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The last topic we will be looking at is the physics behind shooting. Shooting is arguably one the hardest, and most important techniques you need to learn to be a good hockey player. Without a good shot you cannot beat a good goal tender and cannot capitalize on scoring opportunity's. If you don't learn to shoot the puck properly the rest of your skills and prove to be useless and futile. The physics behind shooting can become quite complicated and tricky which is why for this section we will focus primarily on how Newtons Second Law and the law of Conservation of Energy apply to shooting.

As young hockey players we were all thought to shoot the puck by winding up our stick, swing our stick towards the puck while making contact with the ice and flexing our stick, then and using the momentum of our body and the flex from the stick hit the puck and send it on its way. This is a perfect example of conservation of energy which shows the transfer of potential energy from you and your stick to kinetic energy which is seen in the puck. This action can be clearly seen in the photo to the right which hows a player loading the potential energy in his body to the flex in his stick which he then will transfer to the puck in an elastic collision sending the puck flying forwards. Another important thing to note here is that because the collision was elastic not only was energy conserved in the system but momentum was conserved as well.

Newtons Second Law can also be seen in this interaction between the stick ad the puck. As the stick hits the puck the force exerted by the stick pushes against the puck causing the puck to accelerate. It is crazy to see the extreme forces professional players exert on pucks as they shoot them to speeds well over 100 mph. We know that a puck weighs on average 163 g and that the wolds fastest shot which was set by Zedno Chara at a speed of 108.8 mph (48.6 m/s) from 30ft (9.1m). Using Newtons Second Law and kinematics we can calculate the force Chara needed to exert on that puck in order to get his shot all the way up to 108.8 mph.
According to our calculations which can be seen below Chara hit the puck with a force of 84.6 newtons! Needless to say that's incredible and not a shot you want to get hit by.