Hockey stick kick point: what the brands promise, what the research measures

Short answer: it is the part of the shaft that bends the most during a shot. Warrior defines it as "where the stick wants to bend when you load it". The top hand holds the end of the shaft, the blade presses on the ice, and the bottom hand pushes in between: the shaft bows like a bow, then springs back and sends the puck.

The diagram below shows it on a player taking a shot: the coloured zone is the part of the shaft that bends the most. Red near the blade for a low kick, blue a little higher for a hybrid, yellow in the middle for a mid kick. Only that zone moves. No manufacturer publishes its kick point position in centimetres: the positions are illustrative.

Each brand has its own vocabulary, but the families look alike. Hockey Monkey sums up the basics: a low kick flexes "at the bottom third of the shaft", a mid kick flexes "at the middle of the shaft". Makers get one or the other by varying stiffness along the shaft, not by adding a hinge.

The word "high kick" still shows up in some studies and at a few retailers. It means a kick point higher up the shaft, on the side of what Bauer, CCM and Warrior now call "mid".

Only partly. Researchers at Washington State University describe the stick as a beam supported in two places, the top hand and the ice, that the bottom hand bends. For them, the point that bends the most sits "near or below the lower hand".

Rod Cross (University of Sydney) and Crawford Lindsey moved the bottom hand along test beams. The result: the point of maximum bend follows the hand, while staying a little closer to the middle than the hand. When stiffness changes along the shaft, that point moves too. Their conclusion fits in one line: the kick point is "a side effect of stiffness and hand position". They see overall stiffness as a better guide to how a stick feels than its kick.

In practice, sliding your bottom hand down makes any stick bend lower. The factory kick moves the flex zone, but so do your hands. One limit to keep in mind: these tests used aluminium beams, not real carbon sticks.

The stick works like a spring. On a slap shot, the blade strikes the ice just behind the puck, the shaft loads, then it springs back while the puck is still on the blade. That contact is surprisingly long: tens of milliseconds on a slap shot, about 100 on a wrist shot, where you drag the puck before letting it go.

At McGill, Villaseñor and colleagues filmed slap shots at 1,000 frames per second. Elite players kept the puck on the blade longer (38 ms versus 27 ms) and shot it much faster (120 km/h versus 80 km/h, about 75 versus 50 mph). For them, the shaft recoil, the spring-back, came at about 60% of the contact. What separates the two groups is the player, not a stick model.

It is the promise on almost every product page: "quick release" for low kicks, "power" for mid kicks. As far as we know, only one controlled study has put it to the test. In 2022, David Pearsall's team at McGill (Léger, Renaud, Robbins and Pearsall, in the journal Sensors) had 10 experienced players, from junior A to professional, shoot with four sticks with no graphics. Three had a low kick, one a high kick; flex and curve were varied too.

The result: no difference in speed. On slap shots, the four sticks gave 31.7 to 32.0 m/s (about 71 to 72 mph), and the high-kick stick was actually the fastest, though not by a significant margin. On wrist shots, 27.4 to 27.9 m/s (about 61 to 62 mph). The only release-related difference measured was slap shot contact time: slightly shorter with the high-kick stick (50 ms) than with the soft low-kick stick (53 ms). That is the opposite of the usual story.

Does this mean kick point is useless? No. Finding no difference in 10 players does not prove there never is one, and feel matters: a stick that releases at the right moment for you is a stick you shoot more often, with confidence. The authors themselves note that published research on flex profiles is scarce. What can honestly be said: no lab evidence shows that a low kick makes a shot faster or more powerful.

If the stick model barely changes speed, what does? The same McGill lab has been answering for more than 20 years: the player. In his 2002 master's thesis, Tong-Ching Tom Wu showed that skilled players push harder into the ice and bend the stick more by adjusting their hand positions. The slap shot is faster than the wrist shot precisely because it bends the stick more.

Villaseñor (2006) points the same way: elites keep the puck on the blade longer and shoot it much faster, with puck acceleration almost identical to recreational players (63.8 g versus 61.8 g). The gain seems to come from how long they push, not from a magic stick.

To improve, the effort goes into technique: spread the hands, drop the bottom hand, shift weight from the back leg to the front. The off-ice shot power program trains exactly that chain starting from the legs, and the guide to the four types of shots explains when each shot is the right one.

Every major brand now has a low, a hybrid and a mid family. The table uses the makers' own words, read on their sites on October 30, 2026. Where a retailer classifies a line differently, it says so.

The two describe the same thing from two angles. Flex is the amount of bend: a lower number bends more easily (Warrior). Kick point is where the shaft bends the most. According to Cross and Lindsey, they are not independent: the distribution of stiffness is what creates the kick point.

Flex has a measured effect, small and dependent on the shot. At the University of Calgary (Grover, 2013), 14 players shot with 85, 100 and 110 flex sticks. On wrist shots, the 85 bent 28.3% more than the 110 and gave a 2.7% faster puck. On slap shots, the 110 gave 3.2% more speed. Above all, players did not all respond the same way: 8 of 14 shot their best wrist shot with the softest stick, 11 of 14 their best slap shot with the stiffest.

So flex comes first: a stick you can actually bend. Kick comes second, for feel. The guide to hockey stick size and flex gives a starting flex by weight and height, with a calculator, and the one on blade curves completes the choice.

Makers' and retailers' advice lines up. Take it as a starting point, not a law: as Hockey Monkey puts it, finding the "right" kick point "is all a matter of preference".

Where your hands go matters as much as your position. A player who grips very low with the bottom hand already bends the stick near the blade; a player with hands close together bends it higher. Before switching lines, look at where your bottom hand sits on your most frequent shots, and which shots you take most: from the slot or from the point. The page on shooting zones helps you find out.

For a child, flex matters far more than kick. A young player is light and does not push hard: they barely bend a stick that is too stiff, and a stick that does not bend does not load, whatever its kick point. As Warrior puts it, kids need softer flexes "so they can actually bend the stick". Bauer presents the flex of its Supreme Junior series as a way to help young players learn proper shooting technique.

Most youth sticks are low kicks anyway, with flexes from 10 to 40 at Sherwood (REKKER R10 to R40). For a parent, the rule is simple: get the right size and a flex the child can bend first, then forget about kick. If the stick is too long, cutting it makes it stiffer still, which goes the wrong way.

No source we read says so. What is documented is that cutting stiffens the stick: about 3 flex points per inch cut (2.5 to 5 depending on the source), or about 1 point per centimetre. Bauer, CCM and Warrior print the scale on most of their shafts.

You cut the top of the shaft, far from the zone that bends on a low-kick stick. But a shorter, stiffer shaft behaves differently in your hands, and your hands move the flex, as we saw. If you cut 3 or 4 inches, judge the stick once it is cut, not in the store at its full length.

A fair test compares one thing at a time. If flex or curve changes along with the kick, you will not know what made the difference: that is exactly what the McGill study showed with its PM9 curve.

The last step is the most reliable. How a stick feels on a store mat does not tell you whether you hit the net more in games. With RinkLog, every shot on net, missed or blocked is logged game after game: over five or six games on each side of the switch, you can see whether the new stick changes anything. The page on shots on goal, missed and blocked explains how to count them.