From The Crease: The Importance of Developing Both Legs
By Jeff Lerg –
As goaltenders practice each day, they develop muscle memory without even thinking about it. Each time a shot is saved, your muscles remember those distinct movements. Your muscles remember all of the movements that are made, so it is important that the good outweighs the bad. An example of the good happens when your body moves fluidly with your legs and arms in perfect position, and you make a great save. Some bad muscle memory forms when your body makes a movement that isn’t beneficial for you as a goaltender. In my opinion, the bad habits can be formed in practice during shooting drills. We, as goaltenders, all know these drills. The coaches blow the whistle over and over and try to get the skaters up and down the ice as fast as possible. The goalies rarely have time to get reset for each shot, so we start to form bad habits. We are trying to keep up with the pace and stop every puck, which forms habits without us even realizing it. If you watch any goaltender when he/she starts to get tired, you will notice that he will do things that will make himself more comfortable. Some start to hunch over, while others brings their gloves lower than they should be, but the area impacted most by these bad practice plans is the legs.
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Goalies all have a dominant leg that we feel more comfortable getting up with every time we are in the butterfly. So, when our bodies start to get tired we get up on this leg after almost every shot. These shooting drills are happening so fast that we arenʼt playing out the rebounds because we will get killed by the next shooter. Since we donʼt have to move to follow the rebounds, we just get up the fastest way possible, which is using our strong leg. If we went down into the butterfly 100 times during the course of a practice, we probably got up 80-90 times on our strong leg. This becomes a cyclical process since our strong leg gets stronger and we continue to feel more and more comfortable getting up with it.
If you canʼt tell, this is something that I have had to work through. During my first year and a half as a pro, I tore and rehabbed both of my ACLʼs. My right knee went first and then my left knee came seven months later. Like many things in life, I did things better my second time around. I knew what to do and rehabbed my leg harder and smarter and now my left leg has become my dominant leg. I have noticed that when I start to get worn down or need to get up quickly, that my left leg rapidly moves without me even thinking. So, I consciously try to get up with my right leg now when I have time. If I need to get up quickly then my left leg will take over, but I now make a concentrated effort to get up on each leg around 50/50 each practice. Since my right leg still needs extra work, I make sure to do extra butterflies each day after practice and only get up using my right leg.
The long-term effects of developing both legs will help us become more dynamic goaltenders in many ways. Think about how many times we have to push or slide around the crease by pushing with one leg. As the play moves from side to side, we will be as equally effective moving both ways. My goal as a goaltender is to eliminate any weaknesses in my game. I feel that developing both legs to be strong will give me the best chance to make any type of save that I need to make.
Jeff Lerg is the head director at Future Pro USA Goaltending.