Goalkeeping Training
Everybody wants to talk about what to eat before a game. Almost nobody wants to talk about Tuesday. Tuesday is where seasons are actually built.
A match is roughly two hours of your week. Training, school, growing, sleeping and recovering is the other one hundred and sixty-six. If your fueling is only good on Saturday, you are polishing one small piece of a much bigger problem.
I get a version of this conversation every few weeks. A parent tells me their keeper has lost a step. He is flat in sessions. He is getting little injuries that will not clear up. He is moody after training. Is it a fitness issue? Should we do more?
Almost never. More is usually the wrong prescription. When I walk back through the week, I find a keeper eating a small breakfast or no breakfast, a rushed school lunch, nothing between school and a 6pm session, and then one big meal at 9pm.
That keeper is not unfit. He is under-fueled, and he has been for months. You cannot out-train that, and you certainly cannot out-glove it.
Young keepers think recovery means foam rolling and an ice bath. Those are fine. They are also not the main event.
The main event is eating after you train. Your body spent ninety minutes diving, sprinting, and landing on the ground repeatedly. The repair bill comes due immediately, and it is paid in food. When you skip that meal -- or push it back three hours because practice ran late and everybody is tired -- you are asking your body to rebuild without materials.
This is why keepers who train four nights a week and eat like they train once end up in a hole they cannot climb out of by March.
Practical version: something in you within an hour of finishing. It does not have to be a full dinner if dinner is coming. A sandwich in the car. Chocolate milk. Yogurt and fruit. Then a real meal when you get home.
Here is something I wish more people said to teenage goalkeepers. Growing is expensive. Your body is building bone and muscle and doing it on a schedule you do not control. That happens on top of everything your training demands, not instead of it.
A keeper in a growth spurt who is also training five days a week has an enormous fuel requirement, and it is genuinely hard to meet by accident. This is the age where I see coordination wobble, where the dive that was clean in September looks awkward in February. Some of that is limb length changing. Some of it is a body being asked to do elite work on ordinary fuel.
Eat like it matters, because it does.
Never leave the house without breakfast. Even a small one. The keeper who eats at 7am is a different athlete at 6pm than the one who did not.
Pack the gap. The window between school ending and training starting is where most young athletes fall behind. Have something in the bag -- fruit, a sandwich, trail mix -- so that gap is not empty.
Carry a real water bottle. Not a small one. Hydration in this state is a daily job, not a match-day one.
Sleep like it is part of the program. Because it is. Food and sleep are the two things that actually turn training into improvement, and they are the two things young athletes trade away first.
Keepers will spend two hundred dollars on gloves and think about their food for zero minutes. I understand it -- gloves are visible, food is not, and nobody compliments your lunch.
But I have coached and played alongside a lot of goalkeepers over twelve years and seven countries. The professionals were not separated from the rest by glove choice. They were separated by the boring things they did every single day when nobody was watching.
If you want this laid out properly for your keeper -- around their training schedule, their school day, their season, and their body -- that is what 90 Minute Nutrition is built to do. It is a separate business from Golden Glove GK, made for soccer players who are serious about the sport, and it takes the guesswork out of the week rather than just the match.
Train the position. Then go feed the athlete who has to play it.
Private sessions and evaluations in Central Florida, led by Coach Gorrick.