Sense Arena For Goalies Review based on what I have seen - Will it work for goalies and should you buy it?
Sense Arena Review - Image1
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 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 AND CONS OF THE SENSE ARENA + WHEN TO BUY THE SENSE ARENA:
Why I wouldn’t recommend 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 it)?
3. Especially on game days, you can’t use Sense Arena since you want to avoid VR/phone/TV/computer or any other type of screens because watching screens will tire your eyes and make your tracking worse. What happens when you can’t track 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.
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 on ice scenarios are valuable but drills with bots waste of time).
2. 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 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 would be watching lots of hockey in TV or your own games with pauses and slow motion to analyse situations or imaginary training.
My personal opinion:
I think that when your overall real-life training is good enough, then you can start looking into extras like Sense Arena. But before buying a virtual gadget for a youth-junior goalie, I’d spend the 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.
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 it can top the real-life training that you can do with balls and
CONCLUSION:
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.
However, Sense Arena could be a nice addition to all the other training you are doing, and it may be worth trying depending on your situation.
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! 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.