Hope you had a great weekend – we enjoyed a nice Canada Day weekend up here. Today is actually the holiday – but not for us Hockey Strength Coach types – – the off-season knows no holiday 🙂
I mentioned the other day that Paul and I were re-building our front porch and we made pretty good progress on it as you can see in the photo on the left with Paul having a seat on the new porch Sunday evening.
I confess, I was not much help yesterday as I had some clients in the gym in the morning and then I spent about 6 hours working on creating training programs for my sold out Elite Goalie Strength & Conditioning group. I did get to work on my computer outside for most of the day, so that was a nice treat.
Goalie Specific Cardio Training
I had a question over the weekend from someone asking about goalie specific cardio training. This goalie felt like their conditioning let them down last season, so they were looking for me to tell them what they should do when they go to the gym to ride the bike.
Unless there is a medical reason why you need to use the bike – like your knees are simply shot and they will not tolerate any pounding, then I would not use it more than once per week (if that). For those workouts I would go as hard as I can for 30 seconds and very easy for 90 seconds. I would repeat that 10-15 times.
DO NOT shorten up the rest interval. The key is to recover enough so that 30 seconds can be full out. If you are cheating on your rest then the intervals may feel harder, but the quality of the work interval will be sacrificed.
I am also suspicious of anyone who feels that a 30 second all out sprint is not hard enough? Have you ever run 200m repeats? Try running 10 of them and tell me it was not hard enough (okay so I cannot run 200m in 30 seconds, but you get the idea).
I do not think you can really call bike intervals goalie specific cardio training since I am pretty sure you will never be riding a bike during a game. So other than to reduce the wear and tear on your joints – stay away.
Today I want to share some goalie specific cardio drills using the agility ladder. If you do not own one, you can easily create one out in the garage or drive way using tape or sidewalk chalk. The squares are 18” and there are typically 10-12 per ladder, but if you make it longer then it means you do not have to turn around as often.
For this workout you will need to do a full dynamic warm up first – see the video below:
Goalie Specific Cardio Drills Using Agility Ladder (video)
- AL: Ins & Outs 20s on: 40s Front Plank x 3 each leg leading
- AL: Swizzle – 20s on: 40s Side Plank x 3 each way
- AL: Lateral Shuffle – 20s on: 40s Glute Bridge x 6
And that is it – with the dynamic warm up this workout will take you roughly 30 minutes. Remember to stay low in your legs, be aware of your torso position and keep your head up.
Cheers,
M