How To Improve Your Slapshot

When you visualize a powerful slap shot, the player that most often comes to mind is NHL star Al MacInnis. He terrorized goalies for years with his vicious shot from the point. The time to train in order to realize physical improvements is the off season, and if your goal is to improve your slap shot then the king of exercises is the chin up and its many variations.

Most people are surprised that the chin up is the most important exercise for improving your slap shot, however if you think of the actual physical movement of the slap shot you can see how important your lats are in that movement.

When performing a chin up it is important that you lower yourself all the way down until your arms are straight, and raise yourself so that your chin is completely over the bar. Pull your body up – don't stretch your neck out like a turtle. Also try to keep your legs still – don't kick and flail them around like a fish out of water. Form is important; if you can't complete a rep with proper form … it is useless! Once you are able to complete the number of reps listed on your program you can begin to add weight to the exercise. The easiest way is to get a waist belt that you can hang dumbbells or plates on. This will increase the intensity of the exercise.

Each exercise can be modified by changing the grip width as well. Close grip means that your hands are 4-6” apart, mid grip means that your hands are shoulder width apart, and wide grip means your hands are 4-6” wider than shoulder width.

At SST we use a variety of chin ups to recruit different muscles. Let's take a look at some of the exercises and how you can incorporate them into your training:

Supinated Grip Chins (Close/Mid) – The hand position is palms facing towards your body. At the SST facility we have different sizes of bars to grip, as well. The thicker bars increase the difficulty of the exercise, but increase grip strength as well.

Pronated Grip Chins (Close/Mid/Wide) – The pronated grip chin is more difficult to perform for most people. This variation of the chin up recruits the brachialis and brachioradialis because of the position of the hands.

Neutral Grip Chins (Close/Mid/Wide ) – Neutral grip chins are usually the variation in which most people are the strongest, allowing them to add more weight to the exercise to increase the intensity. Your hands are facing each other, using parallel grip bars. Most gyms are equipped with a variety of widths for you to use. Also if there is a V Bar you can move closer to the base for close grip and further away for wide grip.

Mixed Grip Chins (Close/Mid) – For this variation one hand is pronated and the other is supinated. Alternate your grip every set and make sure that you do an equal number of sets with each grip.

1¼ Chins (Top/Bottom) – This is a variation you can add to your training using any one of the grips I've just talked about, simply add a ¼ rep at the top or bottom of the movement. For 1¼ chins from bottom, you raise up ¼ of the way to the top, lower yourself back down, then raise yourself over the bar, lowering yourself all the way down to the bottom for the prescribed tempo. This counts as one full rep. For 1¼ chins from the top position just reverse the portion of the chin up where the ¼ rep is performed.

When writing programs I prefer to pair antagonist muscle groups. For this particular example, I will pair chest and back.

The first example will be an accumulation program that will be used early in the off-season. This is the first of a two a day workout – the second workout involves more accessory exercises such as rotator cuff, low trap, and grip work.

The exercises are set so that the hardest variation is first and the easiest is last. The order of the exercises is important because your body is fatiguing more and more with each set.

The second is a more advanced program that would be used later on in off season training. The way the reps are set up is called wave loading. When choosing weights, make sure that in the second wave (sets 4-6), weights are increased slightly. The reason you can do more weight in the second wave is the 3 rd set of 2 reps excites your nervous system and when the weight is decreased for the set of 4 reps your body convinces itself that the weight is light and it should feel easier.

Take advantage of your time in the gym – go in with a plan to make yourself stronger!

Part II will look at improving your wrist shot through strength training.

Steve Bodanis