Before you head out to the skatepark (or that perfectly empty swimming pool in your neighborhood) you need to make sure you’ve covered all your bases when it comes to safety. You might feel like a “dork” wearing a helmet and tons of other safety gear, but you’ll feel even worse if you get into a skateboarding accident, even a minor one, without any type of safety equipment on. With that said, let’s go over some of the most important gear, as well as some optional equipment.

Helmet – This is the most import piece of skateboarding safety gear you could ever wear. If you hit your head without a helmet on, you risk getting a concussion, causing permanent brain damage, and even death. Why risk your life by not wearing a helmet? Even professional skateboarders who have years, or even decades of experience riding, always wear a helmet.

Elbow and Knee Pads – What’s wrong with a couple of bruised knees and elbows right? You might even consider such injuries as “battle scars”. Unfortunately, although it may only seem like a minor bruise on the surface, you might be doing permanent damage to your joints. Falling on your knees without knee pads can cause joint inflammation, and breakage. Injuries to the elbow can include dislocation and fractures.

Wrist Guards – You might not think wrist guards are an essential piece of safety equipment, but wrist fractures happen to be very common skateboarding injuries. Imagine not being able to do simple things like write, or hold a fork, all because you didn’t want to wear wrist guards. Read the rest of this entry »

Skateboarding is a very popular sport in the United States, especially among young people. Yet each year, hundreds of injuries occur. There are many parts of the body that are vulnerable to injury when one is skateboarding. Most of these accidents could be prevented if people followed basic safety rules, one of the most important of which is wearing protective gear. Four skateboarding gear components, are discussed below in detail.

1) Knee pads – A fall on one’s knee can result in inflammation and permanent damage to the patellas. Smith Scabs Elite knee pads have padding that surrounds the knees completely, top and bottom belts secured with Velcro, and leg wraps that are likewise affixed with Velcro and made of neoprene. Smith Scabs Horseshoe Knee Gaskets, which may be worn either independently or in combination with other such equipment, are meant to absorb impact.

2) Elbow pads – Injury to the elbows can have the same consequences as injury to the knees. The 187 Elbow Pads available at xsportsprotective.com are double- stitched and equipped with a reinforcement of Cordura/Neoprene on either side, plus foam padding made of slow memory EVA. Lizard Skins Softcell Elbow Pads have a core of honeycomb textured EVA foam, providing the wearer with more ventilation; their padding is double- layered at the points of highest impact. Read the rest of this entry »