Upper Body Protection For A Full Contact Sport

In hockey, there are two things that you need to watch out for the most. Those two things are incoming pucks and collisions. Now, these things hurt quite considerably if you're not careful enough to be wearing any protective gear.

Being the full contact sport as it is, you need to have the best protection you can get so you wouldn't sustain any injuries from collisions and blows from hockey pucks or sticks. Upper body protection is just as important as what you wear to protect your lower body. Just like football, hockey has shoulder pads as well for upper body protection. Other than this, neck guards, helmets and mouth guards also offer you the best protection that technology can offer you.

1. Your shoulder pads protect your spine and torso from any injuries.

What shoulder pads do is that these deflect impact from your joints to your muscles where these can handle more damage than your bones or joints. Shoulder pads use lightweight and flexible materials that don't sacrifice protection so users wouldn't have limited movement to their upper bodies.

Obviously, your spine and your torso are very important, and this is why people have taken it to themselves to make sure that these body parts remain protected from any harm that could come their way. Putting on these shoulder pads can even make you feel more secure. These things make you feel more confident to go out on the ice and give it everything you've got. After all, worrying about getting hurt a lot will definitely hamper your game.

2. A mouth guard for you might actually save you from a concussion.

In the event of you sustaining a blow to the jaw, being unprotected in that area might reduce harm levels of a concussion. With a mouth guard, this would also prevent you from losing some teeth during hockey games where there may be some unintentional blows to your mouth.

There are a lot of sports that utilize the use of mouth guards to protect its players from further injury. An example of some of these sports would be boxing, American football, martial arts, rugby, wrestling, soccer and a whole lot of other sports. Nowadays, you could even get a certain type of mouth guard that's no longer difficult to speak with when you're wearing it. This means that communication on the ice wouldn't be hampered despite wearing a mouth guard.

3. Neck guards

Well maybe for this specific type of upper body gear, this would be more suited for goaltenders that often get under harms way with hockey pucks racing towards their way. If you are a goaltender in a hockey game, you really wouldn't have much of a choice but to attempt to block the shot that's headed towards the goal post. If one puck may be headed towards your neck area, an exposed bare neck being hit by a hockey puck will most definitely result to injury. With neck guards however, all that force would be deflected and another injury would hopefully be staved off.