German Ice Hockey Federation Sports Science Commitment Bears Early Fruit

Early wins over Slovakia and USA helped propel the German Hockey team towards a quarterfinal berth at the 2016 Ice Hockey World Championship tournament in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is the German team’s first appearance in the final stages of the competition since 2011, ending a 5-year drought.

The groundwork for the German team’s return to form can be at least partially attributable to a renewed commitment by the German Ice Hockey Federation (Deutscher Eishockey-Bund) to incorporate sports science and technology into their team’s preparatory processes.

In November 2015, the German Ice Hockey Federation announced a remarkable program wide adoption of Firstbeat Sports monitoring and analytics platform. Firstbeat’s services would be used during all men’s and women’s German National Team trainings for elite squads and age category squads alike. The bold plan intended to deepen understanding of player development and improve training efficiency across the board.

Marco Dietzel, the German’s top athletic trainer, recently confirmed the value Firstbeat Sports to their team. “Firstbeat gives [the other coaches and I] insight into how the players are doing. As a result, we can design specialized programs based on individual needs while simultaneously protecting them from the effects of overtraining.”

The strength of the Firstbeat Sports platform used by the German teams is two fold. The benefits begin with professional grade heart rate monitoring, but the real value lies in Firstbeat’s analytics that transforms that monitoring data into actionable insights on player performance, training, and recovery.

“These days roughly a third of NHL teams and a large number of elite European teams in the KHL and various national leagues are using our platform to take the guesswork out of training decisions,” explains Firstbeat Head of Sports Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki. ”The training and recovery analytics we provide offer a much more informed personalized approach to coaching that is quickly becoming the norm. Simply put, this is the information you need to compete at elite levels today.”

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