You may have occasionally seen a player on the bench react like they just inhaled something extremely foul, and you wouldn’t be wrong. You just watched a player use something called “smelling salts”. Smelling salts are a mixture of ammonia, water, and alcohol that cause an extreme smell to radiate once the salts are cracked and exposed to air. The smell provides players with something akin to an adrenaline burst and are widely used through not just the NHL, but all major sports. There is some that think the effect is often a bit exaggerated and may be a bit of a placebo but hey, if it works it works right?
Players will often use smelling salts to “wake up”, maybe after being on the receiving end of a big hit or whiffing on a wide-open net. Hockey players are known as some of the most superstitious athletes on Earth, for example Sidney Crosby’s extremely precise stick measuring and taping along with him believing that if anyone touches his stick after it’s taped, he has to tape it again or the widely prevalent superstition that many players follow where they have to be the last one to leave the ice after pre-game warmup, to the point where you may have seen the famous clip of Tyler Seguin and Mark Scheifele playing rock-paper-scissors from across the ice following a pregame warm-up to see who got to leave the ice last.
The biggest question about smelling salts is: is it dangerous? While ammonia is an extremely toxic substance, there have been no studies shown that say the amount consumed by a player from a single smelling salt is enough to cause any lasting harm. It is simply used as a much needed boost for some of the greatest athletes in the world when they need it most.
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