What makes a great skater?  This is a complex question to answer. The truth is, no two strides are the same and there is no perfect answer.  Skating, like playing the guitar, is a skill.  There are plenty of players playing at high levels that have unorthodox stride signatures.  The game of hockey is complex, and although skating comes at a premium, one also must consider hockey sense, technical, and tactical tendencies as all may lead to efficiency on the ice. 

The hockey stride has been described by bio-mechanists as biphasic in nature consisting of alternating periods of single leg and double leg support.  The single support phase corresponds to a period of glide, while the double support phase corresponds to the onset and preparation of propulsion (Marino, 1977).  Both stride rate and stride length have been investigated as a means of measuring/separating the skating velocities of high caliber and low caliber skaters. The purpose of this short blog is to investigate the research in order to answer the question:  which is more important, stride length, or stride rate?