To "stunt your growth", the growth plates of the human body must be injured. The most common being overuse injures or even a fall/blow to the limb - causing bone fractures. Bone infections, extreme cold, radiations and certain medications, neurological disorders and metabolic disease also can cause growth plate injuries. So what are growth plates? The growth plates are areas of growing tissue near the end of bones. Growth plates are located on the long bones of children and young people. Each long bone has at least two growth plates-one at each end. This is where the long bones grow. When young people finish growing, the growth plates close and are replaced by solid bone. Thus injuries to the growth plates are especially dangerous for adolescents. Halting the growth of a child is undesirable and thus should be avoided(duh). Paranoid parents becoming more aware thus began questioning whether weight lifting could stunt the growth of their children.

The goal of any well thought-out fitness program should be to create the exercise response you want in the least amount of time, while keeping hard work to a minimum. The whole idea is to be very efficient in how you train. You can be just as fit and have as high of a Vo2max. (Vo2max is a great indicator of how aerobically fit you are) as genetically possible by just doing a few short hard sprints a few times per week. Same goes for putting on muscle. All you really need is one hard work set per exercise to put on all the muscle your genetics will allow. The whole idea of eating a bunch of empty calories every day and then having to workout long and hard to keep your weight under control is just not worth the risk to your body. It's much smarter to control your weight with a healthy all natural diet and keep the hard workouts short and to a minimum.

The typical signs of overtraining include: Insomnia Achiness or pain in the muscles and/or joints Fatigue Headaches Elevated morning pulse Sudden inability to complete workouts Feeling unmotivated and lacking energy Increased susceptibility to colds, sore throats and other illnesses Loss in appetite Decrease in performance

You can improve your anaerobic conditioning by running up and down stairs or hills. When you complete these exercises, your body needs more oxygen than you can produce, so it depends on the calories that you have stored for energy. You want to fatigue your body through this process, as it allows your lactate threshold to improve. Once this threshold improves, you can sustain longer periods of intense exercise, making you a more effective hockey player. Some players run on the inside of the arena, going up and down every flight of stairs along the way. If that proves too difficult, begin by doing five sets of stairs per lap and work your way up.

Since the 1970s, hockey players have used dryland training to improve conditioning and skills for ice hockey. While skating is a huge part of the game and never can be ignored, players can develop leg strength and core strength and improve their overall skills with dryland drills. 1.) Pull-Ups vs. Lat Pull Machine: With a pull-up, a person uses their own body weight; this creates excellent body awareness, more importantly pull-ups require a great amount of abdominal strength (keeping the abs tight keeps you from swinging). The lat pull machine lacks these two important features. 2.) Push-Ups vs. Bench Press: Push-Ups again require a person's body weight along with lower body stabilization and contracted abdominals. Lying flat on a bench is a very non-athletic position and requires almost no leg or ab strength. 3.) Lunges vs. Leg Extension: Lunging requires a lot of balance and coordination along with strength from the glutes, quads, hamstrings and abs since you are standing and moving forward during the exercise. The leg extension does one thing; isolate the quads. Unless you want to walk around like Quadzilla there is no place for the leg extension in athletics. 4.) Squats vs. Leg Press: When done correctly no other exercise will develop more leg power than the squat. Since they are done in a standing position they require balance, stabilization, coordination, along with ab and back strength. The leg press lacks all of these factors. 5.) Hang Cleans vs. Shrugs: Hang Cleans are an explosive exercise that develops fast twitch motor units in the muscle. It is a full body exercise. Shoulder Shrugs isolate one muscle group the trapezious and involve little athletic ability to perform. Forget the shrugs! 6.) Squat Press vs Seated Shoulder Presses: Many athletes like to perform the seated dumbbell shoulder press. Try standing up and hold two dumbbells at your shoulders, squat down to 90 degrees as you begin to rise explode with a Dumbbell shoulder press using all

This video is a quick feet ladder exercise which will improve agility.

For the average trained athlete the quickest way to increase linear speed is through short sprints with full recovery (5-50m for team sport athletes) and improving technique. Weight training (via improving relative body strength i.e. strength/bodyweight) will help improve speed. Without sprinting it will not have much of an impact on increasing your speed. The same goes for leaping and bounding plyometric drills and improving flexibility and mobility.

This video is a quick feet speed exercise which helps in almost all sports.

Quickness is genetically determined to a degree, but proper training can greatly increase quickness. Drills geared for pure quickness development should last 6-8 seconds. Training for quickness endurance could be longer in duration. The placement of quickness drills in training varies. Athletes are faced with a multitude of different situations when performing; therefore placement of quickness drills varies accordingly.

This is a plyometrics exercise which is very helpful in hockey and other sports.

Plyometrics (also known as "plyos") is a type of exercise training designed to produce fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions of the nervous system, generally for the purpose of improving performance in sports. Plyometric exercises may also be referred to as explosive exercises. Plyometric movements, in which a muscle is loaded and then contracted in rapid sequence, use the strength, elasticity and innervation of muscle and surrounding tissues to jump higher, run faster, throw farther, or hit harder, depending on the desired training goal.