Protect Your Chompers – Find the Best Mouth Guard

Football players endure severe punishment on the field. The average pro defensive backer tackle slams a receiver into the turf with 1,600 pounds of force. That’s one bone-quaking impact, even through the padding and helmet.

A mouth guard is a crucial piece of equipment for protection on the football field. While precise dental injury statistics are hard to come by, you can imagine the shockwave that permeates through your skull when tooth meets tooth after a takedown.

The Battle Sports Oxygen is a non-moldable, breathable mouthpiece made specifically for football players.

The Oxygen’s most prominent feature is the amount of air it lets through. According to Battle Sports, the hole in the center of the mouthpiece “delivers more oxygen to the muscles for faster recovery, clearer thinking, and faster reaction times play after play.” This highlights just how important proper breathing is.

The Oxygen sits in the “one size fits most” sizing category, and the manufacturer says it fits braces wearers just as well. Whether you do or don’t have braces, Battle Sports offers a $5,000 dental guarantee; the company will pay you if your chompers get damaged while wearing the mouth guard.

The Oxygen looks like a rigid piece, but the composite plastic it’s made of is actually rubbery to the touch. It has an absorber shield to protect your lips and comes with a detachable facemask strap.

Make sure you check out the wide array of designs Battle Sports offers. The Oxygen, the top performing stock football mouth guard, costs around $17, plus or minus a few bucks depending on the design you choose.

The ‘Max’ doesn’t refer to the size of this moldable boil and bite mouth guard. It refers to the outstanding protection SISU’s mouthpieces offer. In fact, sitting at a leaflike 2.4 mm thickness, the NextGen Max Guard is one of the thinnest and most compact mouthguards on the market.

Like Ned Flanders, you’ll feel like you’re wearing nothing at all. Just follow the simple molding instructions and you’ll get a snug-fitting mouthguard that won’t impair your talking or drinking. 

A snug mouth guard is especially important in combat sports like MMA or BJJ. Being able to use the time between rounds to communicate with your corner and drink water without having to fumble the guard out of your mouth saves time and effort. Taking the mouthpiece out is not hygienically sound, either, as it usually exchanges a few hands before it lands back in your mouth.

The special, moldable plastic has exceptional tensile strength, enough to protect your teeth and jaw from repeated impact. The material also allows for up to 20 remoldings, which is perfect for athletes with braces.

If you do wear braces, though, there are some extra steps to the molding process. Namely, you will need to place a barrier (aluminum foil or dental wax) over your braces when fitting the NextGen mouthguard. After that, the piece goes directly on the braces. A guard on the bottom teeth will also protect your lip from bracket cuts.

There is no way to strap the SISU NextGen to a mask or helmet. You can get a SISU bundle, which includes a moldable mouth guard, a case, and a canister of scented mouthguard spray for $46.50.

Many mouthguard wearers suffer from halitosis. It’s no wonder – chewing on a piece of plastic for hours on end doesn’t exactly produce a pleasant scent. Thankfully, there are products on the market to combat this. 

The Under Armour Flavor Blast is a mouthguard that comes in five colors, each embedded with different flavor beads: electric blue (berry-flavored), pink (fruit punch-flavored), hyper green (cool mint-flavored), blaze orange (orange mint-flavored), and black (bubble gum-flavored).

Be extra careful about what flavor you choose – you will have to live with it for an entire season. If you’re not too partial to sweet flavors, we recommend you pick the cool mint flavor. The sweet flavors are a great way to get your kid to start loving their mouthguard, too.

That said, the Under Armour Flavor Blast is far from a novelty item. It includes all the safety features Under Armour mouth guards have become famous for. The “armour plate” outside layer provides exceptional protection, while the inner molded gel helps dissipate and absorb impacts.

Although Under Armour employed its patented “polymer shrink” technology in designing this mouth guard, some customers have reported slight breathing and talking impairments.

It can be used with or without a face mask strap and it comes in two sizes – MD for ages 8-12 and LG for ages 12 and up. It will take some boiling to make this piece a custom fit.

Under armour provides a $32,000 dental warranty with its products. That almost makes you want to get your teeth knocked out. The piece itself will run you around $15.

Let’s learn a new word together: monocoque. It means “single shell” in French and is usually used to describe the structure of airplanes. In mouthguard terms, it means that the single casing of the Nano Double protects both your upper and lower teeth and stabilizes your jaw.

The hard plastic outer shell conceals a gel-like material that softens when boiled. The entire array of upper teeth leaves an imprint, and the bottom side has three gel patches for better grip and a snugger fit. After cooling, the material hardens and shrinks, making the Nano Double an exceptionally low profile mouthguard.

Double-sided mouth protectors can lead to some breathing issues, due to their bulkiness. The Nano Double remedies this issue with ventilation holes. Look at it this way – wearing a mouthguard that slows down your mouth breathing can be a means of practicing proper nose breathing.

The best feature of this Shock Doctor mouthguard is the jaw stabilization, which absorbs impact, disperses the energy from blows, and encourages proper jaw positioning. That makes it high in the running for the best boxing mouth guard.

Shock Doctor offers a $10,000 dental warranty. The Nano Double is listed at around $25.

Normally, it would take a costly visit to the dentist to get a tooth impression good enough for a custom mouthguard. Impact cuts out the middleman, which in turn cuts the price of the procedure down considerably.

Once you place an order, Impact ships you a dental impression kit. The imprinting procedure is simple and doesn’t involve boiling water, which is always the safer option. You mix the powders, time everything carefully, then bite down. In less than five minutes, you’ll have an almost professional-grade imprint of your dental landscape. Impact offers an easy-to-follow instructional video for the molding procedure on its website.

Once you ship the impression to the company in the postage-paid envelope that comes with the kit, it will take around 14 business for your personalized mouthguard to reach your doorstep. Impact will store your dental impression for six months. You can pay a few dollars extra for the company to keep the impression for a longer period.

Impact guarantees it will make a perfectly fitting, snug mouthguard no matter “what’s going on in your mouth.” There may be some back and forth for minor adjustments. That’s well worth it, bearing in mind you’ll get a personalized mouthguard that literally “snaps” on for a fraction of the price you would pay a dentist.

An Impact guard will endure years worth of punishment with proper care, like rinsing it with cold water after each use. The plastic is eco-friendly, hypoallergenic, and provides exceptional protection against blows. If you suffer from a sensitive gag reflex, you can order your Impact mouth guard to be specifically trimmed.

And now for the best part – the price. At around $60, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a custom mouthguard for less. You can pay a couple of bucks extra for personalization and $21 for two-day delivery. 

All in all, the Impact Custom Mouthguard earns our title for the best mouth guard because of its low price and custom fit.

Basketball players are always at risk of getting a painful elbow to the mouth. On the other hand, they can’t afford to have something that interferes with their talking during the game. That’s why the best basketball mouth guard needs to provide excellent protection, while still being light and breathable.

The LiteBITE mouth guard is designed with basketball players in mind. It’s a boil and bite mouthpiece that is translucent and rubbery, but still provides ample protection. Of course, it can be used by all sorts of athletes, not just basketball players.

This product even has a story – a story about a disgruntled father of five athletic children who kept misplacing their dentist-made custom mouth guards. Jimmie, the founder of the company, then came up with a way to use the same materials dentists use in their pieces to make a boil and bite style mouth guard.

The LiteBITE molding process is easy, even for people who wear braces. The bite plate can be remolded up to five times, in case you’re not happy with the way your piece turns out. It’s also perfect if you have nighttime teeth-grinding issues.

The LiteBITE cannot be tethered to a football helmet, which shouldn’t be a huge deal because there’s no need to take it out of your mouth.

Steph Curry hits 92% of his free throws while chewing his mouth guard – a 3% increase compared to when the piece stays in his mouth! We’re not saying that a basketball mouth guard will make you a better shooter, nor do we propagate chewing it, but it will certainly make you more liberated and relaxed on the court. 

The price tag is $35, which is not a lot for the special features of the piece. We recommend you invest an extra $5 in the carry case for safekeeping.

Athletes wearing braces require the protection of sports mouth guards more than others. After all, cutting your lips on brackets is never fun. The trouble is that people with braces have highly unstable dentition. This holds especially holds true when they’re young, which most people who wear braces are.

Athletes with orthodontics can’t benefit much from custom mouth guards. They need a guard that can be remolded several times, while still offering top-notch protection. 

Shock Doctor’s Ultra Braces mouth guard checks both of those boxes. The triple layer structure provides top-class protection and shock absorption, while the Insta-Fit Plus adjustment system allows for continuous adaptation. This is crucial because, if you wear braces, the brackets will need to be adjusted regularly.

This particular model protects both the lower and upper jaw from laceration. That makes it relatively bulky, but the breathing holes make up for it. It comes in two colors with two different flavors infusions: “blue raz” and “rocket punch.” The sweet flavors may coax some youngsters to keep the guards in for longer. Be careful, though – the flavor can be strong and may produce the opposite effect if the kid doesn’t like it.

The Shock Doctor Ultra Braces Flavor Fusion comes with a $10,000 dental guarantee, which is very handy for those costly orthodontics bills. This highly durable and customizable mouth guard will cost you around $33.

A challenger appears from across the pond. Even though the Brittish aren’t renowned for their dental care, the land of rugby and cricket still has athletes who need their teeth protected in impact sports. OPRO is an English company that manufactures some of the best sports mouth guards on the planet.

The OPRO Power Fit comes with some innovative features. For starters, the fitting gel on the mouth guard is ribbed. The fin structure, according to OPRO, has been designed using data from around a million custom guard fits. It is anatomically designed to provide the best gel fit when softened in hot water. OPRO’s 20-year experience has led to a comfortable and retentive fit that’s on par with some of the best mouth guards made by dentists. 

Molding (or moulding, as the British would spell it) the mouth guard is easy, especially when you follow the helpful instructional video on OPRO’s website. Power Fit mouth guards can be remolded multiple times; just be sure to keep the guards in hot water for an extra 20 seconds each time you do it. The fitting cradle that comes with the product makes the whole process completely foolproof.

Sports mouth guards can be a breeding ground for contagious bacteria. OPRO products are made with the special additive that provides 99.9% protection against harmful microorganisms. This additive is proven to be resistant to the dangerous MRSA bacteria group.

The OPRO Power Fit costs around $35. The company offers a 14-day money-back guarantee and a $20,000 dental warranty.

Fight Dentist considers the proper fitting of a mouth guard to be the most important feature. If your child takes part in impact sports, you should feel the same way. Children consider a loose-fitting guards to be a nuisance, and that interferes with their will to train and work hard. 

More importantly, though, an improperly fitted mouth guard loses most of its protective properties. The safety of your child should come first.

Young athletes’ jaws are still developing. A youth mouth guard should encourage proper jaw positioning and foster proper growth. Their gums and lips are also much more sensitive than your average athlete. Fight Dentist’s boil and bite guard ticks off all of these goals with its proprietary technology.

Developed by dentists with decades of experience, these boil and bite guards have a near-perfect fit, comparable to custom mouth pieces. 

Fight Dentist’s impact defense system provides excellent protection for lips and gums by ensuring that the guard has a snug fit and does not “drop.” The ergonomic design of the guard is shown in the varying thickness of gel across its length. Your kid pops it in and forgets about it – that’s how it should be.

If you and your child are serious about training for any sport that includes potentially harmful impacts, don’t bribe them with colorful designs or candy-flavored trinkets. Buy them a proper, simple, functional mouth guard that will teach them the importance of proper protection.

You can order the Fight Dentist mouth guard designed specifically for young athletes for around $20. They come in three simple, transparent colors – black, pink, and green.

You might not have heard of the term bruxism, but you’ve probably encountered it. This the bane of many a spouse across the country. A partner’s constant and incessant teeth grinding will make you lose sleep literally, by keeping you awake, and figuratively, as you worry about their health.

Flattened and worn-out teeth, jaw pains, all kinds of headaches, a bad night’s sleep… these are just some of the consequences of gritting teeth. Bruxism itself can be a symptom of other problems, such as a high overall stress or more serious diseases, like Parkinson’s.

While there is no direct cure, a mouth guard for clenching can alleviate most of the negative side-effects of Bruxism. It acts as a shock absorber against the headaches and protects teeth enamel from the wear and tear.

Our choice for the best night guard is the Dental Duty Professional Dental Guard because of its excellent price-to-value ratio. For just $15 on Amazon, you get four dental guards and an anti-bacterial case. 

While you may not get a professional, tooth-perfect occlusal guard, this boil and bite product will get you as close as possible for a fraction of the price. If you don’t succeed in getting a satisfactory fit, you have 30 nights to sleep on it. Dental Duty offers a money-back guarantee or a replacement piece for unsatisfied customers.

This product can also serve as a sports mouth guard or a teeth-whitening tray.

Your Dental Duty Professional dental mouth guard will have a much longer lifespan if you care for it properly. Consider purchasing Dental Duty’s anti-bacterial retainer cleanser tablets. Take a glass of water, pop the retainer and the tablet in, and in 15 minutes you’ll have a clean and disinfected guard.

The guards come in two sizes: a regular adult size and a small boys and girls mouth guard. It’s also available in thin and regular fits. It costs around $20.