What You ACTUALLY Need to Know About NFL Guardian Caps

Introduction today we're actually going to step away from the clinical side of sting a little bit and we're going to look at the NFL let's talk about these Guardian caps that we're seeing in the NFL players hey there I'm Dr Mark so I've worked with almost exclusively concussion for the past 5 years I've helped clear over 500 athletes from professional ice hockey players to NCAA swimmers all the way to teachers and entrepreneurs so on this channel we talk about concussion rehab getting over your symptoms and just getting you back to work Sports school or your regular life Guardian Caps: Football Safety or Just a Trend? talk about what you actually need to know about these Guardian caps if you're unfamiliar these are lightweight soft shell covers that go over the player's helmets and the whole goal is if we put this cover over can we reduce the force and can we reduce the potential damage that might cause concussions can we reduce concussions by putting the soft shell cover over at the time of my recording this we've already seen Jonathan Taylor and several other Cults we've seen James Daniels of the Steelers the Steelers not the Steelers and we've seen other NFL players wearing these Guardian caps and many of the comments when we see on social media these Guardian caps are polarized like go figure we seem to have this Camp over here and this Camp over here and one Camp is saying why would you do that that's ridiculous that's so silly that you know it looks Goofy and then you got this other Camp going like football's barbaric I'm so glad that these people are finally considering their Futures and their brains like good for you hurrah and we've got this like Spectrum 2024 Update: Do Guardian Caps Live Up to NFL’s 50% Concussion Reduction Claim? over here and let's talk about what the data actually says now I originally posted a video about helmets and guardian caps in 2022 at the time there were two published studies with Guardian gaps today in 2024 it's August 202 before I when I film this there are only four published studies so let's dive into the updated research on Guardian caps and let's start with the claim that the NFL is making so with describing the 2022 preseason which is when the guardian caps kind of made their debut in the NFL the NFL described a 50% reduction in sports related concussion when compared with the averages from 2018 2019 and 2021 nonetheless the data behind this claim have never been published so the NFL is talking about reducing concussion rates by 50% with the 2024 published data do Guardian caps do with the NFL and what the guardian cap company says they do do they reduce the force and do they reduce rates of Helmets vs. Guardian Caps: What the Data Says About Concussion Prevention concussion let's start with helmets in general I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty here because we're talking about Guardian caps but I do at least want to mention helmets because the guardian cap is going over a helmet it's covering the player's helmets what does the data show about helmets and concussions so please please please don't shoot the messenger here but helmets don't actually do anything to prevent mild traumatic brain injuries or concussions helmets do prevent more severe forms of traumatic brain injury and they do prevent external trauma like face or skull fractures so we do want to wear your helmets but in that same breath don't expect a helmet to prevent a concussion so if you want the references on that you want to deeper dive into the data on helmets go back to my original helmets in Guardian cap review from 2022 but that's what I'm going to say about helmets for now so with that we know that helmets could obviously use some work in the concussion prevention department so enter Guardian caps these were created in 20210 and from their website they say quote the guardian cap is the leading soft shell helmet cover engineered for impact reduction it brings a padded soft shell layer to the outside of decades old hard shell helmet and reduces impact up to 33% so they claim it it to tap into physics of like let's reduce force one layer at a time we've got the soft shell we've got the helmet we've got the skull and by kind of reducing the force on the way to the brain we're going to reduce impact damage and possibly reduce concussion which is a great claim and a great idea so how does that translate out into the real world game play and honestly where does that 33% number come from that 33% reduction so we've got Impact Testing Guardian Caps: What Lab Studies Say About Their Performance four studies we've got two lab based studies and we've got two game and player based studies so another way we've got two in the lab and two in the world two kind of nerdy bench science and two sort of how does this actually play out outside of the lab so start in the lab what did the lab studies show us so we've got one from 2017 and we got one from 2021 so the 2017 study researchers dropped helmets with and without Guardian caps so that it's this form of drop testing so they dropped helmets with and without Guardian caps to determine if the guardian cap actually reduced force and they measured the helmet movement and the impact severity to assess the Caps Effectiveness the researchers looked at two main things to see if the guardian caps worked they look at the Gad severity index or the GSI and they looked at Peak acceleration so the Gad severity index is a score that tells us how severe a head impact is the higher the score the worse the head impact the problem with this is we can't really clinically tie this to anything there's no like threshold that says at this GSI we see concussion and at this we don't but regardless we know that helmets have to go through this testing to see can it tolerate sufficient amounts of force or enough force and they found that the guardian cap actually didn't really affect the GSI score all that much at all they also looked at Peak acceleration which measures how quickly the helmet moves when it's hit and again the guardian cap did not make a big difference here either except in two positions when the helmet got hit in the rear or the back or when it got hit kind of on the back side or the rear boss so Peak acceleration did decrease in the rear and the rear boss positions but w w these are actually the least common sites for players to be hit playing football so we reduced Force but where players don't actually ever get hit and the decrease was only 10 to 11% so we still haven't found that 33% number but we're only one studying so overall the results of the 2017 lab study showed that the guardian cap didn't actually significantly improve the helmet's ability to protect the head from Impact 2021 Study: Guardian Caps vs. ProTech Caps let's go to 2021 it's a different study this study compared two add-ons so it compared the guardian cap versus a prot te cap and they use seven different models of football helmets CU players might buy different helmets so let's put the cap on different helmets and let's tried two different caps let's see the guardian cap compared to this older Protech cap so they did two kinds ofs first they use a special machine called a Pneumatic Ram to basically shoot a padded weight at a helmet on a fake head so they just shot a weight at a crash test dummy and they tested if the extra padding slowed down the movement when it hit second test they used another machine to smash two helmets together to go helmet to helmet contact and they tested if the extra padding changed how the helmets hit each other and if it affected the chance of neck injury so what did they find they found that both Protek and guardian cap did reduce the amount of head movement in most tests which is good for preventing concussion so yay that's what we want the important numbers here are that the guardian cap reduced a measurement of head movement so head acceleration response metric also called harm which is kind of funny so the guardian cap produced harm by an average of 9% whereas the Protek cap Protech helmet cap reduced harm by about 5% clinically relevant note here the best improvements were seen with helmets that didn't protect well on their own so set a different way helmets that already did a good job at reducing Force without any add-ons weren't actually help that much when you added the guardian cap or the protect cap so helmets that already did a good job at Baseline didn't really get improved with this add-on with the soft shell add-on So in theory reducing forces by about 9% May reduce concussion risk but again we still haven't seen that published 33% and we still don't know if it's all that helpful because NFL players are probably wearing good helmets to begin with so to recap the lab data we got three points one when we Smash and Crash Test Dummies and helmets together the guardian Cap May reduce forces about 10% that's cool but it's less effective in helmets that are already high quality like the NFL probably uses and the forces may be most reduced in the places where the players are least likely to be hit so now let's 2023 NCAA Study: Do Guardian Caps Improve Player Safety? look at the football data let's look at when we actually put these Guardian caps on playing moving human football players what happens so we got a 2023 study that looked at 10 Division 1 NCAA college players so researchers wanted to see if the extra Guardian cap padding on the football helmets actually prevented injuries so we had 10 D1 players that were wearing special helmets with sensors inside so five players had the guardian cap five players did not and the sensors measured it was head impact Telemetry so they measured acceleration and impact and all this other stuff and they went through 14 practices with the caps and sensors and then the sensors measured how hard their heads were hit and the researchers also filmed the practice to see okay this the sensor recorded measurements what did that hit actually look like what you know like what kind of hit did the player take and then they compared the data to look at if the extra padding made a difference drum roll quote overall the peak linear acceleration and Peak rotational acceleration between the shells so the guardian cap and control were equivocal across helmet location observe Direction starting stance and closing distance gameplay factors so basically the guardian cap and the control no difference if we get nitty-gritty here there may have been lower rotational forces so there may have been a benefit lower rotational forces starting from a three and fourpoint stance but the flip side of that there was actually greater rotational forces so worse rotational forces from a two-point stance so repeat it more simply and to quote the researchers directly based on our preliminary findings protective soft shell padding did not reduce head linear or rotational acceleration among a subset of college football players so our first kind of real world study says the cardian cap doesn't do much of anything compared to regular helmets so 2024 Study: No Significant Change in Head Impact Metrics now we got the 2024 study and this was actually the one that you'll see if you look it up Guardian caps and Pub net this was duplicated so there's a pre-print in 2023 that was kind of officially published in the Journal of athletic training in 2024 and this study involved 25 male NCAA division 1 college football players who are identified by their coaches as having the potential to experience a lot of head impacts over the course of the season so what they did is they used six kind of standardized practices workouts in the middle of the preseason for testing three of the practices they used traditional helmets and then three of the practices they had Guardian caps and the whole time they had instrumented mouthguards that could detect the peak linear and angular acceleration of these impacts in this time they captured analyzed 809 unique video verified head impacts across the various players positions and playing time roles so what did they find I'm going to quote this one as well quote the major outcome was that the guardian caps did not reduce or attenuate the peak linear acceleration or the peak angular acceleration or alter the total number of head impacts during the six closely matched practice sessions so said again and quoted from a different part of the study consistent with the limited literature on Guardian caps we found no reduction in Peak angular acceleration linear acceleration or total impacts when the guardian caps were fixed to traditional helmets and Collegiate American football players so Guardian Caps Reviewed: Some Force Reduction, Zero Evidence of Lower Concussion Rates what is the end conclusion from these four studies one lab studies show Guardian caps can slightly reduce head impact forces but this effect is less pronounced in high quality helmets and occurred in places least likely to be hit and when we go to the real world football settings no significant reduction in head impact number or metrics were observed and very very important we have zero data reporting decreased concussion rates we have lab data showing minimal impact reductions we have player data showing no impact effects and we have zero data showing any changes in concussion numbers and that is arguably the most important and most missing metric from this research Why Helmets Are Still the Best Bet for Safety right now now this is not meant to stoke polarity online this is just data my recommendation as a clinician and as a guy who treats concussion and postconcussion day in and day out I want you to wear your helmet I want you to replace your helmet every couple years but for right now you could probably save your money on the add-ons for now like maybe that research will get better while helmets and add-ons cannot entirely prevent concussions you still want to prevent face fractures skull fractures more severe forms of TBI you definitely want to wear your helmet when you're competing in sport when you're cycling contact Sports any chance you want to wear your helmet you should please please please remember for the folks who think that football ice hockey rugby are just barbaric Sports we could cancel all sports tomorrow and the dent on concussion in PCS would be far far less than you think most concussions actually occur from car accidents and accidental Falls not contact Sports and additionally we got benefits from Sports at the youth and community levels as well as even in like the NFL and professional football there's benefits that can be their own separate video so what I want to say for those of you who think it's barbaric and guardian caps are kind of a Saving Grace pump your brakes the data doesn't show that at all and on the other side of things for those of you who think Guardian caps are stupid and pointless also pump your brakes we still need helmets for other reasons and we need research like this to keep pushing the player safety forward we learn more from what we get wrong than what we get right so I am happy to see this research out there that is what we know about the guardian caps in August 2024 I appreciate you sticking around if you enjoyed this or learned something from it you probably also enjoy or maybe learn something from this one as well until next time I'm Dr Mark and I appreciate you watching