The Lacrosse Goalie At-Home Improvement Guide
I know that everyone is sitting at home wondering what CAN I do? I hope this will help no matter what equipment or personnel you have access to.
Save Reps
This is the least exciting to go through the motions of your save technique, but incredibly important. Ways to make this more fun:
Record yourself - make sure you’re actually performing the correct movements. Here’s video of saving highs, mids, and lows.
Make it competitive - Time yourself for 1 minute and see how many rounds you can get in of going through the motion of a save and resetting before going to the next spot. Work your way from stick-side high to offside low, that will be 1 “rep”. Try to beat your time every day. As the weeks continue add a minute. If you need accountability - film yourself to make sure you’re executing each save correctly and as hard as you really can.
Add resistance - You can add resistance to your shaft or waist. See the difference resistance bands can have here.
Make it reactive - record audio of you saying “GO”, changing the time gaps between each one as you go. You can go through each rep with a simple reset in between, or you can make it more active by adding in “fast feet” in between or little hops. You can do this also with lows as I demonstrate in this drill labeling each side “1” and “2” and alternating back and forth.
Add training tools - like the Sklz catapult.
Use a Tree - If you’re like me and don’t have a wall to use, most people can find a tree to start with ball tosses with your hand and progress to a stick like I show here. Just like above, there are plenty of ways you can make it more exciting my recording yourself, timing yourself, and making it reactive with jumps and turns. If you happen to have a reaction ball, try it out on the tree!
Clearing Form
Now is a great time to work on your clearing form! If you’re stuck inside, grab a sock to throw into a wall and record yourself getting the reps in. If you need a guide on what your clearing form should look like, check out this video.
Film Review
Review yourself and other goalies. Use this time to watch film on yourself, and other goalies out there. More to come on how I review film and what to look for.
Speed, Agility, and Quickness Drills
If you don’t have a lot of space, equipment, or cones, the HomeCourt app has been a ton of fun to use! Also, in case you missed my post yesterday, a speed expert I know Les Spellman put out an app called Spellman Performance and upon entering the code “dream” you can start the app and work on your own speed training to make those plays outside the cage count! Jumping rope, line agilities, and box agilities are all exercises to utilize for improvement.
Strength Work
Now is a great time to work on your strength, especially in your lower body and core. Bodyweight exercises like chair squats, regular squats, single leg squats, lunges (in all planes), single leg deadlifts, planks, dead bugs, bird dogs, hollow body holds, and bear crawls are a great place to start. Using your time through the movements to make sure you’re working your muscles harder and improving movement quality will only make you that much faster when you step back on the field.
Team Turnpike put out a great article on staying fresh under quarantine too that you can see here!
There’s more on the way, but I hope this is a starting point for ways you make the most out of this downtime. How are you using the most of this downtime to get creative with new training? Let me know, I will continue to update this page with ideas!