00:15 – Rhiannon asks what a goalie out on injury can do to stay sharp without participating in practice.
00:40 – Coach Edwards recommends staying fit however you can.
01:11 – How staying in the game mentally can be as effective as real practice.
01:40 – Why maintaining your flexibility is important when a lacrosse goalie is injured.
02:03 – How standing behind the cage and watching the ball during practice can benefit an injured goalie.
Hey, it’s Coach Edwards from LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com. I’ve got another tip for you. This question comes from Rhiannon. She asks:
“Coach, quick question. For a goalie out on injury, is there any way I can stay sharp on my game without being able to participate fully in practices. Thanks.”
Rhiannon, great question and one that I think more goalies need to think about. For a lot of goalies they get injured and it’s just a prescription to sit and do nothing, and that’s not cool. There are a lot of things you can do. First and foremost, keep up whatever fitness you can.
If you’ve injured your ankle, you can still do push ups. You can hit the gym and you can do all sorts of stuff. Pull downs, rows, you name it, there are ways to stay active and even improve some areas of your fitness that you weren’t able to do before. If you’ve injured your wrist you can get on the oliptical. You can walk on an incline. You name it, you can do it. Just because you’re injured doesn’t mean it’s a recipe to do nothing.
Number two is stay mentally in your game. This is where visualization comes key. If you can spend time before you go to bed at night, after you wake up in the morning, visualizing yourself making the saves you want to make, moving properly to the ball, do it. Whatever your brain thinks about right before you go to bed replays itself about seven times a night, so just before you nod off is a great time to wire yourself for success.
The other thing is to maintain your flexibility. Do something, anything, to maintain your flexibility, working around your injury. Obviously you don’t want to re-injure yourself, however incorporating flexibility can go a long way in both maintaining your flexibility but also aiding your recovery, so keep that in mind too.
The other thing to do is if you are mobile, which means you have an upper body injury but you can walk around the field, I suggest getting behind the cage while your other goalie takes shots. I remember being injured once and we only had one goalie, so what I ended up doing was standing behind the cage calling out defensive opportunities, positions of the ball, things like that. All by standing behind the crease, behind the safety of the net.
Actually getting in there and watching the ball come at you is amazing. When you stand behind the cage and take shots, I used to do this all the time when we had a back up goalie taking shots after me in warm up, I would get behind the cage. Don’t fish the balls, you can get them later. Just get in the cage, get in your stance and take shots, but with the safety of that net in front of you you can really focus on the ball and not focus on getting hit with it.
There’s lots of stuff, Rhiannon, you can do. Great question. Really appreciate it. Lots of lacrosse tips here at lacrossegoalieuniversity.com, so if you’ve got a question, feel free to email me. But also leave your comments right below this video. There’s a great discuss comments section. If you leave your comments below it really helps the website grow. I’m happy to answer your questions through there as well, and if they’re good I’ll make a video.
Cheers! Coach Edwards here. Talk to you soon.
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