In September 2024, Connor McDavid explained the Edmonton Oilers’ terrible start to the previous season by blaming himself, and not in the way players usually do. He said he had trained too hard.
“I was just very tired and fatigued from a long summer of training,” he said. He described the old approach as “very go, go, go” and “throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks”. So he changed it: heavy work off the ice, and no skating at all until August, followed by “five great weeks on the ice”.
His line about why is the most useful sentence anybody in hockey has said about off-season planning. “You don’t necessarily need to peak Sept. 18,” he said, “but you need to peak for Oct. 9 when the first game is.”
What follows is everything documented about how he trains and what he eats, with one warning up front: the training record is current and specific, and the food record is from 2015.
How does he train in the summer?
With Gary Roberts, the former NHL forward, as he has since he was 15. That has not changed in eleven years. What has changed is where.
Roberts’ operation, now called Gary Roberts Performance, lists a single address in Vaughan, Ontario, at 9600 Bathurst Street in Maple, rather than the North York facility named in the reporting from McDavid’s teenage years. It is the anchor tenant of the Honey and Barry Memorial Arena with 12,500 square feet of training space, in a building that opened in July 2025 and was announced as a summer base for professional players.
It has also turned into a gathering point. In August 2026, McDavid appeared in a Gary Roberts Performance clip alongside Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, Chris Tanev and Shane Wright. In July 2026, the San Jose prospect Igor Karmanov, training there at the same time, named Gabriel Landeskog, Zach Hyman, Quinton Byfield and Zayne Parekh in the group, and described doing forty minutes on a stationary bike next to McDavid on a Saturday. In August 2023, the group was McDavid, Draisaitl, Hyman, Steven Stamkos and Sean Durzi.
It even has a competitive end: the Ray Emery Cup, an annual summer tournament run by Roberts and trainer Matt Nichol. In August 2026, McDavid played for Roberts’ side with Shane Wright, Zach Hyman and Jordan Binnington, against Nichol’s group captained by Tom Wilson.
The program’s own description is on-ice work, off-ice work, nutrition, and treatment under one roof, by application, for elite players only. It names no coaches and publishes no weekly structure.
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The change he made in 2024
This is the most concrete thing he has said about his own training, and it runs against the grain of almost every athlete profile ever written.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| On-ice work | through the summer | none until August, then five weeks |
| Off-ice work | heavy, high volume | heavy, and the only focus early |
| His description | “very go, go, go” | “rested a little bit” |
| Target | being sharp for camp | being sharp for the opener |
The context he attached to it: in 2023-24 Edmonton started 2-9-1, and he had two goals and ten points in his first eleven games while missing two with injury. His own diagnosis was that the previous summer had been “very volume heavy”.
He has stayed with that logic since. Ahead of the Milano Cortina Olympics, he said in December 2025 that he wanted to “peak in February”, and that at that stage of a season the work is “more rounding out your game, you want to make sure the details are there”.
READ MORE: Will Connor McDavid get 200 points? Ten have been on pace. Two made it
What does he eat on a game day?
Chicken and rice, and the honest answer is that nobody has asked him about it since 2015.
The quote everybody reproduces comes from a Sports Illustrated “Behind the Body” piece in October 2015. “I’m a pretty boring person,” he said. “I usually eat the same things before every game, chicken and rice.” On why: “It’s pretty light and makes you feel good. I just stick to what I know.”
What does he eat the rest of the time?
From the Sports Illustrated piece: eggs with vegetables for breakfast, chicken and rice for lunch, steak with a side salad for dinner, trail mix or berries for snacks, no spices, and no sauces. The declared weakness was Twizzlers and licorice. During the Roberts program, intake was 4,500 to 5,000 calories a day, mostly whole foods with protein, carbohydrate, fat, and fiber at every meal; groceries were bought twice a week with a nutritionist; and there was an occasional cheat day.
The only current information is that a private chef in the Edmonton area, Sheridan McLaren, counts McDavid among the clients of a performance meal-preparation service described as built around fuelling and precision. That was reported in May 2026. It says nothing about what is on the plates.
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What does he do in season?
The one in-season session published in his own words is from April 2020, during the pandemic pause, when he and Roberts filmed a fifteen-minute circuit: ten bodyweight squats, a 45-second wall sit, ten push-ups, a 30-second split squat hold on each leg, four rounds. His caption, as the NHL published it: “Here’s our first 15 minute workout, be sure to tag us if you give them a try!”
The other documented physical project is rehabilitation, not training. He tore the posterior cruciate ligament in his left knee against Calgary on 6 April 2019, with further tearing and a fracture in the tibia, and chose intensive physiotherapy over surgery, working with Roberts and Dr. Mark Lindsay. He made the following season’s opener, roughly six months later.
His own account of that, from a 2020 Sportsnet documentary: “The main focus was getting healthy. There were days when it didn’t feel that good going through that process.” And on the injury itself: “It’s a PCL. Only a few doctors have done that and it’s not like it’s been mastered.”
He has also spoken about the knee as the low point of his career, in an Instagram video made for BODYARMOR: “I’d say a moment that I wanted to quit is injuring my knee. It was a serious injury, significant, long, long rehab, and a lot of dark days in there.”
What his training partners say
The most vivid material on this subject comes from people who have been in the room.
Sean Durzi, after the summer of 2023: “The work ethic stands out.” He described being “on the ice with him, with them, every day” and pushing each other in the gym, which he called “second to none”.
Igor Karmanov, in July 2026, calls McDavid’s professionalism “unbelievable”. He says the gym’s coaches told him McDavid trained at five in the morning on his own wedding day, and that McDavid kept working while friends walked past joking with him, “because he knew what his job was”.
READ MORE: Connor McDavid’s best and worst team, in ten different categories
What has actually been measured?
Very little, and all of it from one week in 2015.
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Standing long jump | 97.3 inches |
| Vertical jump | 19.488 inches |
| Pro agility | 4.43 left, 4.53 right |
| Bench press | 9 repetitions |
| Pull-ups | 6 |
| Wingate, cycle | 17.49 |
| VO2 max, cycle | 10:15 |
Those are the 2015 NHL Scouting Combine numbers, from before he had played an NHL game. No weight and no body-fat percentage were reported.
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