At what age should a boy begin wearing a groin cup? Whether your son is learning taekwondo at the age of 8 or 18 years, he needs a groin cup. Period. An unprotected groin is exposed to injury, whether it’s in martial arts, hockey, baseball, or any other sport. Irrespective of your kid’s age and size of testicles, any injuries to genitals can leave permanent damage.
As an athlete moves, the groin or pelvic cup must move with them, and stay where it needs to be. Male or female, the device must always be over the genitals. Always!
A survey of males under 30 showed that a large number of “debilitating testicle pain” injuries in sports were issues where the athletic cup had moved, was the wrong size, or for the wrong sport. But this is largely preventable.
There are many high-quality genital cups that are designed to correctly hold the protective device in place as you move. There is one cup that has a patented design where the straps/cords connect directly to the cup itself. This would tend to hold the cup in place more secure than a standard jockstrap, or cup-inserted compression short.
Cupping your genitals, where the term “cup” came from, is not really what a cup needs to do. Think about this… when a male takes a shot to the groin there are actually two impacts; the 1st is the hit to the cup, the 2nd is when the cup then hits your testicles. This 2nd hit is what athletes think, and worry about. Good product design can directly influence this.
Even if your school, coach, parent, or friends think wearing a cup is “uncool” or “unnecessary”... THEY are not the ones that feel the horrible pain when you get hit. In riskier sports like martial arts, jockey, lacrosse, baseball… not wearing a cup is simply a risk not worth taking.
Men and boys can suffer seriously, sometimes life-changing, injuries and protecting your genitals with a high-quality cup is, well…
Nearly all martial arts disciplines have strict rules about striking certain parts of the body. The neck and eyes, for example, are always off-limits, and certainly holds are outlawed also. But due to the location on the body, both men and women are at great risk of hits to the genitals. This is not only terribly painful, but it can cause serious injury also. While the vast majority of amateur and professionally trained MMA artists respect this and work to avoid it, accidents do happen. But accidents are not the only issue.
