Which sports need a mouthguard? A sport-by-sport guide

You need a mouthguard (Mundschutz or Sportschiene) in any sport where an opponent’s body, a piece of hard equipment or the ground can reach your face at speed. That puts combat sports, ice and field hockey, rugby, American football and lacrosse in the top group, where a guard is simply part of the kit. Football, basketball, handball and everything on wheels or a board sit in a second group that most people underestimate. And one factor overrides the whole list: if you wear fixed braces (feste Zahnspange), or have crowns, veneers or implants on your front teeth, you move up a tier whatever you play. In Germany a sports mouthguard is a private service — statutory health insurance (gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, GKV) does not pay for it, unlike a night guard prescribed for teeth grinding.

Sports change, new ones appear, and no list is ever complete. Rather than memorising one, put your sport through three questions.

1. Can another person’s body reach my face at speed? Elbows, knees, heads, shoulders, fists. 2. Is there hard equipment in play? A stick, a bat, a puck, a ball travelling fast, a board, a handlebar. 3. Can I hit something solid with my face? The floor, a post, a wall, the bar, frozen ground, tarmac.

One clear yes makes a mouthguard worth considering. Two or more, and you should be wearing one — including in training, which is where a good share of injuries actually happen, precisely because people take the protective kit out of the bag only for match days.

In these disciplines the question is not whether to wear one but which type. Dental associations in Germany and internationally have recommended mouthguards for full-contact and stick sports for decades.

The common thread is that the impact is rarely a gentle one. A mouthguard cushions and spreads the force, keeps the lips and cheeks off the teeth, and separates the jaws so that a blow from below does not slam the lower teeth into the upper ones. It cannot rule an injury out — nothing can — but it reduces the risk substantially, and it changes the kind of damage that occurs.

This is where most of the dental injuries we actually see come from, for a straightforward reason: far more people play these sports, and hardly anybody wears protection.

Football (Fußball). No equipment aimed at your head, but plenty of elbows in the air, heads meeting at corners, goalkeepers’ knees, and a hard post. Shin pads are compulsory and unquestioned; teeth get nothing. There is more on this in Do you really need a mouthguard for football?.

Basketball. Elbows under the basket at exactly mouth height, with no referee able to prevent it.

Handball. Body contact, high arms and a fast ball in a small space — closer to a contact sport than the rulebook suggests.

Skateboarding, scootering, BMX and mountain biking. The face meets tarmac, a kerb or the handlebars. Helmets are widely accepted here; the mouth is left exposed.

Trampolining and gymnastics. Knees to the chin, and falls onto a bar or a beam.

Equestrian sport. A head lifted suddenly, or a kick. Uncommon, but severe when it happens.

Any martial art at training level. Sparring with a training partner produces the same accidental contact as competition, just with less adrenaline.

If your child plays one of these two or three times a week from the age of seven onwards, that is a large number of exposures across a childhood.

For running, swimming, rowing, tennis, badminton, athletics, most cycling on the road, yoga and ordinary gym work, a mouthguard is not part of sensible kit. Squash and doubles racket sports sit on the edge — a racket to the face is a real event, though eye protection is the more pressing concern there.

Regardless of which group your sport falls into, discuss a guard if any of the following applies to you:

• Fixed braces. Brackets turn a modest knock into a laceration of the lip and cheek, and any orthodontic treatment (kieferorthopädische Behandlung) is a long, expensive project to have interrupted by trauma.
• Crowns, veneers or implants on the front teeth. Restored teeth do not behave like intact ones under impact, and replacing them is neither quick nor cheap.
• A front tooth that has already been injured, or one that has had root canal treatment (Wurzelbehandlung). It is more brittle than its neighbours.
• Prominent upper front teeth with little lip coverage — a recognised risk factor for dental trauma in sport.
• A history of concussion or repeated falls, which raises the value of anything that cushions the jaw.

Some federations make a mouthguard compulsory at competition level — amateur boxing being the most familiar example — while others recommend it without requiring it. Requirements frequently differ between competition and training, and between age groups, sometimes in a direction you would not expect.

As things stand in 2026, these are the German federations whose competition rules require one:

• Boxing (Deutscher Boxsport-Verband, DBV) — compulsory in every age class from the youngest upwards and for both sexes. Losing the guard during a bout brings a warning and can end in disqualification.
• Karate, kumite (DKV/WKF) — part of the prescribed equipment under the competition rules applying from 1 January 2026; children under 14 additionally wear head protection.
• Kickboxing (WAKO Deutschland) — compulsory across all disciplines. Two details matter if you wear braces: with fixed appliances on both jaws a double guard is required, and a guard worn over braces is not admitted without written clearance from your dentist.
• Ice hockey (DEB/IIHF) — compulsory for U20 players who have turned 18; for children and in women’s ice hockey a full face shield (Gesichtsschutz) is required instead.

Recommended but not prescribed: football, handball, basketball, field hockey, skateboarding and mountain biking. Rugby is the one most often misreported — under the World Rugby laws a mouthguard is permitted rather than prescribed equipment, so where it is compulsory the obligation comes from the club or the competition rather than from the laws of the game. For judo the rules say nothing either way, which makes it a question for your club rather than for an article.

Because these rules are revised from time to time, ask your club or check your federation’s current competition regulations rather than relying on an article — including this one. If a guard is required, it is normally your responsibility to bring your own; the club does not provide it.

If you have just moved here. Club sport in Germany runs through the local Verein, and the paperwork, the training schedule and the equipment rules all arrive in German. If you would rather sort out the dental side in English before you sort out the rest, that is straightforward — see English-Speaking Dentist in NRW.

The permanent front teeth come through in the primary-school years and are then meant to last a lifetime — so an injury at nine has consequences that run for decades, in a way the same injury at forty does not. That is the age at which children also start playing organised sport with real speed and real contact.

Two things follow. A growing jaw means a child’s guard has a much shorter working life than an adult’s. And comfort decides everything: one that makes a child gag or will not stay put is a guard that lives in the bag rather than in the mouth. We take the impression with a Primescan digital scanner, so there are no trays and nothing to gag on — which for many children is the difference between wearing it and not. The parent’s version of this topic is A sports guard for children: protecting the permanent teeth.

Guards come in three grades: the ready-made version from the sports shop, the boil-and-bite one you shape yourself in hot water, and the laboratory-made guard produced from an impression or a digital scan of your own teeth. The first two are cheap and available immediately; they also tend to be bulky, to sit loose, to interfere with breathing and speech, and to be spat out mid-match. A custom guard is made to your jaw, stays in place without being held there, and can be built up in thickness where your sport takes the most impact. We make ours in our own in-house master dental laboratory (Meisterlabor), so the fit is checked in the practice and adjusted on the spot — the process is described on Sports mouthguards – service page (EN). The full comparison of the three types is in Custom sports guard or shop-bought model: which is better?.

On cost: a sports mouthguard is a private service in Germany. Statutory health insurance does not contribute, and there is no Heil- und Kostenplan to submit — that route applies to dentures and similar work, not to sports protection. Some supplementary dental policies (Zahnzusatzversicherung) and some private tariffs make a contribution, but the wording varies enormously from policy to policy, so read yours or ask your insurer directly. You will receive our cost in writing before anything is made. See What does a sports mouthguard cost?.

Whichever group your sport falls into, a tooth rescue box (Zahnrettungsbox) from the pharmacy belongs in the team first-aid kit. A knocked-out permanent tooth can often be saved, but the odds fall away quickly — the tooth must be picked up by the crown rather than the root, kept moist, and brought to a dentist within the hour, with the out-of-hours service (Notdienst) covering evenings and weekends. The full first-aid sequence, and what a guard can and cannot prevent, is set out in Can a sports mouthguard save your teeth?.