To All Crusaders,

Gary Smith has kindly offered to assist the Club with an assessment of player fitness prior to the start of this Season.

For those of you that don’t know Gary – he is a fully qualified chiropractor. During his many years of General Practice Gary has developed an interest in the science of sport physiology.
Which gave him the opportunity to work with the IOC at the Rio Olympics. So you can be assured you are in safe hands.

Gary has put together a package to asses player fitness which will set a baseline for each player, with ongoing review during the season.

This is open to all members of Crusaders Hockey Club; below is a brief outline.

Crusaders Hockey Club fitness training will commence Tuesday 4th February at 6pm. Meet at Hockey grounds car park entrance.

We will commence with a warm up/preparation followed by a series of fitness tests, which we estimate will take one and a half hours.

The purpose of the tests is to:

- Identify individual players strengths and weaknesses and to give feedback to the players about these.
- Set goals and give strategies as to how these can be improved, with a view to hopefully reduce injury and improve performance.
- Retest later to gauge the success of training/strategies.
- The intention is to provide a targeted approach to physical preparation, to meet the specific demands of Hockey.

Tests will include:

- Multi stage fitness test ie Beep/Pacer test of cardio-vascular fitness.
- “T” agility test
- Various tests of lower limb muscular endurance, power, and ankle joint mobility, upper body/limb strength and stability.

Feedback will be given to players in week 2 and the training proper will commence.

If a participant has any medical issues or other problems that may interfere with their ability to engage in these tests they should bring this to the attention of the club.

If we can get fit early, and prepare our body well, the season will hopefully be more enjoyable and successful.

Please note that we will require some assistance with collecting the data, so if you are not interested in doing the assessment we could really use some help so lets all get involved in building a better club.

Here’s to a great year!