With international concern around sporting injuries (particularly concussion), consumer demands for high performance, and a low barrier to entry in terms of standardisation, the sporting goods market is an early adopter of new technologies. Mechanical metamaterials – engineered structures with combinations of properties that can’t be achieved in their unstructured constituent materials – are being tailored to replace conventional materials used in protective equipment. They can be adapted to various impact conditions, body types, and user requirements (e.g., performance, comfort). The talk will focus on the challenge of designing and producing such adaptive or tailored systems, featuring a combination of experimental and theoretical dynamics and contact mechanics to define external loading, and micro-mechanics to specify required metamaterial geometries.