Firstbeat Sports for Ice hockey

The hardest 40 seconds of your week might not happen in a game.

They can happen in Tuesday’s practice. Firstbeat Sports is the internal-load system performance staffs in the NHL, AHL, Liiga, SHL, DEL and NCAA use to see what every shift, skate and back-to-back costs each player, and to plan the next day on it.

Book a demo

Hockey is an interval sport. Distance doesn’t tell you what it cost.

A game is not 60 minutes of work. It is 20 to 25 all-out shifts with incomplete recovery, board battles that never show up as skating distance, and a third period played on accumulating fatigue. Your tracking system shows what a player did. Firstbeat shows what it cost them, and whether the athlete is ready to do it again tomorrow.

See how staffs use it

A 40-second shift can be the hardest stimulus of the whole week. Live TRIMP/min shows it as it happens.

Wins in the corners barely move a distance number. Heart-rate-based load and Movement Load capture the effort your eyes can see but distance can’t.

Two defensemen can play the same minutes and carry completely different internal loads. Every number is read against the player’s own history.

Agree the day’s intensity with the head coach before the skate

Easy day, moderate day, battle day: with TRIMP/min as the shared language, the conversation before practice is how long and how hard. The report afterwards confirms whether the plan actually happened. The most advanced programs go a drill deeper, with a drill library that predicts tomorrow’s practice before the first whistle.

Watch: In-Season Performance Insights (Avalanche)

Back-to-backs, travel, and being ready when the puck drops

Friday’s game decides what Saturday’s lineup can give. A Quick Recovery Test at the breakfast table tells you who recovered, always against the player’s own baseline, never a team average. Game-day readiness extends to the warm-up: when a team comes out flat in game two, the data often finds the reason there, like a pregame warm-up that never left zone 3.

Watch: From Training to Game Day (UConn)

From the 29-minute defenseman to the healthy scratch

The two hardest players to manage are the one who plays everything and the one who plays nothing. Track high-minute players for accumulating fatigue before it shows in their game, and give non-dressers a true game-substitute load, with enough time above 90 percent of HRmax to stay ready for the call-up.

Watch: From Training to Game Day (UConn)

Submaximal fitness test, peak %HRmax: 77% before the injury, 86% on the first day back with the team, 77% again at week 20.

Return to play on the player’s own numbers

Rehab skates are routinely harder than team practices. Without data, that surprises everyone. Progress an injured player on evidence: enough high-intensity work to rebuild game fitness, no more fatigue than the plan allows, and a clear comparison against the player’s own pre-injury baseline before full contact.

Read: How-To-Guide — Return to Play After Injury

From U18 to the first team, and testing without a test day

Elite games demand more than junior games, but juniors need to train more than pros. Clubs that run U18, U20 and the men’s team on the same system see the real gap between junior and pro demands and build each player’s pathway to close it. And when max testing is off the table in season, the submaximal fitness test built into a normal warm-up keeps fitness tracking alive every four to six weeks.

Watch: Building Robust Athletes (Tappara)

What changed when hockey staffs started measuring the cost

“Was it too hard or too soft, or for the days after games how was the recovery? How about when we were traveling? … Now we know.”

Jesper Gillerås,
Strength and Conditioning Coach, Leksands IF
Read more

“Just duration and TRIMP per minute. That’s all you care about. And you can be tremendously effective and build really good buy-in with just 2 simple metrics like that.”

Alexi Pianosi
Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, Colorado Avalanche
Watch the webinar

“I believe that heart rate monitoring systems, they are coming back. I would say that the coaches have understood that how individually players react, it’s very important to see what is the response of each and every player.”

Marko Haverinen,
Head of Performance, Tappara (2026)
Watch the webinar

Training Load Guide for Ice Hockey

The reference values for men’s and women’s hockey, metric by metric, and how pro teams dose intensity across the season.

Game, hard practice and MD-1 (the day before the game) reference ranges for men’s and women’s ice hockey
TRIMP, TRIMP/min, Training Effect, Movement Load and the Quick Recovery Test explained for hockey
Practitioner notes from the NHL, Liiga and national-team staffs

Get the guide