Yenepoya FC’s #1 Rameez has been a trusted figure under the bars both locally and at the National stage for Karnataka. Apart from donning the gloves when he’s on the pitch, he spends his time in medical scrubs at the Yenepoya Hospital where he works as a Physiotherapist.
Having worked closely with multiple injured footballers over the years and supervised their rehabilitation back into the game, Rameez’s hands-on experience and insight as a goal keeper made him specialise in position-specific injuries.
“Most teams nowadays do not have a specialist goalkeeping coach. The GKs train with the outfielders and do the same warmups and exercises. Due to the nature of their football actions, the goalkeepers are more exposed to shoulder disorders than outfield players and hence additional care has to be taken to avoid injuries.”
According to Rameez, in order to prevent this shoulder injuries in goalkeepers need special training programme for shoulders, elbow, wrist and fingers. It include strengthening programme (with body weight exercises like pull ups and pushups),dumbbells, therabands, theratubes, medicine ball, endurance training and plyometrics to upper limbs.
Ideally, Goalkeepers should do their warmups session starting with some basic body movements without ball and then introduce some ball handling work. This session should be from 10 to 15 minutes.
Atleast twice a week, they should do some strengthening exercises to improve strength and balance of the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and finger muscles, and advanced exercises for core stability and muscle control.
This will help to muscle activation before the football intensity training and thereby preventing the risk of injury.
Main injuries to the goalkeepers is shoulder, elbow and wrist and finger.
“The FIFA 11+ Program is a holistic program for players to follow for a good-warmup and injury prevention”
You might be interested in the FIFA 11+ . This is a complete warm-up and injury prevention program for amateur players. (Click here to download the PDF).
