The Sunday Read: Inside the Sports Science That Has the Bruins Feeling Their Best

BOSTON –– A lot of hockey has been played in a short amount of time for the Boston Bruins.​

It is a common theme around the league this season, as the condensed schedule was introduced to accommodate the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.

It has meant more game action, fewer practices, and, perhaps the most pressing of all, a heightened importance around recovery.​

While the setup of this season may have seemed daunting at the start, the B’s staff behind the scenes has been planning, adjusting and adapting to the speedy cadence of the year to ensure the players are prepared to put their best product on the ice.

​“The second one game is over, the focus shifts immediately to what’s coming next,” said Kevin Neeld, who is the Bruins’ head performance coach.

That mindset has worked well for Boston. The team is coming off a 16-game schedule in March, which included four sets of back-to-back games. The Bruins finished with a 10-3-3 record, tied for the second-most wins in the league during that span. With five games left in the regular season, they sit in the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference with 94 points.

How has it all worked out? Well, there have been no excuses for this group.​

“It definitely feels different. There’s a noticeably different feel this year from my past years. I would say the schedule feels a little more rushed. But you come into it understanding that is going to be the case,” Sean Kuraly said. “I think these are the things that you had to prepare for in the summer – there’s just no catching up in-season, there’s no time to catch up.”

Neeld and the organization set a standard that every player shows up to the first day of training camp already in game shape. Then, throughout the season, they build around that. The method of how they maintain that readiness, though, has seen some changes this season, especially in the gym.

“We are trying to find the right amount of work to get the effect that we’re after from a training standpoint, while minimizing any excessive work that could lead to fatigue or soreness that affects how the players are feeling the next day,” Neeld said.

Some of that has to do with how many sets and reps players are doing. It has also made Neeld more intentional with his exercise selection. Kuraly, for example, said he’s focused more on corrective exercises – figuring out what parts of his body need to be kept strong, and which parts need to loosen up.

“Soreness happens more when the muscle is contracting while lengthening; think of the lowering down in a squat pattern, lowering the bar to your chest in a bench press, things like that. That’s when more muscle damage occurs, and that’s when there’s likely to be more soreness,” Neeld said. “So we try to emphasize exercises that are more of the pushing phase of movements, so we can get a lot of the effects that we want while minimizing the risk of muscle damage and soreness that’ll spill over.”

Neeld and his team gather information during the B’s practices to supplement the conversations they are having with the players about how they’re feeling. They use software called Catapult to get data on each guy’s workload and how their body is reacting to it. Each player wears a Catapult unit in their shoulder pads, and it has a series of sensors in it that measure acceleration, orientation and direction. This allows Neeld to quantify the effort attached to movement – up, down, side to side, through rotation.

“We also have players who wear heart-rate monitors. What the idea there is that the Catapult sensor provides feedback on what the players are actually doing – what is the load associated with their movement?” Neeld said. “And then the heart rate gives you an idea of how hard it was for that player to produce that amount of work. Looking at those two things in conjunction can be really helpful to understand exactly what the player did from a work standpoint and how stressful it was for them to perform that work.”

This all gives Neeld a clearer picture of what a practice day should look like for the Bruins – and if they need more off-days, too. He is in constant communication with head coach Marco Sturm and his staff about the skating schedule. While teams always want to get out on the ice between games, sometimes rest can be more beneficial for future performance.

“Your speed is also really important. So how do you dose little segments of speed work or staying explosive, but making sure you’re not doing it at a time when your body is too tired,” Kuraly said. “Our staff is really exceptional at communicating to us like, ‘How are we feeling? What do we need? What do we think we need? What do they think we need?’ And kind of just going back and forth and figuring things out together on the fly. Because in a lot of these situations, you can’t plan for.”  

Food plays a big role in the players’ energy, and that is where Julie Nicoletti comes in. She started her company, Kinetic Fuel, in 2008 and joined the Bruins as the team nutritionist in 2015. Nicoletti has focused on refueling the players as quickly as possible.

“There are a couple of really important distinctions from a nutritional side when we think about a condensed schedule,” Nicoletti said. “One is replenishing glycogen. Glycogen is stored energy; it’s found in the liver and the muscles. It is what they use in game two of a back-to-back, for example.”

Carbohydrates and protein after a game help refill players’ glycogen storage. Rice and potatoes have been go-to, easily digestible carb options. The offered protein – whether it be chicken, salmon, steak, or other options – works against muscle damage, too.

“We always think about protein as building muscle, but because during a game, they’re stopping, they’re checking – all of those things are putting these little micro-tears in their muscles,” Nicoletti said. “We want to make sure that we turn on the pathways to healing those micro-tears. Because over time, they accumulate, and that can increase risk of injury. We really want to make sure their muscles are being repaired.”

Hydration is another key factor; electrolytes are used pre- and post-game in water. While it is obvious that athletes sweat during games, hockey is played in a cold, dry rink. Accordingly, it can be misleading how profuse the perspiration really is.

​“Even a 2% drop in body weight from dehydration will impact their skating speed and their decision-making ability – their ability to just think clearly, make split-second decisions,” Nicoletti said.

On top of all that, they’ve got to stay healthy, too, which can be challenging when surrounded by 20-plus members of your team plus staff on a daily basis. On a home-and-away back-to-back, for example, players are exerting themselves for a 60-minute matchup, and then all get on a plane and bus together. Nicoletti has honed in on boosting immunity and limiting inflammation through diet.

​“We can’t have them getting sick,” she said. “Keeping inflammation low and immunity high – that would be things like Omega 3s from salmon, which they have every pregame meal, from avocado, which is always provided pretty much every meal…The berries provide antioxidants that help reduce inflammation and boost their vitamin C for immunity.”

When the B’s are going through the food line before and after the game, they may not realize that each and every ingredient on the table was put there with a purpose. Nicoletti tries to make it as easy as possible for the players not to have to think about what to eat. Anything they choose, she said, has a targeted benefit.

“How tight the schedule is, too – they have to shower, do media, get on the bus. So it’s a balance,” Nicoletti said. “I’d like to put nutrition in a bubble for them and make everything perfect, but we have to make it perfect enough for them to make it realistic.”

That food triggers the immediate recovery process. Neeld also recommends cold tubs to decrease soreness and maximize energy for the next day. Most critical, though, – and seemingly, the most simple – is a good night’s sleep.

“We know sleep is by far the most impactful recovery strategy that we have, so making sure that players are able to get to sleep as quickly as possible and that, when they’re getting to sleep, that they’re staying asleep has been a really important strategy,” Neeld said.  

Neeld discusses each individual’s sleep environment – is it quiet enough, cool enough, dark enough? Even if all those elements are perfected, it can be hard to come down from the adrenaline of skating in an NHL arena in front of nearly 18,000 roaring fans. Supplements have been helpful to work around that. Magnesium L-threonate is one that calms the mind and allows guys to more easily fall asleep.

“There are other forms of magnesium that are also helpful for muscular recovery, and we will also lean on those. There’s an amino acid supplement called L-theanine that is essentially nature’s anti-anxiety. It’s an ingredient that you will see in kind of two places – it’s in a lot of sleep supplements, but it’s also in a lot of pre-workouts because it can help hone the energy from caffeine if people feel like they’re getting the jitters and they’re a little shaky,” Neeld said.

“I think there are a lot more resources available to players now than there were 20 years ago. There’s also a lot more information about the benefits of certain strategies and the timing of when they may be more or less effective.”

Beyond the advice of Neeld and the rest of the staff, players take it upon themselves to feel their best during the demands of the regular season and, the hope is, playoffs. Some use at-home saunas, others have Normatec boots, which help with fatigue, muscle soreness and inflammation with its pulsing compression technology, which increases blood circulation.

“You probably don’t need to go that far back, where if a player needed to flush their legs, they were reliant on a massage therapist to be able to do that. That becomes a little bit of a bottleneck if you have one massage therapist and 23 players that are looking for care there,” Neeld said. “We’ve also seen the staff sizes grow on the medical side of things as well, but I think pretty much every player at this point has access to those compression boots so they can get some of that basic flush work in on a regular basis without relying on somebody else’s help to do it.”

There is not one specific routine that guarantees a team wins in the NHL. Instead, it is buy-in from each and every player to be the best they can be on and off the ice. Today’s game is too fast, competitive and constant to only lock in once one arrives at the rink.

The condensed schedule, among other things, could have been used as a reason for a poor 2025-26 showing from the Bruins. Quite the opposite has happened because the team decided it was committed to winning – everywhere.

“You have an appreciation for how hard the players work and how much work and attention to detail they put in behind the scenes, and you like to see that get rewarded,” Neeld said. “I think more than anything, I’m just happy for this group of guys knowing that they’re doing everything they can to make this a successful season, and they’re being rewarded for doing so.”