In this article I am giving you some examples of the drills we use with pro goaltenders during the summer when we work on speed, quickness, agility and conditioning. The videos in this article were taken in Zürich in May 2008 when we started 2nd phase on our preparation for the upcoming 2008-09 season for the ZSC Lions goalies.

     Use these videos as examples to give you ideas when planning summer training for yourself or for the goalies you coach. I hope you find these examples useful.

Video # 1 – Ladder jumps on stance

     As some of you have noticed I use a lot of ladder drills as part of my routine for goalies during both the on and off season. This first video shows a drill that is being used in almost every ladder session we run with our goalies. The focus should be on game-like stance, keeping the feet as wide apart as when playing on the ice, knees at the same angle and hands out in front.

Video # 2 – Ladder stance jumps, in & out

     This shows you a different variation of stance jumps from the first video.

Video # 3 – Ladder jump & turn

     The third ladder example is far more difficult than the 2 first ones and it’s a lot harder to keep a stance-like position when you have to do 180° turns on every jump.

Video # 4- Ladder 1-leg “slalom”

     We have also a lot of different variations of 1-leg drills that we do on the ladder. This first example is one of the most often used ones.

Video # 5 – Ladder 1-leg in & out

     This video shows another variation of the 1-leg jump where you just jump in and out of the ladder on the same side and then do the other leg on the other side of the ladder next.

Video # 6 - Ladder quick feet

     This is an old but good drill that works really well for quickness training. Notice that we do not allow any crossover steps for the goalies as they don’t do them on the ice either. With this drill you will see very rapid improvement once you have done it for a few weeks and the benefits will carry to the ice as well.

Video # 7 – Sprints

     When we work on speed we do usually do sets like 3 x 3 sprints with 3 different distances that are fairly short. You can see the distances used in the video where the goalies do sprints just to the first cone, but the 2 other cones can be seen. We also use a lot of different starts like from the goalie stance or stomach like in this example.

Video # 8 – Short sprints, both ways

     This drill shows how we work on just the first 3-4 quick steps from the cones. Notice that we also do sprints backwards as goalies need to skate backwards too.

Video # 9 – Agility track

     This last video shows an example of a track where we work on starts, lateral movement and agility. We have a ton of different variations in our summer program as we don’t want goalies to become mentally “lazy” by making them repeat the same tracks or drills often.