Ever feel strong in the gym, but soft in battles?

You get knocked off pucks you should win. Your shot doesn’t feel as heavy as it should. And your first step feels slow — even though you know you’re strong.

A lot of the time, that problem isn’t your legs. It’s how you’ve trained your core.

You already know how to build muscle and get stronger. You use progressive overload. You lift through a full range of motion. You add weight to the bar when you can handle more load.

But when it comes to training your core, most players throw all of that out the window.

Sit-ups until you can’t do any more. Planks until you’re shaking. Russian twists with a light medicine ball.

Here’s the truth: those exercises don’t just fail to help — they actively train the wrong thing for athletes.

And if you’ve been told to “brace your core” during movements, you’re actually losing power.

Let me explain.

Your Core’s Real Job

Traditional core exercises are built around creating motion through your spine. You’re crunching, twisting, and bending to “work the abs.”

But your core’s actual job as an athlete isn’t to move. And it’s not to “brace” either.

Your core’s job is to stabilize the spine and stop unwanted movement.

There’s a big difference.

When you brace your core, you’re creating a threatening pattern in your brain. You’re tensing up, holding your breath, and locking everything down.

Your nervous system reads that as a threat, and when your brain senses a threat, you lose explosiveness. You move slower. You fatigue faster.

What you actually want is a core that can resist unwanted movement in the spine.

It should prevent twisting when you don’t want rotation. It should prevent your lower back from over-arching when you’re loading force. It should stop you from bending sideways when you’re battling or absorbing contact.

And it should do all of that automatically, without you having to think about “bracing.”

Think about when you take a shot. Your legs drive force into the ice, your hips rotate, and your core stops your torso from collapsing or or over-twisting in the wrong direction. All of that power transfers cleanly through your body and into your stick. You’re not thinking about bracing. Your core is just doing its job.

Same thing in the corner. When someone leans into you, they’re trying to knock your torso out of line with your hips. A strong core keeps you stacked, with your ribs over your hips, so you don’t fold sideways and lose balance or power.

When your core only knows how to brace, it can’t do any of that efficiently. You leak power. You lose explosiveness. You get slower.

What Your Core Actually Is

Your core isn’t just your abs. It’s not the six-pack muscles you see in the mirror.

Your core is a 29-muscle system that includes your entire trunk, your hips, your obliques, and your spinal stabilizers. It’s the system that connects your upper body to your lower body and stops unwanted movement in every direction.

And it needs to be trained to resist unwanted movement in three different planes:

1. Anti-rotation is stopping unwanted twisting forces. Exercises like Pallof presses and landmine anti-rotation presses train your core to prevent rotation.
2. Anti-extension is stopping your lower back from arching under load. Movements like ab rollouts and overhead carries force your core to control extension without you having to consciously brace.
3. Anti-lateral flexion is stopping sideways bending. Things like farmer’s carries, and suitcase marches teach your obliques to prevent lateral collapse.

Every one of these trains your core to stop unwanted movement automatically, without the threatening “brace” pattern that kills your power.

And every one of them can be loaded and progressed over time just like a squat or deadlift.

What This Means For You

If you’ve been doing sit-ups, planks, and Russian twists and wondering why your gym strength doesn’t show up in games, this is why.

You’ve been training your core to do the opposite of what it needs to do.

The fix isn’t complicated. Train all three planes the same way you train everything else. Use challenging loads. Progress over time.

When you do, everything you’re already strong at starts translating to the ice. Your shot gets harder. You stay fast late in games. You hold your ground in battles.

If you’re wondering how all of this fits into an actual program, that’s exactly what we built the Power & Explosiveness Program around.

Six weeks of progressive training blocks covering core strength and power, acceleration, reactive explosiveness, lateral power, posterior chain, and upper body.

Every workout is designed to make you faster and more explosive on the ice.

We’re launching the first week of January so you can build real power heading into the second half of your season.

Join the waitlist now for early access and an exclusive pre-launch price.

​Join the waitlist here.​

That's all for this week

See you next weekend,

Tony