It’s well known that American football is associated with a lot of head injuries, both acute and chronic. The NFL has been experimenting with new helmet designs, with extra padding, in the hopes of reducing this (see exhibit A):
But no matter how much padding you add, these helmets are still, fundamentally, connected to the head. By increasing the time of collisions, you can cut down on the peak force, but any impulse to the helmet is still ultimately an impulse to the head.
On the other hand, take a look at the helmet Buzz Lightyear wears (Exhibit B):
This helmet isn’t attached to the head at all, but rather to torso armor. Any impacts Mr. Lightyear takes will transfer the impulse to his broad, manly shoulders, not to his head.
Are helmets like this viable for football? Have they even been considered?
But they’ll have to swing your neck around to do so. How do you keep your neck from getting injured?
Also, regarding that first picture, wasn’t there a study at some point that showed people are getting hurt more because of the extra padding in helmets? Before modern helmets the players wouldn’t hit as hard in order to protect themselves from injuries. But maybe that was just a random comment I read somewhere.
When hard shells were first introduced, the number of head injuries actually increased because players had a false sense of security and made more dangerous tackles
Early in the season, head impacts were comparable in both groups, the researchers found. But as the season progressed, the players who occasionally practiced without helmets began to experience considerably fewer blows to their heads.
By the end of the season, they were hitting their heads about 30 percent less often in any given game or practice than the players who never took their helmets off during drills.
The TLDR version of that article seems to be ‘wear a helmet and don’t lead with your head’.
…I’m not following. Do you mean whiplash, like in a car crash? I don’t think that two humans (even large, strong humans like NFL players) colliding under muscle power are capable of producing conditions that would result in whiplash.
I don’t know enough about whiplash to speak about it, but I did find this:
whiplash also can result from sports accidents
may take place on a roller coaster[19] or other rides at an amusement park, sports injuries such as skiing accidents…or from being hit, kicked or shaken
But having said that, I don’t know the nature of the injury that would result. Imagine running, at speed, into something, including the ground. If your chest hits and your head is still several inches from the object, it’s going to attempt to keep moving until it hits something or won’t move/bend any further. I can only assume that would cause some type of injury. Even if it’s not an immediately obvious/acute injury, doing it over and over might cause problems.
If there was some way to keep their head rigidly inline with the rest of their body that would be different. Think about how a race car driver wears a collar and has their helmet anchored, but they’d still have to be able move their head.
Come to think of it, a Buzz Lightyear helmet with a padded collar might work better than the helmet alone.
My understanding is that concussions and TBIs have relatively little to do with the helmet itself, and more to do with the brain hitting the inside of the skull when there is a rapid change in speed and/or direction (as in making a, or being involved in, a tackle, running into another player, or hitting your head on the ground or against another player).
Better helmets have, as I understand it, reduced the instance of TBIs to an extent, but I’m not at all convinced that any helmet design can really reduce the risk, given the nature of the sport.
IIRC, the most effective helmets were found to be special material helmets that would allow there to be a temporary dent in the helmet (lasting a second or so) and then promptly pop back out to their original shape. That absorbed the most force.
If that’s the case, then body-on-body impacts (where, obviously, no helmet is going to make any difference) would be just as much of a CTE risk as head impacts. Is that the case?
The basic idea here is that a Buzz Lightyear helmet would replace a head impact with a body impact.
IANAD, but I think that that’s at least partially correct. My understanding is that direct head contact/impact is the worst/highest risk, but that you can receive a concussion or sub-concussive TBI even if you aren’t directly hit in the head.
If you’re running, and suddenly collide with another player, leading to a change in your direction and/or speed, that change affects your whole body, not just your head; the sudden deceleration or direction change still leads to your brain bouncing against the inside of your skull.
That would make sense. Similarly, motorcycle (bikes as well, I assume) helmets need to be replaced if they hit the pavement after a crash as the material that absorbs some of the energy is permanently deformed and will offer less, if any, protection now. Football helmets have to be able to do this over and over and over again, rebounding as close to 100% each time. After all is said and done, that probably means the player’s head has to absorb more of that energy.
OTOH, no matter how you look at it, a football player is doing this over and over and over whereas I feel like it would be a safe bet that the average number of times a biker is saved from injury or death by their helmet, over their entire riding career is less than 1.
IIRC, offensive and defensive linemen were found to have substantial brain damage because of sustaining thousands of tiny brain-jarring hits in their career. Every time a 300-pound man smashed into the opposing 300-pound man in front of him with full force, both sustained an indirect tiny jarring of the brain, even if their helmets never collided or they never led with their head.
No. Look at it like this: If I run at you at 10mph and stiff arm you in the face, it’s going to feel exactly the same as if I hold my arm out and you run face first in to it at 10mph.
All else being equal, the amount of force you experience is dependent on the amount of momentum transferred into or out of your body (or, head, in this case).
You also have to keep in mind that this is how much force either of them will experience during the impact. It’s unrelated to what each player does with their newly found/lost momentum. In the above example, if I hit you at 10mph, you’re likely to fall backwards. If you run into my hand at 10mph, I’m likely to fall over. But a force gauge would show the same number either way. If this is a helmet to helmet impact, the helmet isn’t going to care if was moving at 10mph until it suddenly wasn’t or if it wasn’t moving and now it’s going 10mph backwards.
There’s obviously going to be a lot of nuances so the answer isn’t going to be anywhere near this straight forward, but assuming spherical players in a vacuum, this should be a good general answer
OTOH, I haven’t been in physics classroom in over 2 decades, so there’s that, but I think this should be mostly correct, at least within the ‘perfect world’ of a physics lecture.
Well, not really, there is still usually one person who is clearly initiating contact and the other who is on the receiving end. Marion Barber and Roy Williams both liked to initiate and plow with their helmet into opponents’ heads, often unnecessarily so.
This is correct. Extra padding can help to an extent, but it cannot stop the whiplash which causes the brain to hit the skull. The whiplash is the cause of the brain injuries, not necessarily the hit to the head (or, it’s better to think in this framing).
To protect against brain injuries, you need to stabilize the neck to prevent the whiplash. I watch Indy car drivers slam into walls at 220mph and they rarely get a brain injury. The reason is less the helmet they wear, and much more how much their neck is stabilized. See here:
The neck doesn’t move at all when the impact occurs and prevents whiplash. Until you fix that, you’re going to have brain injuries in football regardless of the type of helmet.
Late: I don’t think you can fix it and still call it football. You need a mobile neck and head to look around to play football.
And yet, they are still trying to mitigate the problem by designing helmets with more padding. Surely, a shoulder-mounted helmet would work at least as well as a padded head-mounted helmet?
As far as reducing head injuries, I’d think a secured, shoulder-mounted helmet would probably be more effective. I would also expect that they would be hated by players, as a helmet that’s directly affixed to the shoulder pads would also probably seriously limit the player’s ability to turn their head, which would make playing the game more difficult for most positions – as, in order to look in a different direction, you would have to turn your entire body (or at least your upper body), rather than just turning your head.
The sort of set-up that auto racers now wear, AIUI, does really limit the ability to move the head.
