fix isn't to argue with the tactical plan, it's to vary the size deliberately. Small fields one week, medium the next, big the week after, or small on Tuesday and big on Thursday. And if you genuinely do need to play small every time, then, in his words, make sure you're getting your sprinting in somewhere else.
The warm-up is the only budget you are certain to get
Ask most club coaches where an extra fifteen minutes of physical work is coming from and the honest answer is nowhere. Eyles has the same problem at national level, and his answer is the most useful thing in the session for anyone coaching two nights a week.
"Probably the biggest takeaway I can give you is don't underestimate the value of a warm up. So quite often, all I've got at the club and at the national level is a warm up to get all this stuff in because neither the club or the national team think they have enough time."
His warm-ups are planned, not filled. One night, the last three to five minutes are the sprinting. Another night, the last three to five minutes are the change of direction work. That's the whole speed and agility exposure for the week, and it cost the hockey session nothing.
When he was asked how to convince a head coach to hand over pitch time at all, he was honest that it's a sales job, and that injury reduction is the easiest thing to sell, because coaches want their players available. He also offered the version that avoids the argument entirely: on a lower intensity night, split the squad into three, one coach on goal scoring, one on passing and receiving, and one area of the pitch working on something physical.
Two other things from the Q&A are worth carrying into a club season. The first is that a completely free week is usually a bad idea. Reducing load is fine, dropping a session is fine, but as he says about the week off, that's training load you'll never get back. The second is a monitoring method that costs nothing. Ask each player how hard the session was out of ten, multiply by the minutes, and watch the number over time. Eight out of ten across a hundred minutes gives you eight hundred. It only becomes useful when one player is consistently reporting a much bigger number than everyone else, which is exactly the information you want before something tears.
And on recovery, he draws a line that's worth stealing: there's no such thing as recovery training.
"For me, you have recovery and you have training. And any training is something that you have to recover from."
Take it to your next session
Plan the last five minutes of one warm-up this week as real sprinting. Two or three efforts over thirty to forty metres, at full intent, after the players are properly warm. Nothing else changes in the session.
Add one hold to your warm-up and keep it there all season. A thirty second lunge hold, a heel raised bridge, or a Copenhagen side plank. Bodyweight is fine, and consistency is the point.
Look at the pitch sizes in your last three sessions. If they were all the same, pick a different one for next week, and if you can't move off small, put the sprinting somewhere else.
Watch the full masterclass
The article above is the whole idea, yours to use. If you want to see how Eyles actually runs it, the full session goes further: the exercise footage, and the Q&A on drag flickers, goalkeepers, GPS metrics and periodising a season with two matches a week. The first 20 minutes are free for everyone, so you can have a look before deciding.
The full video sits inside a Coach subscription, 99,99 euro for the year, or 9,99 euro a month if you'd rather start smaller. Pre-season is when this stuff actually matters, so if you're building your physical base for next season, it's a good place to start.
Watch Injury Reduction Training Methods in full here:
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