3 Key Ingredients To A Successful Season

Whether you’re a coach, athletic trainer or athlete, getting your season off to a good start is of great importance. Now that you know what you want to achieve in the upcoming season, and with the new year just around the corner, it’s time to take the next step towards making those goals a reality.

So, where do you start? Let’s look at three essential components to starting your season off right, and how custom mouthguards help give you that extra boost you and your team need to be successful.

1. Communication Is Key

Whether it’s between players and coaches, players and athletic trainers, or players and their teammates, communication is one of the most important tenets of a successful season. Having open lines of dialogue keeps everyone on the same page and working towards the same goals.

But something as small as a mouthguard has the ability to hinder your team’s communication before the season even begins. Check your player’s mouthguards; if they look like a chewed up dog toy, you should brace for a communication breakdown.

This is a very common problem for any athlete wearing a generic boil-and-bite mouthguard. Because boil-and-bite mouthguards are basically big chunks of rubber, they are uniformly thick all the way around. That means your players are getting bulkiness where comfort is needed, making it extremely difficult to breathe or communicate properly on the field, court or ice.

Engineered with a streamlined design and crafted to the exact specifications of each player’s individual mouth, custom mouthguards give your players the precise protection they need without the bulkiness they don’t. That means breathing and speaking is completely uninhibited, allowing teammates to call out plays and make changes on the fly with ease.

2. Endurance Test

Much like communicating clearly, it is critical to start your season ready and in shape. The long and grueling months ahead are going to be that much more difficult if your team is playing catch up from the get-go.

Do your players have the endurance to last the long haul? Once again, look to their mouthguards.

Much like the nasal strips commonly worn by athletes, custom mouthguards are designed to open up the airway for optimal oxygen flow. The more oxygen an athlete takes in, the more enhanced their performance and endurance becomes, as breathing clearly and uninhibited helps your players play faster and stronger, perform at peak levels and outlast their opponents. In fact, research shows evidence that mouthguards not only prevent oral and facial injuries, but improve muscular strength and endurance.

Of course, this means your players must have custom mouthguards crafted to perfectly fit their individual mouth structures. Generic boil-and-bite mouthguards are simply too bulky and ill fitting to give your players the proper airflow they need to boost their performance.

While athletes wearing boil-and-bites are lagging behind on the field due to lack of oxygen, your players with custom mouthguards are busy running them off the field.

3. Come Together

When it comes to team sports, team unity is just as important as communication and endurance, and even overall talent or individual skill. In order for your coming season to be successful, your entire team — from the coaching staff and athletic trainers to star players and back-ups — has to come together as one cohesive unit, with one identity, working together towards one shared goal.

But generic boil-and-bite mouthguards won’t give your team the identity they need, and your players may only unite in their loathing of their ineffective mouthguards.

With a completely personalized mouthguard — from team color and logo to player’s name and number — your athletes won’t just get a performance enhancing piece of equipment, but a new piece of team gear they value as much as their jersey or lucky undershirt. And when they’re at their locker preparing for game time, after they pull their jersey over their pads and apply eye black, the last piece of equipment they put on is their custom mouthguard, completing their game face.

When your team looks alike, with their shared colors and logos, they form a tight bond and become as close-knit as a family. Those shared colors help form a team identity and camaraderie between players, as they feel like they are a part of something bigger. They look like a team.

And that’s the first step to a successful season.

Start next season off ahead of the curve and gear up with a Gladiator Custom Mouthguard, the industry-leader in custom mouthguards.