Injury-proof your season.

Every hockey player knows the feeling, or knows someone who does. A hard stride, a quick change of direction, and something in the groin grabs. It is not dramatic. There is no cart, no brace, no highlight. Just a nagging pull that steals a few weeks, comes back the moment you push off hard, and quietly follows you for the rest of the season. Injuries like this are the hidden tax on a hockey career, and here is the part most players never hear: most of them are not bad luck. They are trainable.

The research on hockey injuries is unusually clear about what goes wrong, why, and what to do about it. This guide walks through the injuries the sport actually hands out, the warning sign that predicts the most common one, and the off-ice training that keeps you available, because the best ability any player has is being healthy enough to play.

The injuries hockey actually hands out

Hockey is fast, heavy, and played on a knife's edge, so it carries real injury risk. A seven-year study of professional players found that the lower limbs accounted for about 40 percent of all injuries, the most of any region, with the upper body and the head and spine making up roughly a quarter each. Concussions alone were about 15 percent of injuries, a serious category that deserves its own respect and its own article. But for the everyday, season-stealing problems a player can train against, the story lives in the lower body.

Within that lower body, two injuries show up again and again: the groin strain and the knee sprain. The knee we will come back to. But the groin is the one that defines hockey, and it is also the one the science says you can do the most about.

Why the groin is the canary in the coal mine

No sport loves the groin like hockey. The skating stride is, at its core, a powerful sideways push: the adductor muscles on the inside of the thigh fire hard on every stride to drive you out and pull you back, thousands of times a game. That makes them the engine of skating and, when they are underprepared, the first thing to break. In one classic survey of elite players, groin strains made up about 43 percent of all muscle strains. Nearly half of every pulled muscle in the sport is the groin.

That concentration is actually good news. When one injury is this common, and this tied to one muscle group, it becomes a target. You cannot train away every freak collision, but you can absolutely train the groin, and the research shows that when you do, the injuries fall off a cliff.

The number that predicts a groin strain

Here is one of the most useful findings in all of hockey sports science. Researchers measured the preseason hip strength of professional players and then tracked who got hurt. The players who went on to strain a groin were not weaker everywhere. They had a specific imbalance: their adductors (the muscles that pull the leg in) were weak relative to their abductors (the muscles that push it out). In the healthy players, adductor strength was about 95 percent of abductor strength. In the players who got hurt, it was only 78 percent. And the headline: a player was 17 times more likely to strain his groin if his adductors were weaker than 80 percent of his abductors.

Read that again, because it reframes the whole problem. The groin strain is not random. It has a measurable warning sign, and that warning sign is a strength imbalance you can fix off the ice. The same study found that groin flexibility did not separate the injured from the healthy. It was not about being tight. It was about being weak in the wrong place.

The groin strain is not bad luck. It is a weak adductor with a warning light you can see in the preseason.

The fix that actually works

So what happens when you train the warning sign away? The same group ran the experiment. They took the professional players whose preseason testing flagged them as weak and therefore at risk, and put them through a simple six-week adductor-strengthening program before the season. The result was dramatic. Compared with the seasons before the program, groin strains fell from 3.2 to 0.71 per 1000 player-game exposures, a reduction of more than three quarters, just from strengthening the muscle that was about to fail.

This is not a one-off. The same adductor-focused approach has prevented groin problems in other sports too: a large trial in footballers found that a simple program built around the Copenhagen adduction exercise cut the risk of groin problems by 41 percent. And the principle scales up to injuries in general. A landmark review of injury-prevention research found that strength training reduced sports injuries to less than a third of the rate seen without it, with a later analysis confirming the effect is dose-dependent: the stronger you get, the more protected you are. Strength is not just for performance. It is the most effective injury insurance ever studied.

For hockey, that means a handful of off-ice targets carry most of the protective load. The menu below is where to spend your durability work.

Don't forget the knees

If the groin is the overuse story, the knee is the contact story. In international men's hockey, the knee was the most-injured part of the lower body, and the medial collateral ligament, the MCL on the inside of the knee, was by far the most common knee injury. A separate study of college players found the MCL was usually hurt by contact, either a hit or a collision with the boards or ice, in more than three quarters of cases.

You cannot train away a knee-on-knee hit. But you can build a knee that tolerates the awkward landings and sudden cuts that cause the non-contact ones, and a body that absorbs contact better. That is the job of the hip, hamstring, and landing work in the menu above: strong muscles around a joint are the shock absorbers that keep a bad moment from becoming a torn ligament. Add in load awareness, since hip and groin injuries in college players struck at about three times the rate in games as in practice, and you have covered most of what a player can actually control.

Why stretching is not injury insurance

If you grew up in hockey, you were probably told to stretch so you would not pull anything. It is one of the most durable myths in the sport, and the evidence does not support it. Stretching has its place for mobility and feeling ready, but as a standalone shield against injury, it does very little.

How this changes by age

Durability is a lifelong project, but the emphasis shifts as a player grows.

The bottom line

Hockey will always carry risk, but the injuries that quietly end seasons are not the random ones. They are the groin that was weak, the knee that could not absorb the landing, the body that was rushed back too fast. Every one of those has a known answer, and the answer is almost always strength: a groin that is at least 80 percent as strong as the outer hip, hips and hamstrings that protect the knee, a braced trunk, and load you build instead of spike. Spend a little of your off-ice time on durability and you buy the most valuable thing a player owns, which is being healthy enough to take every shift the season offers.

Coach David Ciboch

M.Ed. Sport Science · National Team Coach

David builds science-based off-ice training for hockey players at every level, from first-year youth skaters to adult and masters players. Elite Hockey Drills exists to put real sport science in the hands of players who want to train smarter, not just harder.