Magnets in Football helmets

Football is one of the most dangerous sports in the world with a high injury rate and dangerous situations for its players. Since it was made a professional sport it has gotten more and more safety precautions such as better helmets and better padding. But injuries, especially to the head, still happen. Most helmets consist of a hard plastic shell with thick padding on the inside, a face mask made of one or more plastic-coated metal bars, and a chinstrap. These helmets protect the head and cushion blows.

But these helmets still have room for improvement. Enter, magnets. If you don't know how magnets work, they produce a magnetic field around themselves and other magnetic things are either attracted to them or pushed away by them. The idea of putting magnets in helmets consists of lining the outermost shell of the helmet with magnets. These magnets, whenever they come into contact with other helmets, will repel each other, softening the blows.

On the field, football players can run at nearly 20 miles per hour and can experience up to 150 g’s of force upon impact. Concussions readily occur at impacts greater than 100 g’s. Every year there are 100,000 concussions at all levels of play among the nearly 1.2 million people who play football in the United States. The magnets have shown to repel each other with around 100 pounds of force. This can make the g forces almost nothing when they collide.