Goalies moving beyond yoga to body-control disciplines in workouts

Collin Delia isn't making career plans for his 5-month-old son yet. But if Anderson Delia chooses to follow his dad into the crease, the Chicago Blackhawks goalie has evolving ideas on how to help him train.

Delia added Pilates as part of an offseason training plan that already included yoga and quickly became a believer in benefits that he sees as specifically related to stopping pucks.
The 26-year-old isn't alone; though yoga has increasingly become a staple for goalies during the past decade, many have turned to other seemingly related body-control disciplines like Pilates, ELDOA and even Barre ballet-style workouts in the past year.
"If my son decides to become a goalie, I'm going to have him in Pilates as soon as he can and I'm going to have him in gymnastics, just to make him a good athlete," Delia said. "Having that ability to be flexible and also powerful, I feel like that's something that contributes to a long career."
Delia was already interested in Pilates, which focuses on core strength, stability and muscle control emphasizing proper postural alignment, sometimes using a machine called a Reformer. But it took a push from his partner, Ava Lammers, to finally get him into a class this summer.
"I always thought there'd be a lot of benefit and crossover as a goaltender, so she booked me a class and said, 'You better be there,'" said Delia, who will compete with Malcolm Subban and Kevin Lankinen for the No.1 job in Chicago this season. "I fell in love with it. If you've ever done yoga -- and I'm a huge proponent of yoga -- you get into that flow state where time melts away and it feels like you've been there for a couple seconds and an hour and a half is gone. I'm still doing my foundational things -- in the gym five days a week, on the ice a couple days -- but I think adding these little things here and there I think can make the difference in the long run and help me have a longer career."
Florida Panthers goalie Chris Driedger feels similarly about yoga after embracing it when the NHL paused the 2019-20 between March 12 due to concerns over the Coronavirus. With reduced access to his usual workouts, Driedger spent more time practicing yoga and has stuck with it even as those other options opened up again.
"I've actually been ramping up the yoga of late. I'll have less time for it once the season starts, so [I'm] getting it in while I can," said Driedger, who was 7-2-1 with a .938 save percentage last season. "Yoga is pretty relevant when it comes to all the things you need to touch on to keep fit as a goalie. The flexibility and there's a lot of focus involved, strength and then some balance as well. I think that checks all the boxes for goaltending."

Goalies finding benefit in yoga isn't new.
Tim Thomas
credited yoga for helping him win the first Vezina Trophy for the first time in 2009 with the Boston Bruins despite a hip injury that eventually required surgically. Ryan Miller, who played for the Anaheim Ducks last season, said he practices yoga each summer to help his posture recover from position-specific work during the season. Carey Price of the Montreal Canadiens added regular yoga practice to his offseason routine in 2015, and Carter Hart of the Philadelphia Flyers said this summer he works with a yoga instructor twice a week.
The key is not making it too much of your focus, said Maria Mountain, a certified exercise physiologist who has worked with goalies around the world for 12 years, including Carter Hutton of the Buffalo Sabres.
"The takeaway for yoga, Pilates or ballet is if you really like it, then do it," Mountain said. "The benefits are movement literacy, getting you to move your body in different ways, different postures, some sustained holds to build local muscular endurance. But we can also do that from a more goalie-specific pattern. So rather than a ballet dancing pattern to teach body control and ankle dorsiflexion, we can actually do that within the context of being a goalie. But if you love it, do it."
That includes ELDOA, a series of stretching and movements developed in France to decompress and open up space in joints, particularly the spine. Adam Francilia, a goaltending consultant with the San Jose Sharks who trains close to a dozen NHL-contracted goalies privately, has integrated parts of ELDOA into offseason training for the past five years. Mountain has two levels of ELDOA certification, and she uses ELDOA with her goalies.
"I love using ELDOA when to do a restorative sequence when they come off the ice because it's meant to sort of decompress the spine through those movement patterns," Mountain said. "I look at it as an ingredient we use as part of their overall mobility training, whatever we're doing."
Then there's Barre, a training method based on ballet movements.
It may not be prevalent among NHL goalies yet, but Bruins prospect
Jeremy Swayman
is a proponent and his success, winning the Mike Richter Award as the top goalie in the NCAA last season, led University of Maine goaltending coach Alfie Michaud to seek out a program through his daughter's dance classes for his goalies this season.
"[Swayman's] body awareness and control just went to another level with the ballet," Michaud said. "It seems to me they get more mobility through their hips, they're definitely getting more mobility through their ankles, and this just worked for a kid that just won the Mike Richter award and he swears by it, so why wouldn't you go all in and just give it a whirl?"