Scare Away Injuries With 3 Tips For Spooky Season

It may be spooky season, but that doesn’t mean sports should be scary.

That’s especially true when it comes to protecting your players from injury. Regardless of your sport, injuries to the mouth and face happen. Direct impact from elbows, fists, pucks, sticks or any hard hit that slams the upper and lower jaw together, may have scary results:

• Approximately 5 million teeth are knocked out annually during sports and recreational activities.
• Athletes have a 33-56% chance of receiving an orofacial injury — an injury to the mouth or face — during their playing career.
• Broken bones heal. ACLs are repairable. A broken tooth lasts forever.
• The lifetime cost to replace just one tooth — with maintenance, appointments and surgeries — is approximately $20,000.

While it’s easy to fear the ever-present dread of a potential injury, here are 3 tips to help keep you and your players at ease. Or at least their teeth and jawbone!

Wear It
Much like a costume on Halloween, if it’s not worn for a party or trick-or-treating it’s kind of a waste.
Players need to wear their mouthguards or they don’t work. It’s that simple. The best protection for your teeth is the one you are wearing.

Fit Matters
A costume isn’t very good if it doesn’t fit well. Sure, in a pinch a generic, off-the-shelf mouthguard is better than no mouthguard. But from cut and design, to form and function, the only real similarities between custom mouthguards and boil-and-bites is that they’re worn in the mouth.

That’s why both the American Dental Association (ADA) and the Academy for Sports Dentistry (ASD) recommend a professionally made, properly fitted custom mouthguard for all contact and collision sports. In addition, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) recommends that athletes to wear “properly fitted mouthguards during sports activities.”

A Gladiator custom mouthguard is engineered for each specific athlete, their specific needs and their specific sport. That means they are made from an exact impression of each athlete’s mouth structure and pressed at 120lbs per sq using advanced techniques. Creating an intimate fit that cannot be matched. All others press at no more than 80lbs per sq, 30% less fit than a Gladiator!

Proper Protection
There is a delicate balance between comfort and protection. Too thick and your mouthguard will be uncomfortable. Too thin and you’re leaving yourself open to serious injury.

Mouthguards should have at least 4mm thickness of material in the important impact zones — the areas in front of the teeth and under the molars, unless wearing a full-face shield.

Only Gladiator Custom Mouthguards offers highly specialized styles and upgrades to meet every sport and need for all athletes. Simply stated, light, medium and heavy options alone just don’t cut it for what today’s athletes need.

It may be Halloween time, but sports shouldn’t be scary. Remove the fear with the most protective and comfortable custom mouthguard available. Learn more at the link below.

Don’t Play Scared. Play Protected.

Author Bio

Bobbie Quinn, co-founder of Gladiator Custom Mouthguards, played both lacrosse and field hockey as a youth and went on to play Division 1 women’s lacrosse in college. Bobbie continues to play women’s league field hockey and enjoys watching her son play various sports.