This month, many of us are revamping our fitness goals.
If you’re hitting the gym anew, you’ll want your sports bra to keep up. This is not a one-size-fits-all occasion — depending on your body and your activities, you’ll want to find the right sports bra for you. We spoke to Lori Kaplan, aka The Fairy Bra Mother, CEO and founder of New York’s Bra Tenders lingerie store, to learn what’s necessary for your most successful sports bra yet.
What’s Your Size?
It seems easy, but women really have a lot of trouble choosing the right bra because they haven’t been properly measured for one. “Women really should have a bra fitting once a year to determine what their proper size is,” Kaplan says. What’s good, though, is that once you know your size, you’re good to go. “Your bra size is your bra size, and that translates across any kind of bra,” she explains.
What’s Your Construction?
“Sports bras work [in] two different ways. One is by compression, which is by holding the breasts flat against the chest wall, and the other is by encapsulation, which means that each breast is individually contained in separate cups,” Kaplan says. “Most of the sport bras that are for smaller-busted woman, A, B, C, are compression. And most of those do not have individual cups. For D cup women and bigger, you want to look for something that’s going to control the bounce, minimize the bounce — so encapsulation and compression in a bra do that.” Kaplan also recommends thicker straps for everyone because thin straps just can’t protect in the same way.
What’s Your Workout?
“A sports bra is designed to protect you so that the ligaments in the breasts don’t get injured,” Kaplan says. Depending on your exercise, you’ll want different kinds of bras. “If you do more high-impact activities, you need a bra with better motion control,” Kaplan says. “If you’re doing yoga, you don’t need something that’s controlling the bounce, because you’re really not bouncing … you just need something that keeps the breasts in place and out of the way. If you’re doing racquet sports or anything like that, where you’re moving your arms a lot, you don’t want to be bumping into your boobs while you’re doing that,” she laughs.