We’re in the Middle of a Sports-Bra Revolution

(Photo: Petra Zeiler)

We’re in the Middle of a Sports-Bra Revolution

Published: Mar 5, 2020 Updated: Oct 28, 2022

Technological advances and a growing line of research have paved the way for a new class of support systems that are comfortable, look good, and fit a wide(r) variety of bodies.

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I’ve only known Helen Kenworthy for an hour when she asks me to take off my shirt. We’re in a small room with a mirror at the headquarters of Brooks Running in Seattle. Down the hall is��the shoe and apparel brand’s sports-bra design department, where well-lit work tables are piled with fabric cutouts, spools of zipper, and honeydew-size��plastic molds marked A cup,��B cup,��and so on.

Kenworthy, a senior bra developer for Brooks, wraps a measuring tape around my bust, then my rib cage, and tells me matter-of-factly that I have been wearing the wrong size bra��my entire life.

It’s not my fault. I—and, in fact, most women—don’t have the necessary information to shop correctly. Over the course of a month or even a day, Kenworthy explains, women’s chests can fluctuate by as much as a full cup or band measurement. Add in the fact that women’s breasts have unique compositions, each requiring slightly different forms of support, and you get a complex fit matrix that has to do with much more than a number and a letter. Sports bras are only just catching up to those realities.

“We’re retraining ourselves on how to develop, understand, and speak about fit preferences versus size,” she says. In other words, for Brooks and many other companies, the days of designing bras for support at the expense of comfort and then telling women to buy all their sports bras in one true size—even if that means they’re painfully tight—are over.

It’s more than a shift in mindset and sales tactics. I’d come to Seattle to get an up-close look at Dare, a collection of six sports bras��that launched in February and includes a crossback,��a racerback, a scoop-back, a high-neck, a zip-front, and a strappy model, all of which��run��from a 30A to a 40F. The new models look nothing like the sports bras that have defined its women’s line for decades.

Standby classics like the Juno, the Rebound Racer, and the Maia have distinctive features like Velcro shoulder straps, chunky back clasps, and contoured full-coverage cups. I had a strained relationship with those bras growing up. They were the only ones that worked for my 32D chest, but their bulky design made me feel ashamed of this part of my body,��apparently so outsize that��it��required metal and Velcro��or fabric up to my collarbones just to stay put.

The Dare styles retain that contoured shape, but everything else about them is entirely modern: laser-cut seamless edges, cups that are heat-molded to offer encapsulation—cupping each breast separately like your regular lingerie bra—without the need for underwire or extra stitching. They look good. And, as Kenworthy explains, they’re also far more comfortable without sacrificing support.

Brooks isn’t alone. Brands like Lululemon, Nike, and Reebok have all begun to revamp their offerings. For the first time, companies are investing in research and development to understand how breasts really move and how women want their sports bras to feel.

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Anyone with breasts will tell you that sports bras aren’t totally comfortable. This is��something ��ԹϺ�� has reported on numerous times over the years. For some, the problem is chafing. For others, it’s compression that’s so overkill, it hurts or restricts your ability to breathe. Still others have trouble finding options that fit both their chest and their rib cage without being too tight or loose in one place or another. Then there’s the issue of getting them on and off, which can often feel like yet another strenuous part of a workout.

In January 2019, 632 women responded to an ��ԹϺ�� reader survey about sports bras. Of those women, who ranged in size from AA to I cups and 32 to 48 bands, 61 percent said they were unhappy with the high-impact sports bras available to them (40 percent said the same of low-impact options). The most common refrains:��discomfort and a lack of aesthetics.

People without boobs might find this surprising, since the whole point of a sports bra is to make breasts feel less painful during activity. But it all starts to make sense when you consider that the modern-day sports bra was initially designed with the exclusive goal of minimizing breast movement.��

In 1977, Lisa Lindahl, Polly Smith, and Hinda Miller brought the Jogbra to the world. The garment—which was originally two jockstraps sewn together—used compression to pull breasts close to the chest��so they’d move less during sports like running. “It was not attractive at all,” says Lindahl. “But I didn’t care! And the women who were buying it didn’t care. The point was that, all of a sudden, I wasn’t having to pull up my bra straps, and I wasn’t getting horrible comments when I ran down the street.”

Other women felt the same way—and not just runners. Within a decade, the Jogbra company had expanded its line to include a bra designed for women with smaller chests and those who did sports that involved less jumping and jiggling, like hiking. Then came a Jogbra for large-chested women that supported via encapsulation as opposed to only compression.

The company defined each bra by how much or how little it did for breast movement, using something called the Motion Control Requirements Chart. The��company’s founders also coined three new terms: low impact, medium impact, and high impact. A low-impact��bra was for activities like walking, while a high-impact��bra was for sports like running or tennis. Whether a bra was low impact or high impact also depended on the size of your breasts.

As sports bras took off in popularity and more companies started making them, that singular focus on motion control stuck—especially for high-impact bras and those for big chests. This was largely because breasts are a uniquely difficult body part to design for. They’re essentially sacks of fat and connective tissue that move independently from the rest of the body, with no muscle or bone to halt motion. “It’s passive tissue that’s on the body,”��says Chantelle Murnaghan, director of Whitespace, Lululemon’s in-house product-testing lab. “It presents a really great engineering problem.” So sports-bra designers focused on controlling this most unruly body part—often at the expense of user experience. This usually involved adding more layers or hardware like underwire, says Barbara Ebersberger, vice president of apparel at Reebok. “This made the bra heavier and more uncomfortable,” she says.

Most designers thought of discomfort as a natural side effect of wearing your sports bra correctly. “We would try to figure out how to put another feature in there, another layer of stabilizer to make it more supportive,” says Julianne Ruckman, Brooks’s senior product-line manager for women’s apparel. And when it came to matching customers with the right size, “we used to fit bras by cranking [the measuring tape] as tight as possible without breaking a rib.”

Of course, sports bras are also tied up in the fraught cultural symbolism that surrounds women’s bodies. “Historically, women’s breasts were seen as a sign of inferiority, as yet another reason why [women] were ill-suited for sport,” says Jaime Schultz, professor of kinesiology at the University of Pennsylvania. “There was an article at the turn of the [19th] century in The New York Times about why women made lousy swimmers. One of the reasons, the author argued, was because they have breasts where men have pectoral muscles.” In 1995, the that golf commentator Ben Wright said that “women are handicapped by having boobs” because breasts get in the way of their swing. Breasts—and, thus, sports bras—are also a sign of sexuality. The result is a whole lot of shame (whether your breasts are too small or too big) wrapped into a relatively small piece of clothing. It’s no wonder that many women look to sports bras as a means of strapping down their chests as tightly as possible.

To be clear, there have been comfortable sports bras out there for a long time. Most of them—at least until recently—just weren’t high impact. “There was this paradigm that existed,” says Lululemon’s Murnaghan. “You could have a bra that performed extremely well but was very rigid and uncomfortable, or you could have a bra that was very comfortable but then you sacrificed performance.”

Recently, things have begun to improve. In 2017, when ��ԹϺ�� reported on the sorry state of the sports-bra industry, companies were talking about new technologies, fabrics, and manufacturing techniques that would change��the game. Within months of that story, the technologies began to show up in actual products.

First Lululemon launched the Enlite bra, becoming��one of the initial��major athletic brands to break the comfort-versus-support paradigm. The bra debuted��in 20 sizes, from 32 to 38 bands��and up to an E cup. Despite featuring four straps, a back clasp, and maximum coverage—and the support that comes with all of that—the Enlite is sleek and unobtrusive. Perhaps most notably, it maintains the wearer’s natural curves rather than smashing them down like most high-impact bras. This is thanks largely to a nylon-Lycra-blend fabric that is lightweight and stretchy yet has the heft of something thicker��and is heat moldable, which translates to a higher degree of support and bounce reduction without the need for overbuilt construction. The bra earned on the internet from women who wear C, D, and DD cups.

That same year, Nike launched the , a pullover racerback constructed with 3-D-knit technology that the brand originally developed for running shoes. The Fe/Nom is constructed from two single-layer panels into one piece��by machines that can vary the thickness and stretchiness of the material as they go. This means it’s virtually seam-free and has compression only where needed, allowing the chest to move and breathe with less restriction.

In 2018, Reebok launched the ��racerback, which uses sheer thickening fluid (STF), a chemical application originally used by the military and NASA��that is pliant at rest but stiffens under impact. The PureMove becomes highly supportive (though still moderately flexible) for activities like running��but softens so it’s less constrictive when the wearer is just standing around or running errands.

When it came time to design its Dare bras, Brooks had to retrain its designers, says Ruckman. In a notable in-house experiment, Brooks gave money to a handful of employees to buy whatever running bra they wanted from any brand, then conducted tests with these bras followed by a Brooks bra. Overwhelmingly, the bras that employees chose were less supportive than the Brooks styles, but the women liked them more. The company learned that some women “actually prefer to run in a style that is less supportive,” says Ruckman. For many of Brooks’s sports-bra designers, this was a revelation. “Their education tells them to say, ‘I can do that more supportively,’” she says. “And I said, ‘But how can you do that more comfortably?’”

Most of Brooks’s classic high-impact bras reduce between 65 to 75 percent of breast motion. In building the Dare line, Ruckman told designers to stay within 50 to 70 percent of motion reduction. That range hits a sweet spot that’s supportive enough to handle the uncomfortable, annoying, and physically damaging side effects of breast motion��without going overboard to the point of discomfort. Anything much higher, she says, is “doing a disservice to the runner.”

Dialing back support also allowed designers to eliminate excess features. Strips of fabric reinforcement around the underarm, formerly a fixture on many Brooks standbys, are gone on the Dare bras, replaced by clean, seamless, laser-cut edges that reduce chafing and improve comfort by allowing the bra to flex instead of dig in. Low-profile metal shoulder-strap sliders, like the ones on traditional lingerie bras, are replacing the old Velcro adjustors. The cups are all heat-molded—a manufacturing technique that bonds multiple fabrics together without sewing—into shapes that mimic the body’s natural curves.

Paradigm shifts and better manufacturing alone aren’t responsible for today’s modern sports bra, though. Growing research about breasts is fueling the change. “Breasts and bras were always quite a taboo subject, whereas now I think cultural changes have occurred, and they are spoken about more openly,” says Brogan Horler, head of product testing at the . Horler’s��team at the university is a world leader in breast biomechanics research��and consults with many top sports-bra makers globally, including Brooks. Another group,�� in Australia, now also specializes in studying how to minimize breast pain through bras.

Thanks to research from organizations like these, as well as extensive lab studies done internally by sports-bra makers, we know that the majority of support comes from a bra’s band, not the straps, and that breasts don’t just move up and down. “They move up and down, side to side, and in and out,” says Lululemon’s Murnaghan. “It’s the acceleration, or how fast the breast is moving through that motion, that is most critical to create a solution around.”

Companies are also finally taking advantage of information we’ve had for decades. For example: not all breasts need the same kind of support. Some breasts have more fatty tissue, while others are primarily made up of connective and glandular tissue. (The former is squishier, while the latter is denser.) How these different compositions impact the way a breast moves is the subject of ongoing research. “We do not yet know what impact different breast compositions have on breast biomechanics,” says Jenny Burbage, a biomechanics expert with the Portsmouth breast-health research group. The team she works on is researching the subject.

One thing has become clear: your breast composition probably impacts the kind of sports bra that you’ll find most comfortable. According to Ruckman, someone with more fibrous tissue is likely to appreciate an encapsulation-style bra that lifts and separates the breasts. “That breast tissue is not moldable,” says Ruckman. “It’s harder, denser. If you try to smash that down, that’s uncomfortable. You want to lift and complement it by putting a shell over it.” Meanwhile, women with fattier breasts are likely to prefer compression-style bras. That’s because fat is pliant—more squishable—and also jiggles more. “[Those kinds of women] want compression,” says Ruckman. “If you try to lift a fattier tissue, there will still be motion. If you compress it, it stops that motion.” (The onl

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We’re in the Middle of a Sports-Bra Revolution

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