I had a question the other day from someone who said ‘Thanks for the stuff on hand-eye coordination, but what do you do for foot-eye coordination?’ What a great question?
The truth is, in the studio I do not do that much work on this – probably because my space is a little limited, so I have kind of forgotten about it. But here are two exercises I have used in the past to train foot-eye coordination in hockey goalies.
1. Juggling with a soccer ball. I can immediately hear someone say – but a soccer ball is WAY bigger than a puck, that is not very sport specific. I agree, until you actually try juggling a soccer ball with your feet. When you can juggle a soccer ball with your feet without letting it touch the ground, then you can move down to a tennis ball or hacky sack.
There are two ways you can juggle the soccer ball (more than two I suppose). To start with you will just juggle it with your feet, I used to allow guys to let the ball bounce on the floor once as a way to keep the ball live for longer. But also try juggling the ball off the wall – you can do some rapid fire work keeping the ball along the floor and you can do some more challenging work keeping the ball up on the wall using your feet.
2. On the ice we used to do what we called the ‘puck chaser relay’ and here is how it worked. I put about 10 pucks on either side of the centre red line with one guy on each side. I would vary the time interval depending on the training outcome I was going for, but typically it would be 30-45 seconds.
On the “go” command the players would kick (no sticks) all of the pucks into the other guys end and then the chase was on. Players would race around their end (staying on their own half of the centre red) to the pucks and dribble them or kick them back to the other side of the centre red. The winner was the guy who had fewer pucks in his end at the end of the time interval. It was a great conditioning drill that worked some foot-eye coordination and added a nice element of competition to the workout. I use this one with skaters and goalies.
I hope that gives you a few ideas.
Cheers,
Maria