How to Skate Faster in Hockey: The Three Leaks Costing You Speed
Quick Answer: Hockey speed comes from three things, in this order: a deep knee bend (the limiter for almost everyone), pushing sideways at roughly 45° rather than straight back, and snapping the pushing leg back under your body fast. Fix posture first, then stride direction, then cadence. Stronger legs are not the answer — most players already have the strength and are leaking it.
Every slow skater believes they need stronger legs. Almost none of them do. Watch a fast player and a slow player in slow motion and the difference isn’t muscle — it’s that one of them is sending force into the ice and the other is sending it into the air, into a wobble, and into a stride that stops halfway.
This is where speed actually comes from, in the order that fixes it fastest — and why the thing you’re probably doing at the gym isn’t helping.
The physics nobody explains: why you can’t push backwards
This is the concept that reorganises everything else, and it’s almost never stated plainly.
When you’re standing still, you can push your skate backwards against the ice and it grips — that’s how you start. But once you’re moving at speed, pushing straight back stops working. To generate force that way, your skate would have to travel backwards faster than your body is travelling forwards, and no human leg extends that quickly. At 25 km/h your leg simply cannot outrun your own momentum.
So where does the power come from? Sideways. At speed, you push out to the side — hip abduction — and the ice pushes back along the diagonal. That diagonal has a forward component, and that forward component is your acceleration. This is why the classic V-shaped stride exists: it’s not a style, it’s the only geometry that works once you’re moving.
⚠️ This is the single biggest reason skaters plateau. They accelerate well from a standstill (backwards push works there), then hit a ceiling and try harder — pushing more backwards, more furiously, achieving nothing. The fix isn’t effort. It’s changing the direction the force goes.
The three speed leaks, in priority order
| Leak | What you’d see | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Skating tall | Short choppy strides, burning quads, upright torso | Hips back, chest up, knee bent toward 90° |
| 2. Pushing backward | Huge effort, no glide, legs kicking behind you | Push out and back at ~45° — full extension to the side |
| 3. Lazy recovery | Wide looping leg return, slow cadence | Snap the foot back under your hips, blade low |
Leak 1: skating tall (fix this first)
An upright skater has physically nowhere to push from. A straight leg can’t extend — it’s already extended. That’s the whole problem in one sentence, and it accounts for more lost speed than everything else combined.
The correct position feels absurd at first: hinge at the hips so your chest comes forward, keep your shoulders level, and drive your knees forward over your toes until your thigh approaches parallel with the ice. From that position you have a full leg’s worth of extension available, and every stride is a genuine push rather than a shuffle.
It’s also exhausting, which is the honest reason most people don’t do it. A deep skating stance is a sustained squat, and it will wreck your legs for the first few weeks. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong — it’s the reason fast skaters are fit and slow ones are comfortable.
Leak 2: pushing in the wrong direction
Given the physics above, the fix is mechanical: extend to the side, and finish the extension. Push until your leg is straight and your toe flicks at the end — that last few inches of extension is free speed that most players simply don’t take. Half-finished strides are the most common technical fault in adult hockey.
A useful self-check: at the end of each push, is your leg straight? Most people believe theirs is. Film yourself for ten seconds and you’ll probably discover you’re stopping at about 70% — which means you’re doing 70% of the work for 70% of the result while feeling like you’re trying 100%.
Leak 3: slow recovery
After the push, the leg has to come back. Where it comes back to determines your next stride. A wide, looping recovery — the leg swinging out and around — takes time you don’t have and leaves you off balance when it lands. The correct recovery is direct: knee drives back under your hips, blade skimming close to the ice, so you’re already loaded for the next push the instant the foot lands.
This one is invisible to the skater and obvious to anyone watching. If your cadence feels slow no matter how hard you work, your recovery is the reason.
The head-bob test (a free diagnostic)
Have someone film you skating from the side, or just watch a teammate. If the head bobs up and down as they stride, energy is going vertically instead of forwards. Every centimetre your head rises is work your legs did to lift your body rather than to move it toward the net.
Fast skaters look eerily level — the head tracks along a flat line while the legs do violent work underneath. That levelness isn’t an aesthetic; it’s the visible evidence that all the force is going in the useful direction. It’s the quickest way to assess a skater from the bench, and the quickest way to assess yourself on video.
Stride length × stride frequency
Speed is literally these two numbers multiplied together, which means you can improve either — but the order matters.
Beginners should chase length first. Full extension, toe flick at the end, deep knee bend to give yourself something to extend. Long strides with a slow cadence still produce real speed, and more importantly they build the mechanics that cadence will later multiply.
Chasing frequency first is the classic trap. Fast, short, choppy strides feel fast — you’re working hard, your legs are moving, the ice is going past — and you’re running on skates. It’s the equivalent of sprinting with tiny steps: high effort, low output, and it grooves a stride shape you’ll have to unlearn.
💡 The stride-count drill: skate a lap and count your strides. Then try to complete the same lap in fewer. Not faster — fewer. This forces full extension in a way no instruction can, because the only way to cut the count is to make each push do more work. Do it every session for a month and watch the number fall.
The first three steps (where games are actually won)
Here’s a truth that reorders your training priorities: top speed barely matters in hockey. Almost every race for a puck is decided within about 15 feet. The player who wins it isn’t the fastest skater on the ice — they’re the one who got moving first.
Acceleration from a standstill is its own skill with different mechanics. Body angled forward at roughly 45°, and the first three strides are runs on your toes — short, digging, V-shaped pushes — not glides. You’re literally running on the ice for three steps before you transition into a gliding stride. Most recreational players skip this entirely: they start by gliding, which means they spend a full second doing nothing while the other guy takes the puck.
Ten explosive starts from a standstill, every session, costs three minutes and wins more pucks than any amount of top-speed work. It’s the highest-return three minutes in hockey practice and almost nobody does it.
Speed through turns: the free speed nobody trains
Games are played in curves, not straight lines, and crossovers are how you carry speed through them — or even gain it. A good crossover actually accelerates you around a turn, because each cross-under push is a full lateral extension exactly like the physics above wants.
Yet almost every recreational player decelerates into turns, coasts around, and re-accelerates out. That’s three losses in one corner: the speed you shed, the time you spend coasting, and the effort to rebuild. Crossovers are the single most under-trained skill in adult hockey, and the one where the gap between a trained player and an untrained one is most visible on the ice.
Backward speed: the half of skating nobody trains
Defencemen spend a large share of every shift skating backwards, and forwards need it more than they admit — every backcheck, every gap control, every transition. Yet almost all practice time goes into forward skating, which is why so many players are two completely different athletes depending on which way they’re pointed.
The good news: the principles are identical. Deep knee bend, push to the side, snap the recovery under your body. The mechanics differ in one respect — backward power comes primarily from C-cuts, where the skate carves a half-moon arc out and back rather than a straight-line push. Same physics (lateral force, diagonal return), different shape.
The reason it feels so much harder is simply volume: you’ve done fifty thousand forward strides and maybe two hundred backward ones. It’s not a talent gap, it’s a rep gap. Five minutes of backward laps every session closes it faster than you’d expect — and the payoff is enormous, because a player who can skate backwards at speed can defend, transition, and see the play develop instead of chasing it. Our backward skating guide covers the technique in full.
Why you slow down in the third period
There’s a version of ‘skating faster’ that has nothing to do with technique: being able to skate at your actual speed in the last ten minutes of a game rather than only in the first ten.
Hockey is an interval sport — 40 seconds of near-maximal effort, then two minutes on the bench, repeated for an hour. That’s the specific fitness quality you need, and it’s not the one long slow cardio builds. Players who jog for conditioning arrive in the third period with excellent endurance for jogging and nothing left for a shift.
The training that actually matches: repeated hard intervals with incomplete recovery. Bike sprints, 40 seconds hard / 90 seconds easy, ten rounds. Or the on-ice version — hard laps with a short bench rest. It’s miserable and it’s precisely what a shift feels like, which is the point.
The mechanical connection matters too: as you fatigue, your knee bend is the first thing to go. You stand up because standing up is easier, and standing up costs you leak #1 — which means your stride shortens exactly when you need it most. Conditioning isn’t a separate topic from technique; it’s what lets you keep your technique.
Drills that transfer
| Drill | How | Builds |
|---|---|---|
| Stride count laps | Count strides per lap, work to lower it | Full extension |
| One-leg push circuits | All pushing from one leg across the width, then swap | Exposes your weak side instantly |
| Line sprints | Goal line to blue line, walk back, ×8–10 | Acceleration and the first three steps |
| Crossover circles | Both directions around the faceoff circles | The free speed in turns |
| Deep-stance laps | One lap holding a knee bend deeper than feels sane | The posture your legs refuse to hold |
Off the ice: what helps and what doesn’t
Transfers well: squats and lunges (single-leg especially — skating is a one-leg sport, always), lateral bounds and skater jumps (they train the sideways push directly), and short hill sprints for the explosive first steps.
Doesn’t transfer: slow steady jogging and machine leg curls. Hockey is explosive, lateral, and asymmetric; long slow forward running is none of those things. It’s not that running is bad — it’s that a 5k does close to nothing for your stride.
Equipment audit before you blame yourself
Worth ruling out before you rebuild your technique:
- Skates too big — power leaks into empty space inside the boot. Our sizing guide has the fit test.
- Dull edges — you can’t push against ice you can’t grip. Sharpen every 3–5 hours (guide).
- Boot too stiff — if you can’t flex forward, you can’t get into a deep knee bend, which is leak #1 caused by equipment.
- Laced wrong — loose ankles mean your edges never get your input (lacing guide).
⚠️ Lighter skates will not make you faster. The marketing implies otherwise and the physics disagrees — a deeper knee bend is worth more than every gram of carbon fibre on the market. Fix the free things first.
Frequently asked questions
Why am I fast in a straight line but slow in games?
Because games are starts, stops and turns, not straightaways. Train acceleration and stops — straight-line speed is the smallest slice of game speed.
Will stronger legs make me faster?
Only after your mechanics are right. Most players already have the strength and are leaking it through a shallow knee bend and a backward push. Strength multiplies good technique; it can’t replace it.
How do I know if my knee bend is deep enough?
If you can hold it for a full shift without your legs burning, it isn’t. A proper hockey stance is a sustained squat — it should be genuinely hard until you’re conditioned for it.
Do lighter skates make you faster?
Marginally at best, and nowhere near enough to matter next to technique. Save the money and film your stride instead.
How often should I sharpen if I want speed?
Every 3–5 hours of ice for most players. Dull edges leak power on every single push — it’s the cheapest speed upgrade available.
How long until my stride actually changes?
Posture changes show up within a few sessions. A rebuilt stride takes a season — and it will feel worse before it feels better, because you’re dismantling something automatic. Push through that phase; everyone who got fast went through it.
