Last Updated on September 5, 2021 by FS Studios Personal Training

We recently began training a fairly high level 14 year old hockey goalie. Our focus
was to work on kinesthetics, coordination, speed, movement patterns and dynamic
flexibility. Improved kinesthetics allow an athlete to improve their ability to search
out an object without looking directly at it. In the case of a hockey goalie, this
can help them catch a puck as it goes flying by their body without eye tracking it into
their glove. The need for strong kinesthetics is high among hockey goalies as many
things are going on around the goalie during a game. As for coordination, though many
athletes are fairly coordinated to begin with, we help them find the parts of their
game where things aren’t moving quite as fast as everything else. To improve both the
coordination and speed of our hockey goalie, we focused on refinement of motion. Showing
an athlete how to contract the proper core muscles and helping them find the right
angles of direction to move in can help them make huge improvements in speed and
coordination. Sometimes you may feel a long swooping motion is good for your wrist shot
when in reality, a straight and tight shot is stronger and faster. We refined various
motions of our hockey goalie in this manner showing him that point a to b could be
quickened with tighter and more direct motions.

In contrast to popular training, we have not given our young goalie a lot of weight training
exercises at this point in his development. It should be mentioned that NHL goalies are very lean, quick
and tall and because our goalie already has such a frame. No heavy weight training has been prescribed.
Though it is routinely believed that bigger and stronger is faster, the correlation isn’t quite accurate.
The force velocity curve is a correlation showing that with great force, velocity tends to drop off and with
incredibly high velocities comes less force production. Our hockey goalie needs to stop a puck moving at very
high velocities whereas a world class shot putter doesn’t really need to throw a shot put in the same fashion.
Because our hockey goalie needs to move quickly, we want him to be light and fast versus powerful and a bit
slower. Thus, we’ve trained him accordingly.