Inside an empty SportPlex de l’énergie ice rink in Varennes, Quebec, just across the St. Laurence River from downtown Montreal, Marc-Andre Fleury explodes back and forth across his crease, holding a stick in one hand and an elastic band attached to a flywheel machine in the other.
The 20-year NHL vet fights against the resistance of the pulley, which is attached to the net post, as he performs butterfly pushes. He repeats the exercise as his longtime strength coach, Paul Gagne, shouts encouragement in a mix of French and English that echoes through the cavernous venue.
Fleury and Gagne met in 2000, when Fleury was 16, and have worked together every summer for nearly two decades. The two are currently in the final stage of offseason preparations that Gagne refers to as “gym-on-ice.”
With NHL training camps set to open across North America in about one month, goalies are putting the finishing touches on their summer programs to ensure they’re prepared for the long season ahead.
Fleury typically takes a month off when the hockey season concludes. Sometimes, that break is shorter if he plays deep into the summer, which he’s done plenty over his career, with three Stanley Cup rings and two other Cup Final appearances. During that time, he doesn’t touch the ice or the gym, in order to allow for a full mental and physical reset.
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“In my mind, it’s just a good break physically, because we are always using the same joints and muscles all the time, and even mentally, it’s good to take a little break,” Fleury explained. “Then when you come back, you start getting happy, excited and looking forward to playing goalie again.”
This routine is typical for professional goalies. Younger netminders may hit the gym more often in June or July as they continue building strength, but as fall approaches, they tend to move away from weights and shift toward functional, on-ice strength.
“I lighten the workouts up a bit,” Fleury said. “I usually work out before I skate, so I don’t want to go heavy weight and kill myself in the gym before the ice time. For me, it’s always felt like the on-ice work is the priority.”
In August, one of the exercises that Maria Mountain, founder of Goalie Training Pro in London, Ontario, prescribes for her goalies is an overcoming isometric, or a press against an immovable object. A goalie should kneel on the ground, place his or her left shoulder against a wall, lift the right leg and push as hard as possible into the wall for 10 seconds.
“I’m trying to push myself right through that wall,” Mountain said. “I’m turning on my high-threshold motor units, my fast-twitch muscle fibers, because I’m trying to move this wall. That’s requiring all the force I can make.”
By now, goalies have checked off summer objectives such as building stamina, stabilizing the core and maximizing strength. In the closing segment of the offseason, goalie-specific instructors like Mountain are focusing on a critical topping-off element: power.
Earlier in the summer, Mountain did not worry when her clients complained of fatigue by the end of the week. Heavy helpings of gym and on-ice work usually do that to goalies. But with camp approaching, goalies are spending more time in the net than at the squat rack. They are tracking pucks and refining movements so they can arrive at camp in peak condition and with their games in gear.
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“I don’t want you feeling like a bag of hammers,” Mountain said. “I want you feeling good on the ice so that you’re really able to play these scenarios at game speed and really make the most of that time on the ice.”
The focus, after all, is shifting away from the gym and into the rink. Goalies are starting to apply their prior foundational work to the technique that will help them stop pucks.
“We want to build that reservoir of functional strength — not like you’re a big powerlifter, but functional strength,” said Mountain. “In doing that, we’re setting up the foundation of power training. We’re working on deceleration, movement, mechanics, those kinds of things. But then when we get to August, we want to take this big reservoir of strength we’ve built and apply that force very, very quickly. Which is what power is.”
“It’s power for velocity,” Gagne elaborated. “You need elasticity in your tissues. When you do flywheel workouts mixed with plyometrics, it builds the elasticity of your tissues, especially in the ankles, and that dictates power. That’s how I train my athletes. I train them to maximize the elasticity of their tissues.”
Fleury works with Gagne five times a week in August, with an hour-long workout every morning from the comfort of his home in Quebec. Fleury used to travel to work out with Gagne in person, but would often spend more time in the car than in the gym, so he now owns all of the necessary equipment to save time.
“He goes downstairs, he has his dog, sometimes his two daughters,” Gagne said. “It’s perfect; he doesn’t have to leave the house.”
The two do meet up, though, to translate their workouts to the ice, something Gagne feels is incredibly important.
“When you train a soccer or rugby player, what you see in the gym is pretty much what you see on the field, because they’re wearing essentially the same shoes,” Gagne explained. “But in the gym, you don’t have skates or goalie equipment on. When you squat without goalie equipment or skates, your movement in your leg is much more free. Your knee travels easier over your toe.”
By having goalies perform drills in their equipment, balancing on the edges of their skate blades, it ensures the physical gains from the workouts translate to the game.
Whether it’s on-ice gym workouts with Gagne or the occasional beer league skate without his goalie gear, Fleury likes getting on the ice as much as possible in August.
“It’s different. It’s fun,” Fleury said. “It gets your heart going on the ice. Sometimes, when you’re doing whatever you do for cardio, whether it’s a stationary bike, or escalator, then you get on the ice and it’s still tiring. There’s nothing like a bag skate on the ice.”
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It takes some time to readapt to life in the crease, even for goalies with decades of hockey experience. Some of Mountain’s clients find themselves moving too much in August. They have become so strong in the gym that as they incorporate more on-ice reps, a T-push that once got them to the weak-side post is now accelerating them past their optimal landing point. Shooting sessions let them recalibrate their technique to align with the muscles they’ve built.
Mountain likens it to a Formula 1 car that has been fitted with a bigger engine. The driver needs practice laps to dial in the horsepower.
“I don’t need a big push,” Mountain said. “I need a very quick, powerful push.”
Fleury performs drills with electronic pucks that illuminate in a random order, T-pushing or shuffling to square his body to each puck as it shines bright blue. Not only does this refine the skating maneuvers, but it helps attach visual recognition to movements.
“There’s always an adjustment, so when I start getting going again I have to find my bearings,” Fleury said. “It takes a few practices, for sure, to gauge where your pushes and slides are ending. That usually comes fairly quickly for me.”
Every goalie is chasing power. But there are no summer shortcuts to this destination. Without base work, the goalie who suddenly emphasizes plyometrics or speed-focused bench presses is at risk of injury. This is the time of year when goalies want to feel their best.
“If you’ve done your training, it’s nice. It’s a fun time,” Mountain said. “It’s a time where we let all that work really shine.”
Above all, Mountain emphasizes health before camp. No goalie wants to limp into the first practice and put preseason performance at risk. This is easier said than done. The stress that the reverse vertical-horizontal technique, for example, places on a goalie’s hips is not normal for the body.
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So even though it’s summer, goalies are going through dynamic warmups before their on-ice work. Upon completion, they’re doing postural restoration, foam rolling and deep breathing to bring the body back to baseline.
“Nobody,” Mountain said, “is designed to goalie.”
Gagne agrees with that sentiment. Put differently, “A goalie is not a hockey player, he’s like a cat with equipment.”
Along with maintaining health, goalies are transitioning from building strength to sharpening skills as camp nears. Along with his daily workouts with Gagne, Fleury also works with one goalie coach in Montreal, and that’s where he emphasizes technique.
“With Paul, the on-ice training helps you with pulleys and it’s not so much about stopping pucks, but getting your legs and heart going,” Fleury explained. “That’s one part of it. Then I work with another coach, and he’s more technical. We spend time on the angle of my body, where my glove or blocker is, moving into the shot, and weight on my skates for certain positions. More details like that. It’s not overly taxing.”
The final step in Fleury’s camp preparation is going home to Sorel-Tracy, the small Quebec city just northeast of Montreal where he grew up. There, he works with goalie coach Steph Menard, who has coached Fleury since he was 10 years old. Those on-ice workouts are a closer simulation to game action.
“With Steph, he’s more about game-like situations with lots of shots,” Fleury said. “Usually, you play the puck and every rebound until the play is over. I like to finish the summer with that. When I’m done with that I’m ready for camp.”
(Photo of Marc-Andre Fleury: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
