With ice hockey being such a physical sport it is natural to think that the bigger the protective equipment the safer the players are. While this is true on some level, there are many serious injuries happening every year because the protective equipment like shoulder pads and elbow pads are being made to be too hard. At the most elite levels of ice hockey the speed is incredibly fast and the contact is very furious. There are huge body checks being given many times in each hockey game. For some strange reason, we are seeing more and more serious head injuries and concussions than we had back in the 1980′s and 1990′s.

The reason why there are more concussions happening to hockey players is because of the amount of rock hard padding that exists in todays hockey shoulder pads and hockey elbow pads. Although elbowing other players in the head has always been looked at as a “dirty” play in the sport of ice hockey, only lately has an elbow been seen as something that can potentially end a career. The elbow caps that players have in their elbow pads can feel like a baseball bat hitting you in the face if you don’t have a mask on. The fact of the matter is that the elbow pads of the 1980′s were as protective as they needed to be to prevent elbow injuries, but if you accidentally got your elbow up on an opposing player the consequences were not nearly as severe as they were today.

The same thing goes for ice hockey shoulder pads, with the exception of hitting someone with your shoulder being labeled as a “dirty” play. In fact shoulder hits are not only legal in the sport of ice hockey, they are encouraged. The problem is that if your shoulder hits the head of an opposing player at a high rate of speed, it can essentially have the exact same effect that an illegal elbow has. One play is illegal and one is legal, so in my opinion the only way to truly limit the amount of concussions that happen in the great game of ice hockey is to go back to the same style of elbow and shoulder pads that were used twenty to thirty years ago. Sure, we might see a few more shoulder or elbow injuries, but isn’t that worth it to prevent the serious head injuries that are happening so often in today’s sport of ice hockey?