Youth Hockey Shin Guards — Sizing Guide

How to Measure for Shin Guards

1. Put on hockey skates and lace them the way they'd actually be worn on the ice.
2. Sit on a chair or bench with feet flat on the floor and knees bent at roughly a 90-degree angle — the same position a skating stance puts the leg in.
3. Measure the distance from the top of the skate boot to the center of the kneecap.
4. Round that measurement up to the nearest inch — that's the starting shin guard size to try.

This knee-to-ankle measurement is the standard method retailers use, and it's worth doing with skates actually on: shin guards are sized to work with a specific boot height, not just leg length on its own.

Youth & Junior Sizing Chart

These are typical manufacturer size ranges — actual fit still varies by brand and by how a specific player is built, so treat this as a starting point to try on, not a guarantee.

Notice the height ranges overlap between sizes — a player at 4'6" could reasonably fit Youth 9" or Junior 10" depending on their own proportions. The knee-to-ankle measurement is the more reliable number; use height only as a rough cross-check. Height brackets also vary noticeably between retailers and manufacturers — a second source we checked maps similar pad sizes to different height ranges than the first — which is exactly why the measurement, not the height column, is the number worth trusting. See Sources below.

Fit Check

The one rule that matters more than any chart: neither the kneecap nor the ankle should be exposed. A gap at the top leaves the kneecap unprotected during a fall or collision; a gap at the bottom leaves the ankle area exposed to skate blades and pucks.

Some players wear the shin guard over the tongue of the skate boot, which generally calls for sizing up slightly; others tuck it under the tongue and can usually size down. Neither is wrong — it's a comfort and mobility preference — but it does shift which size in the chart above actually fits, so try the guard on with skates laced before deciding it's the wrong size.

Shin guards should also overlap correctly with hockey pants at the top — see our hockey pants sizing guide for the matching overlap check from the pants side.

How to Choose

• Measure knee-to-ankle with skates on rather than guessing from age or height alone — the chart above is a starting point, not a substitute for trying the pair on.
• Confirm neither the kneecap nor the ankle is exposed once the guard is on and the skate is laced — that's the real fit test, not the size label.
• Decide over-the-tongue vs. under-the-tongue preference first, since it shifts which size actually fits correctly.
• Expect to size up within a season or two for a growing player — shin guards don't have the adjustment range that pants or gloves sometimes do.

• HockeyMonkey — "Hockey Shin Guard Sizing Chart & Guide": the knee-to-ankle measurement method and the youth/junior sizing chart above.
• Ice Warehouse — "How to Size a Hockey Shin Guard": a second, independent sizing reference, used to cross-check the chart above.

Note on sourcing: both pages above were fetched and read directly, not just seen as search snippets. The two sources broadly agree on the measurement method and on pad size tracking roughly with the knee-to-ankle measurement in inches, which is why that number is presented as primary above. They do NOT agree closely on height brackets for a given pad size — Ice Warehouse's general (not youth/junior-specific) chart correlates similar pad sizes to noticeably shorter height ranges than HockeyMonkey's youth/junior chart. Rather than picking one arbitrarily or inventing a merged number, the height column above is kept as HockeyMonkey's youth/junior-specific figures and explicitly flagged, both here and in the Sizing Chart section, as the less reliable of the two numbers — use the knee-to-ankle measurement as the primary figure, and height only as a loose sanity check.