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End the painful bouncing and too-tight feeling once and for all with the newest generation of sports bras.
Bras have come a long way from the cloth and leather supports women used to bind their breasts in ancient Rome. But shockingly, it wasn’t until 1977 when the first “modern” sports bra was invented by Lisa Lindahl and Polly Smith. Known as the Jockbra, and later rebranded as the Jogbra, it was fashioned out of two jockstraps sewn together. Certainly, there was room for improvement—but it served as a crucial starting point.
Now, more than 40 years later we’re finally seeing major strides in the advancement of the category, partly because of the staying power of the athleisure trend and the rise of fitness culture, which has become ingrained in much of our daily lives. “Today, sports bras now account for roughly 40 percent of the bras a woman owns—in short, it’s become a big business,” says Joanna Griffiths, founder of Knix, the Canadian-born undergarments (and sports bra) brand, which has seen major success both here and beyond our borders. And the second reason she cites for the evolution? Knowledge. “We only recently began to understand the way that breasts move, which is not up and down like one might expect, but rather in a figure-eight motion,” says Griffiths, who worked with three different university testing partners to study chafing and bounce rate reduction when creating Knix’s acclaimed Catalyst bra. Thanks to its performance-moulded cups that keep breasts lifted, separated and supported, Catalyst has outperformed more than 800 bras in third-party testing.