NHL Sense Arena For Ice Hockey Goalies Review - Does it work for goalies, should you buy it and what are alternatives?

Summary of the article: If you can afford getting NHL Sense Arena I recommend you buy it because when you combine it with the Glove Club drills you’ll get the best results. But so far I have seen real life training producing better results and if you have a weak physique you can’t compensate it by playing video games. Sense Arena and other coordination training is just a small part of everything you need to do which you already know.

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COMMON SENSE ARENA QUESTIONS I GET:

• What do you think about the Sense Arena and do you recommend it?

• Should I buy Sense Arena?

• Is the Sense Arena a good investment and worth buying?

• What is the difference between the Sense Arena and the Glove Club / Pro Hands Program?

This article will answer those questions.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NHL SENSE ARENA AND THE GLOVE CLUB?

The Glove Club is real-life training; Sense Arena is virtual training. I think Sense Arena is a great product that is constantly improving but has its limitation. In certain situations, I highly recommend Sense Arena and in others, I don’t. More about that below.

PROS / CONS OF THE NHL SENSE ARENA AND WHEN TO BUY THE SENSE ARENA:

Why and when I’d recommend buying Sense Arena:

1. If you are a beginner goalie from a small hockey country who doesn’t have more than a couple of low-tempo ice practices a week with players who can hardly skate, then I think a combination of Sense Arena and The Glove Club drills will give you the best results because with Sense Arena you’ll get to see on ice scenarios. (I think Sense Arena on ice scenarios are valuable but drills with bots waste of time).

2. NHL Sense Arena can be a great tool when you don’t have an opportunity to do off-ice training as much as you’d want. For example, if you live in an apartment in a big city like New York, where you simply don’t have a place to throw a ball against a wall and catch it and can’t go to the rink early to train on your own, then getting Sense Arena can make lots of sense.

3. What I like about NHL Sense Arena are the drills where you have real players shooting because that can actually improve your shot reading and help you see real-life situations. But the drills where you have virtual bots shooting are almost a waste of time because you are not getting a real read for the shot, and you are not getting as many reps as you would with real-life off-ice drills. On top of that, you can get away with bad habits that real-life coordination drills don’t allow you to do. So, to get more game like situations Sense Arena is a good. “Poor man’s alternative” for the Sense Arena would be watching lots of hockey or your own games with pauses and slow motion to analyse situations and imaginary training. By the way, those alternatives have actually proven to produce good results so you want to be doing those things anyway.

Why I wouldn’t recommend NHL Sense Arena:

1. My biggest hesitation with Sense Arena is that I have seen it enforce bad habits. I have seen it also not produce the same results as real-life training when compared the time and effort invested.

2. Also, do you really want to spend more time watching a screen that affects your dopamine production, which impacts many things? (Google: how screens affect dopamine and health)

3. Especially on game days, you don’t want to use Sense Arena since you want to avoid screens including VR/phone/TV/computer or any other type of screen because watching blue light screens will tire your eyes and make your tracking worse. And what happens when you can’t track and see the puck well? Your reactions are slower, game reading worse and you’ll let more shots in. When you want to do coordination for a warm up use racquet balls as I’ll show you in The Glove Club.

4. Based on my experience so far, real-life training gives much better results for the time and effort invested. So, if you have limited time and energy due to school, team practices, and everything else, you want to put your time and energy into training that gives you the best return on investment, which is real-life training (lifting, running, jumping, coordination, ice training, etc.) not virtual training.

My personal opinion - where to put the money first:

I think that when your overall real-life training is good enough, then you can start looking into extras like Sense Arena. So before buying a virtual gadget for a youth-junior goalie worth a few hundred dollars, I’d spend the same money on a personal trainer to make him/her faster and stronger because if you have a weak physique, all the goalie clinics, camps, and gadgets aren’t going to get you to the pros.

If you’ve read this far, don’t get me wrong—I think technology is great, and nothing gets better if we don’t start somewhere so I think it is great they have made the Sense Arena and it gets better all the time even real life training still produces better results at the moment.

Of course you want to take this with a grain of salt because I’m selling my own product. If you have bought Sense Arena I recommend to combine it with The Glove Club for the best results. At the moment I just don’t think Sense Arena can top the real-life training that you can do with balls. And no one ever made it to the pro by playing video games.

CONCLUSION:

If you can afford getting NHL Sense Arena I recommend you buy it because when you combine it with the Glove Club drills you’ll get the best results.

THE GLOVE CLUB ADVERTISMENT:

In the end, you’ll know better how it fits into your training than I do because every situation is different. Also, if Sense Arena gets you training more, it could be a great investment from that point of view too! The same goes for The Glove Club, a heart rate monitor, Oura ring, or whatever. If it gets you doing more and/or better that’s worth the price.

In the end, you don’t really know for sure how well Sense Arena fits to your training until you try it. I think the biggest risk usually is that you buy something and don’t use it. To tackle this with the The Glove Club, I made easy-to-follow programs so your habit change would happen as smoothly as possible and your amount of repetitions would go up 10x in now time.

If you have any question you can always contact me. To read more and to buy The Glove Club - click here.