Yoga for goalies

C'mon we all know why we guys do Yoga these days! hahaha


Seriously though, there are some stretches I find helpful and then some others I find quite strange. I see where your coming from with regards to people pushing themselves in a class set up. Instead of doing the stretch for its sole purpose I believe some people may treat it as a competition, go that lil bit lower, little bit wider than the person next to them.


I pick and choose excercises that I feel are a beneficial to me and ignore the ones I just plain dont like. haha

I agree with this completely, most yoga is not designed to be anatomically correct... if you were to go to a physical therapist, the stretches they would assign to you would certainly not contain anything that requires the arching of your back, just as you mentioned

IIRC, Tim Thomas practiced Yoga in the off season after his surgery.

I'm sure lots of goalies in the pros do Yoga -- the real question is HOW they do yoga on an individual basis. If you get paid a couple mil a year, you can probably afford a private yoga instructor...And a good private yoga instructor would hopefully know what to and NOT to do for an individuals situation, though from what I hear (and read from this article), there aren't a lot of trainings available for that kind of information for yogis and yoginis.

Another related question is whether "the pros do it" is a good enough reason to do something! I actually had a guy come into my office last week tell me he was REALLY jazzed about buying a new knee brace of a specific model because a pro he really likes in the NBA has one. He said that even if we can get his knee to feel 100% (and I think we can), he would still wear the knee brace because the pro wears it!

What area of medicine are you in? Just out of curiosity!

I think the key with Yoga is to find a competent instructor. If you are a beginner trying to emulate some insanely bendy instructor on a DVD, have walked into a class where the instructor isn’t properly trained or you turn yoga into a competition, you are more likely to get injured. My wife is a yoga instructor who went through 200+ hours of training, including study of anatomy textbooks and physical restrictions. She was taught how to modify positions to accommodate the fact that every single person has a different body, and there is no single perfect yoga position. And, this was after practicing yoga as a student for a few years.

When you walk into a yoga class for the first time, a qualified studio will do some sort of survey of your physical condition – history of injuries, if you sit at a desk all day, and what sports you play. Props should be available to allow modifications of every single pose, depending on your physical abilities/restrictions. Even something as simple as “Child’s Pose” may need to be modified. Yoga, if done properly, isn’t just about flexibility, but muscle balance, core strength, body control and focus. Like anything else, if you push it too far, too fast, for too long, you may get injured.

I do a lot of endurance events (marathons, triathlons) as well as play goalie, and I can tell you this: it’s the times when I fall off the yoga bandwagon, that I get injured.

Originally Posted by Red33

What area of medicine are you in? Just out of curiosity!

I'm not in the medical field, actually. I have training in posture-focused, pain-relieving therapies as well as strength training. A lot of people think that means I'm a chiropractor, but I am not. I work with people who have gotten unsatisfactory results from NSAIDs, surgery, physical therapy, relaxation and deep tissue massages, acupuncture and chiropractic. I do have many clients who are MDs, nurses, and PTs, but I don't fall anywhere within the medical system (though I do believe postural therapy would benefit a lot of people were it integrated into the health care system).

My work is focused on showing people how to systematically restore proper muscle balance and function to remove the stiffness and inefficient movement compensations that lead to so many kinds of pain. Toward that end, I use some specialized massage techniques where necessary and then design specialized, specifically-sequenced exercise programs for each individual's unique issues so that they can begin the process of restoring muscle balance. It's not the quick fix or cookie-cutter kind of therapy that a lot of therapeutic interventions have become, but a lot of my clients have gone from pretty low lows and gotten themselves back to a life worth living even after failed medicinal and surgical interventions.

A lot of people ask how I got into this work, and the short answer is that at 22, hockey and sitting at computers had basically destroyed my body. And I wasn't content to shuttle from doctor to chiro to massage therapist to acupuncturist just to stay SOMEWHAT functional and still not be able to play hockey!

I even have this video on youtube if you want to check out the quick version of my story (hockey footage included featuring UMich's Scooter Vaughan!):

There are also a couple videos on my youtube channel that you can use to test your shoulder mobility and a few that show you things to do to help restore proper shoulder and upper back balance (may not be appropriate for everyone, but inability to do the exercises is a sure sign you have some work to do!).

Interesting, another reason to give yoga a try