Managing Fitness and fatigue training and playing hockey

Training
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Took me a long while to post this - mostly because I thought I had a good handle on it - til the first race of the season ended in me getting dropped.

Through the winter I trained on the SSB high volume as it was basically my only exercise outside hiking the dog. Everything was closed in the pandemic.

Now the league I skate in we play 1-2x a week and I have moved to the mid volume plan for criterium racing. I track my fitness, fatigue and form on intervals.icu but there is one problem: There isnt really a power meter for hockey.
I debated looking into the whoop and I debated wearing a heart rate monitor and watch on the ice to track those numbers - but in the end - I am not sure what the right way to balance this all out is. We only have another 2-3 games and then its back to full time bike racing. But this wont be the last time the two sports are going to overlap.

Wondering if there are any other hockey / cyclists out there who have had success and were able to pass along some sage knowledge.

I had a relatively hard ride yesterday followed by one of the harder games I have had to play in recent memory - and todays endurance ride was a sweatshop. Definitely feel like the poo today.

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I can tell you that hockey is like an interval day for me. I’m totally crushed the rest of the day and I make sure it’s a nice long z2 the day after a game. No chance at doing intervals

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I wore a HR monitor when I played and regularly saw 180+ with spikes up to 193 bpm. I’m about 30yo and 193 is a max (I think). I don’t usually wear HR monitors for anything so I don’t have a lot of data, but hockey is very stressful on the body. I go all out tho and hit the bench when I’m gassed. I know some people noodle out there for like 2 mins so it’s prob a lot different. When I was doing both, I would just ride z2 on the bike for an hour and maybe do a 2-3 hr long ride easy on the weekend. I also did over under workouts on the trainer where I ride between 85% to 110% ftp over under, maybe for a 15-45 min block. I also did super easy spins for 30-45min of under 50% ftp when I needed it.

I didn’t have a regular hockey schedule so our games tended to be late and not on the same days every week. So I didn’t follow a structured cycling plan during the season. I also felt fatigued a lot. It was worth it tho bc it was really fun. Much more fun than cycling, but I like cycling in its own way

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