In this article we are going to talk about the importance and reason of certain shoulder routines, such as the ones we show you. One of the most common injuries of a goalkeeper has to do with the shoulder, a delicate and complex joint that we must pay special attention when collapsing and deflecting. A good protection/cushion technique when collapsing can reduce the chances of injuries in the future. Despite this, the goalkeeper is not immune to get hurt, or even to experience shoulder chronic aches that prevent him/her from the playing 100%.
Preventive exercises are not only focused on working after an injury, but also on avoiding it and re-educate possible alterations in the power train. To do so, as goalkeeping coaches we must detect some aspects that can cause these injuries:
- Identify abnormal movement patterns
- Muscular imbalances
Now we propose a training routine you can workout with your goalkeepers once or three times a week, for 15’/20’ per session.[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/307053926/73ba17bd62″]Let’s focus on WHEN:
- Therapeutic intervention: after recovering the shoulder structure, we must recover the function of that structure and then, we re-educate the motor movement.
- It’s important to identify the type of injury or why it happened, due to the fact that we won’t deal with the prevention the same way if the injury was caused by a trauma action or overuse.
- At this point, we focus on re-adaptation, keeping in mind the age of the goalkeeper and the principle of progression.
As we said before, the preventive routines should not be only focused on the injury, but on the prevention. To do this, we must achieve a strong rotator cuff and with a range of mobility wide enough to stand the impacts from collapses and deflections with one hand. One main feature in any routine is the scapula stability workout, key when re-adapting the shoulder, and always there in our routines in the first phases of the session.