Innovative tool helps Blue Jackets with training

Isaac Newton's third law of motion states that for every action involving force, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Blue Jackets director of high performance Nelson Ayotte can now use that law to measure those forces as they're produced by the bodies of team members.
And his ability to do so is helping the team's on-ice results when it comes to both production and health.

That's thanks to the force plates that Ayotte and the team's strength and conditioning staff have had installed in the performance lab in Nationwide Arena. A growing piece of equipment when it comes to testing athletes in sports across the world, the force plate measures the forces produced when an athlete stands on it, jumps on it, moves on it or otherwise interacts with it.
Leveled by six different lasers and placed into the concrete at the base of Nationwide Arena, the two force plates installed by the team's high performance staff -- one for each leg, generally -- provide a specific measurement of the power contained within each member of the Blue Jackets team.
The applications, of course, are endless in a sport that Ayotte describes as lower-body dominant. The measurements can be used to determine player fatigue throughout a season, if a player is weak in a certain area, if there is an issue with the symmetry within a player's body and so much more.
"We can do a lot with the data," Ayotte said of the subject of this edition of the Ace Tools of the Trade video series.
The measurements can have a big impact in a variety of areas, as Ayotte, strength and conditioning coach Kevin Collins and their staffs can improve performance by targeting a specific area of a player's body if it's in need of work. The force plate measurements also help with injury prevention -- yes, even in a season in which the Blue Jackets lead in the NHL in man-games lost -- as weak areas are often the ones that are susceptible to becoming injured.
"Over the years, we know about 75 percent of injuries in hockey come from high impact, so a guy falling like the (Oliver) Bjorkstrand or the (Seth) Jones injuries," Ayotte said. "You can't do anything about that. There is no way we can do prevent that with training, but everything that is groin, that is hamstring, those come under our responsibilities. That 25 percent, this is where we can really influence the needle here on which side the player or athlete is going to go."
The measurements also allow the staff to have concrete data when it comes to the physical status of the Blue Jackets players. Traditional testing measures have their place, of course, but over his career Ayotte has learned that players can beat the system by adjusting the way they approach drills -- for example, an athlete who usually has a vertical jump of 30 inches but is feeling fatigued on a certain day can compensate on a testing day and still reach the same result.
And sometimes, what a high performance coach sees might be the result of an athlete compensating for something else, often without even realizing it.
"Sometimes there was stuff that we saw on the tape and we said, 'OK, this is how that person is,' and then we test them and it's completely the opposite but until we test we didn't see it," Ayotte said. "It was completely counterintuitive, but those do not lie. They are numbers and this is how it is, but sometimes it allows us to see where we were making the mistake on something else before."
Ayotte tests players throughout the season to see how things are changing and if there's a certain area of focus that is needed either for the whole team or specific players. Protocol for the tests is fairly standardized, with Ayotte only testing players when the team is at home and coming off a day off. The results throughout a season can also help a player know what he has to work on to improve during the offseason.
While the results the team has been able to gather so far have been helpful, what truly excites Ayotte is what might be next. He can see a world in which the team installs more force plates and is able to use that matrix to gain insight into a player's skating style and how to help him build power and speed going forward.
"There's a lot we still don't know," Ayotte said. "We're (using it) way different than we were a year ago right now, and we're not how we're going to be in a year from now, as well. We're evolving with it right now.
"An old strength coach like me, we have to reinvent ourselves. We're actually going back to school and relearning because that's not something they were showing us in the '80s."