“We are so thankful to have found Athletic Republic! We are welcomed with Coach DJ’s big smile and energy! The trainers are amazing.”
– Stephanie M.
via Google Reviews
“Facility is top notch. My son does the (hockey) treadmill and Taylor is an awesome trainer who is knowledgeable and extremely helpful with my kid. She knows her stuff and I’m sure my son will benefit from her expertise.”
– Amul M.
via Google Reviews
“We came to Athletic Republic not expecting much, but just another place to exercise. Wow, were we wrong!!! From the first day with DJ, my son has not looked back. Having trainers that have college degrees in sports performance is what makes this place the BEST PLACE to bring your child.”
– Eunieceh
via Google Reviews
Dry-Land Hockey Training for Year-Round Dominance
For the dedicated parent of a competitive hockey player, the goal is simple: you want to see your athlete succeed.
You want them to win the race to the puck, dominate battles in the corner, stay healthy all season, and play with unshakable confidence. While on-ice skills and traditional weightlifting are crucial, they are only two pieces of the puzzle.
Athletic Republic’s science-based performance training provides the third, critical piece, translating raw strength into on-ice dominance. Our programs are specifically designed to address the most common pain points in a player’s game, delivering measurable improvements that directly impact performance.
Here is a breakdown of the game-changing benefits your athlete will gain through our specialized hockey training protocols:
The Three Roles of Complete
Hockey Player Development
The Three Roles of Complete
Hockey Player Development
In the highly competitive world of high school and collegiate ice hockey, the path to elite performance is no longer a simple matter of talent and ice time. Today’s serious athletes are supported by a specialized team, a triumvirate of experts each responsible for a critical facet of their development. As a parent, you have likely invested significant time, energy, and resources into two of these essential figures.
(not us)
The Head Coach
The team coaching staff’s primary role is to integrate a player’s individual skills into a cohesive team concept, hold try-outs, set the schedule, manage practice, develop game-by-game, and teach the playbook.. These coaches are responsible for strategy, offensive and defensive systems, and fostering teamwork. They manage player roles, and playing time, and make in-game decisions. Ultimately, the team coach is tasked with unifying individual talents to achieve collective success and cultivating a positive team culture.
(not us)
The Skills Coach
The skills coach primary role is to teach and refine the specific techniques and tactics of hockey. This includes drilling fundamental skills like skating, shooting, and passing, as well as developing offensive and defensive strategies and enhancing overall hockey IQ. They are masters of systems, strategy, puck handling, shooting mechanics, and game sense. They are responsible for transforming an athlete into a smarter, more effective hockey player, often with a focus on the athlete’s specific position.
(we are)
The Performance Trainer
The performance coach is a specialist who bridges the vast gap between raw strength and game-day dominance. Their expertise lies not just in building the body’s engine, but in fine-tuning it for maximum output. They focus on the scientific application of strength at high velocity, a quality known as power. They engineer efficient movement patterns to enhance agility, maximize top-end velocity to create game-breaking speed, and build the body’s resilience to withstand the immense forces of the game—a concept we call durability. The performance coach is the architect who makes a hockey player a superior athlete.
Hockey Player Conditioning for High Performance and Injury Prevention
Most dedicated hockey families have the first two coaches covered. However, it is the absence of the third that explains why a strong player may not be fast, why a skilled player gets pushed off the puck, and why so many promising seasons are derailed by preventable injuries.
This critical gap in an athlete’s support system is where the science of athletic development is often neglected, allowing dangerous off-season myths to take root and the high cost of inactivity to diminish hard-earned skills.
By implementing a year-round, data-driven blueprint, it is possible to build a more dominant, durable, and confident hockey player.
Athletic Republic serves as that definitive Performance Coach, a partner dedicated to unlocking an athlete’s full genetic potential through a proven, science-based system of hockey performance training.
The Year-Round Imperative: How to Build and Maintain a High-Performance Hockey Athlete
This is achieved through a scientifically grounded, year-round training plan based on the principle of periodization—the strategic organization of training into distinct phases, each with specific goals and methodologies. This approach ensures that the athlete is not just working hard, but working on the right things at the right time to maximize performance and minimize injury risk.
Phase I: The Off-Season (Building the Engine)
P=F×V (Power = Force x Velocity)
The off-season is the prime window for making significant physiological gains. With the demands of games and team travel removed, this period allows for the volume and intensity of training required to build a bigger, faster, and more powerful athletic engine. A properly structured off-season program, like those employed at the professional level, is typically broken into progressive sub-phases.
Stability and Foundational Strength: The initial phase focuses on recovery from the previous season and addressing the asymmetries and imbalances inherent to a one-sided sport like hockey. The goal is to strengthen joints, improve mobility, and build a solid foundation of functional strength, often using bodyweight and lower-weight, higher-repetition exercises. This phase “bulletproofs” the body for the more intense work to come.
Strength and Hypertrophy: This is the primary muscle-building phase. The focus shifts to progressive overload with compound movements like squats, deadlifts, presses, and pulls. The objective is to increase the athlete’s muscle mass and overall capacity for force production—the “F” in the power equation.
Power and Speed: In the final, most critical phase leading into the preseason, the emphasis shifts to converting the newly built strength into explosive, sport-specific power. This is where the “V” (velocity) in the power equation is developed. Training incorporates plyometrics (jumping and bounding), medicine ball throws, and speed drills to train the nervous system to apply force as rapidly as possible. This is the phase that creates separation from the competition and ensures the athlete arrives at training camp not just strong, but dangerously fast and explosive.
Phase II: The In-Season (Honing the Edge)
One of the most damaging myths in athlete development is the idea that strength and performance training should cease once the competitive season begins. The reality is that without a continued training stimulus, the hard-won gains of the off-season will begin to erode, typically right when the most important games of the season are approaching. The goal of in-season training is not to build new levels of fitness, but to strategically maintain strength, preserve power, and manage fatigue, ensuring the athlete performs at their peak during playoffs, not just in the opening month.
This is accomplished through 1-2 weekly sessions of high-quality, low-volume dry land hockey conditioning. These workouts are carefully designed to stimulate the neuromuscular system and maintain strength levels using loads of 75% or more of the athlete’s one-rep max, but with reduced sets and reps to avoid creating excessive muscle soreness (DOMS) that could hinder on-ice performance. This approach aligns with recommendations from governing bodies like USA Hockey, which advocate for age-appropriate, complementary off-ice training throughout the season to develop agility, balance, coordination, and strength.
A critical point to understand is that the common mid-season performance slump is often misdiagnosed. Coaches and players may perceive a drop in speed and stamina as a lack of cardiovascular conditioning and attempt to solve it with more skating or “bag skates”. However, the high volume of on-ice practices and games is typically more than sufficient to maintain an athlete’s aerobic base. The true culprit is often the decay of strength and power levels, which are the physiological foundation of speed and explosiveness.
In this scenario, adding more skating only increases the athlete’s cumulative fatigue without addressing the root cause of the performance decline, thus accelerating the slump. The correct antidote is a targeted, in-season performance training session that maintains the athlete’s strength and power, preserving the “firepower” in their stride and the force in their shot all season long. This is where a knowledgeable performance coach becomes an invaluable in-season asset, capable of correctly diagnosing the issue and prescribing the precise training dose needed to keep the athlete sharp and dominant.
Our mission at Athletic Republic is to be the indispensable Performance Coach for the dedicated high school and collegiate athletes in our community. We understand the local hockey landscape and the commitment it takes to compete at a high level in this region. We are positioned to be the expert resource that complements your athlete’s on-ice skills coaching and team practices.
A key feature for serious hockey players is our revolutionary Hockey Treadmill. This specialized piece of equipment makes us a destination for any hockey player in Michigan who is truly committed to maximizing their skating speed and efficiency.
Our role in your athlete’s development is distinct and highly specialized. While your skills coach perfects your game on the ice at your local rink, your Athletic Republic performance coach builds the raw athletic engine off the ice. We do not teach game systems or stick skills; we focus with scientific precision on building the foundational pillars of athleticism: speed, power, agility, and durability that make all of those on-ice skills more effective. We provide the horsepower that allows your athlete’s skill to dominate the game.
Become A Better Hockey Player in Commerce, MI
Become A Better Hockey Player in Commerce, MI
Athletic Republic is not simply a place to work out. It’s where better athletes are made. We’re the premier destination for individualized, highly effective, sport-specific training that’s like no other.
