Why Are Sports Bras So Terrible?

The first thing to know about sports and breasts is this: women have always participated in athletics, bra or no bra. In ancient Rome, women bound their breasts with cloth and leather. Pottery and mosaics from the fourth and fifth centuries show female athletes wearing bikini-like uniforms.

In the Victorian era, women turned to corsets to keep their breasts from moving too much. Those competing at Wimbledon in 1887 returned to their dressing rooms in between matches to "unhitch their bloody corsets," having been "repeatedly stabbed by the metal and whale bone stays of the cumbersome garments" as they played.

By 1911, women got a "sports corset" with flexible material, and thanks to the 1914 tango craze, someone even invented a dancing corset. But it wasn't until the 1920s that bras started to replace corsets in the United States, and while brassieres designed for athletic purposes were patented as early as 1906, they simply never caught on.

Finally, in 1977 — the same year Victoria's Secret was founded — the sports bra as we know it was invented by Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith, with the help of designer and runner Hinda Miller. That first sports bra was simply two jockstraps sewn together. It wasn't just that jockstraps were the right size, they were also the right idea. "We said, what we really need to do is what men have been doing: pull everything close to the body," Miller later told researchers. They called this new bra the Jockbra, but quickly changed it to Jogbra after store owners in South Carolina deemed the name offensive.

During its first year on the market, Jogbra moved 25,000 units. Two decades later, in 1998, the sports bra industry sold $412 million worth of product. A 2002 study estimated that sports bras accounted for about 6 percent of the then-$4.5 billion bra market. Today, the bra market is worth about $15 billion. Factor in that female participation in sports is increasing every year and athleisure appears to be here to stay, and it's no wonder that from Lululemon to Under Armour to Victoria's Secret, brands are turning their attention to sports bras.But researchers are still a long way from understanding exactly how breasts move during exercise. Standing in the way of designing the best sports bra possible is millennia of stigma, powerful marketing forces, and good old-fashioned physics.

---

Breasts have no muscle. They sit on top of the pectoral muscles, but breasts themselves are all fat and glands and connective tissue. They're held to the chest by something called Cooper's ligaments, though those ligaments aren't designed to reduce movement. As one study puts it, "the skin appears to provide most of the support for the breast in regards to limiting breast movement."

That is to say that there is nothing biological working to stop breasts from moving. Without any such built-in support, as any person with breasts can attest, they bounce up and down freely, which can cause a fair bit of discomfort. When surveyed, between 40 and 60 percent of women report breast pain associated with physical activity. That pain makes women less likely to exercise, and among those who do, hurts their performance.

Understanding the biomechanics of bouncing is key to understanding how to make it stop, but it's a field that's only recently gained traction. And since breast size, placement, and density are different for every woman, researchers need to look at a large sample to get a good idea of what's going on.

Understanding the biomechanics of bouncing is key to understanding how to make it stop, but it's a field that's only recently gained traction.

Even two people with the same sized breasts might have different breast composition; put them in the same bra, and one might be in heaven while the other can barely breathe. "There are so many factors going on, it's hard to pin down that it's the bra," says Jenny White, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth who studies breast motion.

White's research aims to better understand how breasts move, and what that means for the people who have them. When volunteers come into her lab, she has them do a variety of physical activities in a variety of bras (and without one), and asks them to report how each activity and fit feels. She also uses a sophisticated motion capture system, placing reflective markers on the bra.

Recruiting for this kind of study can be hard, White says, but she came up with a clever strategy. In 2013, her team targeted female runners in the London Marathon: "At registration, we tried to accost as many of them as possible. We got about 1,300 people and we were able to understand that population."

It's one thing to be able to see a woman run in a bra in a lab. It's another to see what they experience after 26.2 miles. Over the course of a marathon, White says, "you might start seeing changes in the patterns of their running. You're probably going to see a decrease in stride levels. You're just not performing as well as you could."

On the other side of the world, at the University of Wollongong in Australia, Julie Steele does similar research. Women who sign up for Steele's studies come in and are all given the same standard issue, commercially-available bra. This lets the team compare how women fit themselves, how they're fitted by experts, and how they fill out and move in the control bra.