ProDrills with the Edmonton Oilers – Warm Up

It is common for NHL goalie warm-ups to start with some simple, stationary hand work that features one shooter repeatedly aiming at the glove and blocker from distance as the goalie starts with stand-up saves before dropping to catch and steer pucks from their knees.

It’s a routine we’ve shared many times here at InGoal Magazine as a common first step before the more varied approaches that follow, but the reality is most minor hockey teams and even some at the junior levels don’t have that kind of time, and most goalies have already (hopefully) done something off the ice to get their hands and eyes ready.

The Edmonton Oilers agree. Warm-up time can be tight even in the NHL, especially on the road, so they started going straight into movements in their goalie warm-ups.

“We go right into movement and I prefer it,” Stuart Skinner told InGoal Magazine. “Me and Calvin (Pickard) talked about it last year because we were doing a couple stationary things and sometimes it’s good to do stationary, like after a back-to-back when you’re feeling kind of tired, so there’s a time and place for it still, but if you want to get out there and get warm, I prefer to get moving right away. When the shots start coming and you get into drills, you’ve got to work hard to make a save, so if we’re just standing there and seeing shots from the blue line at the beginning, I prefer my blood to get moving and my legs to get going a bit.”

InGoal was able to capture the entire Oilers warm up and we’ll share it all below, with more thoughts from Skinner and Edmonton goalie coach Dustin Schwartz. But first we’ll start with that initial drill, which replaces the old static shooting from the middle of the ice.

As you’ll see in the first video below, they start on the post and push up to the near-side shooter positioned up just inside the top of the face-off circle, then work through a series of pushes to that same shooter from different locations: the middle of the crease, then facing the opposite side shooter before pushing across, and finally from the far post, with that shot continuing through a sequence of movements in and out of each post with shots:

Then they do it all from the other side, with the other side shooter.