My mum told me back in 2019 that not wearing a sports bra to the gym will mean my breasts “end up round your ankles by fifty.” Something she said in that way that she says most things; halfway through stacking the dishwasher, full of unshakeable knowledge, no space for questions. I believed her. For four years. Then I looked into where that idea came from and wow, do I have some words for you.
Because the first thing I learned when starting down this particular hole was sitting in the changing rooms at my local gym in Leeds with my friend Priya. We’d both just finished spin, were now halfway through wrestling with our bras before going home and I’ll never forget her saying to me, entirely seriously: “you know none of this actually stops sagging right, it just stops it hurting today.” And I laughed because I thought she was having a joke.
She wasn’t. Girl was, annoyingly, correct.
The myth is doing a job the science was never asked to do
Let’s back up a second though, because what I found when I finally sat down and looked at the science rather than absorbed gym common wisdom through metaphorical osmosis was that there is not one single published study that concluded sports bras, or a lack thereof cause long term sagging. None. Zip. The researcher who’s work comes closest to touching on the subject is a French biomechanics guy called Jean Denis Rouillon who ran a study spanning 15 years about bra wearing and breast support, but even he’s mostly cited as arguing AGAINST the idea that bras prevent sagging, not that going without a sports bra causes it. It’s not the evil evil genesis story it’s been made out to be.
Breast tissue doesn’t actually become permanently “droopier” from not wearing a sports bra. Gravity is real and does cause boobs to get “lower” as you get older but that’sdifferent.There are a million things that actually do cause that change in shape and position over years. Genetics are probably most of it before you’ve even picked out your first bra. Pregnancy and breastfeeding alone stretch skin and the network of ligaments called Cooper’s Ligaments that breasts are attached to, in ways that aren’t actually reversible depending on how old you are when you have children. Then there’s normal ageing, loss of collagen and elastin fibers, weight gain or loss (which also stretch skin tissue), smoking. Sports bras aren’t on any of those lists and yet have somehow managed to become the thing everyone blames. My theory here is that it’s the one preventative measure we can actually control so we lash out at that instead, which actually feels like the real story at play here far more than any anatomy lesson.
My friend Delphine is a physio. She’s also Dutch so my trauma posting about this on the U.K buddies Whatsapp and she was the only person I trusted to fact check responded with “OH HAYLEY” so she also gets to tell me when I’m dumb which means she’s basically the one person in my life whose opinion on this matters and will correct me. Here’s how she explained it to me when we met up to chat about it over lunch(her portion because she refused mine because we were debating so much): “Look the movement whilst you’re exercising is what damages/connects/stretch whatever, sagging isn’t caused by not wearing a sports bra, it’s caused by the movement when you’re not wearing one.” Basically the thing people are concerned about; breast tissue moving up and down and damaging/connecting/stretching whatever bits it’s attached to over years of movement without support, is absolutely a valid, scientifically understandable worry. But it’s about high impact movement OVER TIME without support, not whether or not you forgot your bra today and went for a half hour stroll to the park. And that’s when your boobs hit Aunt Flo, NOT from missing one workout. The nuance was lost somewhere along the way of “supportive underwire helps keep movement to a minimum when exercising” becoming “if you forget your sports bra once you’ll wake up to find them around your knees” and that space in the middle is where all of gym changing room trauma lives.
Fun fact I looked at how many sports bras I own at one point. Eleven. ELEVEN sports bras. For a person that runs maybe twice a month and does like, one pilates class during a good week? Too many. I only knew I owned that many when I was writing this and had to dig through an entire drawer to find the one I wanted to link to in this piece. They’re apparently sorted by MY LIFE IS KINDA SCARING ME level of anxiety over this subject. Thoughts I didn’t know I had about it until that moment.
What the actual mechanism is, and why “just wear one always” isn’t really the honest answer either
Ok so if wearing one doesn’t magically halt sagging what is it actually doing. Bear with me because this is where I think brands (and therefore women) have gotten this wrong in the opposite direction too. Because yes, since Rouillon’s research came out you’ll find loads of trainers/articles telling you support doesn’t matter at all. It sort of does, just not in the scary scarred off forever way we’ve been led to believe.
Breasts themselves have no muscular structure. They’re a combination of fat, glandular stuff and of course those aforementioned Cooper’s Ligaments suspended by skin and tissue with basically no internal support of their own. When you run, jump, essentially DO ANYTHING WHERE YOUR BODY IS MOVING UP AND DOWN REPEATEDLY without support your breasts bounce independently from your core sometimes by several centimetres per step according to one study out of Portsmouth University which has been doing breast biomechanics research for DECADES. That strain on the connective tissue laces over thousands of steps, years of jogging/running without support is what actually causes the sag people are worried about, not just forgetting your sports bra one day and being traumatic over it for the next two decades. Trust.
Does that movement reduction from wearing a bra over those years actually have a meaningful effect on that long term sag prediction versus not bothering with one though? Honestly I don’t think we know there’s not enough data on women who’ve worked out for YEARS without one to say for certain either way. What we DO know is it’s more comfortable, and quite frankly I think that’s enough.
If you’ve never run or otherwise worked out without support in a D cup or above I cannot explain to you how much it actually hurts. Like physically pound into your ribcage and make you consider giving up halfway through hurts. It did me on a regretful 5k I did once in Sheffield in 20something. That alone is plenty of reason to wear one. No sag myth needs to be leveraged here at all to justify throwing one on. Comfort is reason enough.
My colleague Astrid is training for marathons right now. Actual ones. When I asked her why she wore one “Oh I wear one because bouncing around for four hours is miserable AF, not because I’m worried about the repercussions of not wearing one.” Do yourself a favour and listen to her. She’s not wrong, wearing one doesn’t prevent boobs from doing what they will over time. She also doesn’t just not wear one and deal with it, because that’s not how wearing a damn sports bra works. You can do both. Care about the comfort it provides and also remember that sag story is total poppycock at the same time. It’s not complicated.
Where that particular sports bra boogeyman DOES impact things though, and this is what legitimately had my tits pinteresting through study after study once I got started, is in the advice women are given when they DO start to sag due to totally normal stuff. Pregnancy changes the way women’s bodies hang in obvious ways, we then get told that wearing a supportive bra during that recovery process will “stop” those changes when actually none of it can be “stopped” regardless of what you do during recovery. That’s not a hill to die on my fellow fatties, that’s cruel and mostly untrue. Saying that to someone is letting a decades worth of mis read google searches override basic human decency. Nobody’s asking you to debate the science over coffee, they’re just looking for a solution you’re telling them doesn’t exist.
So what do I actually wear now I’ve had all these epiphanies
Sports bra? Yes. Still. To the gym. I want to be clear on that; I didn’t just discover they were a myth and now I’m power jogging every Monday morning without one for the lols. I wear one because it’s comfortable, because chafing your ribcage down to your boobs isn’t and also because there is literally something to the movement limiting theory even if it isn’t the apocalyptic story I once thought.
Where what I wear and how I think about tossing one on has changed? That’s all gone to brands I can trust based on their under wearing research instead of “support technology” whispered promises. Fact versus marketing speak. Compression vs encapsulated(basically a built in cup) styles and STOPPING myself from trying to wear the smallest size “for extra support” which is actual TORTURE trust me on this one I did it for YEARS. Women who haven’t worn a sports bra a size too small for an entire spin class are literally laughing at me right now over this bit but fuck it they can suck it.
There’s definitely a lesson in all of this, itching to get out I know because I kept circling back to it in my notes when researching this. The sports bra panic was applied to a specific product by a worry that has almost nothing to do with sports bras.
Change. Our bodies change, often for reasons we can’t control. Instead of accepting that or explaining puberty or pregnancy honestly we vilify a piece of clothing because it can’t actually prevent a totally natural process from happening. Eat the damn salad if you’re worried about weight, take care of yourself during pregnancy and stop treating sports bras like magic garments that can solve everything women are worried about because they absolutely can’t. Wear one. They’re comfy and stop you bouncing around while you work out which can literally hurt if you don’t. But please, for the love of all that is holy, stop worrying that because you forgot one one day you’ll suddenly turn 50 and find them around your ankles. You won’t.
that, I can promise you.
