Goaltenders require specific attention during the off-season too!

I am actually surprised how often I see high caliber teams up to professional level giving very little or no special focus / training to their goalies during the off-season. Even when these teams have goalie coaches in their staff! Sometimes I have even witnessed goalie coaches just hanging with the rest of the coaching staff and let their goalies do all the same workouts as the rest of the team does. I don’t mean that all their training needs to be goalie specific, but c’mon, goalies have different needs from the rest of the team.

If you are a competitive goalie age 12/13 or older you should get specific goalie related dryland training during the off-season! Here’s why:

· Physical needs are different for goalies

· Goalie conditioning has different demands than other players

· Off-season is good time to work on goalie specific balance and agility

· Goalies need to have their off-season programs proportioned different from forwards and defense

So how do you do this? It all goes back to the game analysis that every goalie coach must do and understand thoroughly. Coach must continuously analyze the game and improve his analysis. With this analysis coach must compare how his goalies are doing both physically (conditioning, speed, strength, flexibility etc) and hockey skills wise. With this analysis coach should build an individual program for each goalie.

How do I do this myself? Let’s take a look at this a bit. First of all I am lucky that I have been able to work with top level pro and Junior A goalies for so many years. This means that I have goalies that are always available and willing to work + most of the resources I need. With my oldest goalie, Ari Sulander of ZSC Lions, I have gone to extreme for some years now. He does not work out with the team during the off-season before the team hits ice early August. For Ari I design every single workout session based on the test results and our own analysis that we do together with him.

As a general rule most of the junior teams age 13-17 should get by with 2-3 goalie specific dryland workouts per week and they can do the rest of the training with the team and/or using the training programs given by the team. How ever that specific training is very important part of goalies weekly training and should address their special needs.

It is also good to point out that goalies strength needs are different from the other players and once the team is doing weights your goalies should have somewhat different programs with focus first on legs and lower body followed by strong core/midsection and then thirdly shoulders. Of course goalies can do some bench presses for general conditioning/strength, but that is really not what they need in their game.

So make sure you really understand what your goalies need and build the summer programs accordingly!

Too tall goalie stick = problem!

This is clearly an issue these days. Every day when I visit various rinks I see kids with way too tall sticks that seem to fit them well when kids are in a traditional stance, but as soon as they go down to make a save in a butterfly position the stick is forcing their hands to incorrect position.

This is mainly a results of too tall paddle/grip height. In the past sticks were always measured to fit goalies stance. This was OK when most of the saves were made standing up, but NOT TODAY. In modern hockey +90% of the saves are being made with 1 or both knees on the ice. Therefor you should also start measuring the stick to fit the most commonly used save position.

Too tall stick pushes your blocker way too high and leaves vulnerable hole under the arm. Lot of goalies compensate this by bringing the arm tight to the body and pushing the stick blade further out. This way the goalie puts himself into a position were it is almost impossible to control the puck properly.

Ask your goalie coach to help, find a stick that fits your save making position and feel natural for you.

Modern goaltending, coaching, trends etc…

I have been publishing my goalie blog in Finnish over a year now and figured out that it is also time to start publishing more in English as well. As folks have noticed we have been very focused on business in Finland at Goaliepro and therefore all the efforts have been on keeping the Finnish website www.goaliepro.com/fi updated at all times. Unfortunately this has meant that www.goaliepro.com/en has not seen any recent updates. This is natural since Goaliepro’s business is mainly in Finland with some consulting in Switzerland and Russia at the moment.

To correct the situation we have decided with Goaliepro’s webmaster Juha Halmesvaara to convert the English site to resource library only and remove the other information from there. Changes will be done during the spring. After that we will start translating the Finnish resources more regularly to English and maintain all the business, camp, equipment etc information only on the Finnish site.

This Blog also plays a role on these changes as I intend to maintain both Finnish and English blogs from now on. Here I will address issues related to goaltending, coaching goalies etc…