Are Shooting Pads And Slick Tiles The Same?

Hockey shooting pads are an essential part of getting the correct amount of training at home in order to sharpen those shooting skills during this pandemic. In fact, any kind of training aids that you can put to use while everybody is locked down will do you some good. There are several types of flooring and foundations to practice hockey including synthetic ice, and slick tiles. But, what is the difference between them all and how can they help your game? Each type of flooring has its own characteristics, so it is up to you to decide which one would be best for you. As for shooting pads and slick tiles, the short answer is no, they are not the same.

What Are Shooting Pads For?

Shooting pads, also known as shooting mats, are specifically for shooting pucks at a target. They are pads that are usually anywhere between two feet by four feet and three feet by five feet. You place your pad on the ground and it acts like a tiny slab of ice that you can practice shots on. Most of the time people incorporate their training with a shooting tarp or a standalone hockey goal. Shooting mats are easy to pack around because they are lightweight and can roll up into a neat cylinder and fit almost anywhere.

What Are Slick Tiles Used For?

Slick tiles, also known as dryland hockey flooring, are made out of a special polymer plastic that allows them to be slick like ice so that the pucks glide across it like they would on an ice rink. They usually come in boxes of tiles that you can install just about anywhere that you have a hard, flat surface and a little bit of room. Dryland hockey flooring can be a small area, or an area as big as a regular hockey rink. It all depends on houw3 much room you have to work with because of the way the tiles interlock with each other you can build and build on the platform. This type of flooring is not ice skate friendly. In fact, if you try to ice skate on your slick tiles it would be a lot like trying to ice skate on the linoleum flooring in a kitchen. Although you can’t ice skate on dryland flooring, you can rollerblade and use sneakers.

What is Synthetic Ice Used For?

Synthetic ice was developed back in the 1960s by a group of people that were determined to find a way to create an environment for ice skaters that was as similar to ice as they possibly could. The problem that they had, in the beginning, is that the way that the ice skates were able to glide so easily across the ice is that the friction from the blade rubbing the ice caused enough heat to melt the ice just enough to create a natural lubricant. The first experience ice skaters had with artificial ice is that the flooring had to constantly be lubricated by an oil or some other outside additive. This dilemma caused a lot of problems because when the lubricant ran out, the surface that the skaters were skating on became the opposite of slick and they would be stopped in their tracks by an unyielding plastic.

As time progressed and technology advanced developers were able to create a great synthetic ice flooring that had its own lubricant built into the material. This made it so that when the skaters glided across the surface there was an ample amount of lubrication on the flooring that allowed the skates to freely glide without much resistance.

Conclusion

All of the hockey training aids that are on the market today have come a long way. If you want to get the most out of your hockey supplies, make sure that you shop for your products through a company that is passionate about the game and loves to teach people the right way to play. Sniper’s Edge Hockey has been training snipes and champions for quite some time.