Well Well Well is Seattle Met’s regular health and wellness column, covering the sometimes surprising ways we can support our physical, emotional, social, and environmental well-being.

The moment I stepped into the shower after completing my first marathon should have been blissful. Instead, it was agony.

The water droplets felt like tiny knives as they quickly alerted me to the fact that I no longer had skin around my ribcage. Despite spending hours doing research on the best running bra, dropping a pretty penny to buy it, and carefully taping and Body Gliding myself, the chafing had taken its toll over 26.2 miles.

I’ve played sports my whole life, so sports bras have long been a crucial element of being able to work out. Unfortunately, I’ve never found one I truly loved. With a small band size and a large cup size, I’m outside the range of what most stores carry. I’ve mostly split the difference over the years, bought a medium, and stuffed myself inside, figuring something was better than nothing.

And something is better than nothing, although that’s a low bar. Until adolescence, girls and boys participate in sports at approximately equal levels. But once puberty begins, girls start dropping out at a rate twice that of boys. One of the major reasons? Issues with sports bras.

A Journal of Adolescent Health study of girls ages 11 to 18 found that 73 percent had at least one breast-specific concern when it came to sports, with breast bounce being the most common. At least one in four girls doesn’t have access to the sports bra she needs.

Seattle-based women’s running apparel brand Oiselle saw this research and wanted to do something to help. In 2017, they started a program called Bras for Girls that matched girls who were training for running a race with some of their its inventory. They hardly advertised, yet in the first year alone, they received requests for 68,000 bras.

“It became very apparent that this is actually a huge issue and an unmet need,” says Sarah Lesko, executive director of Bras for Girls. “It’s not a one-brand type of problem or cause, but more of a global village thing.”

Bras for Girls then spun off from its founding company, becoming a stand-alone nonprofit in 2021. The organization now works with more than 25 different brands that donate sports bras and let them purchase inventory at cost. They’ve distributed 80,000-plus bras over the life of the program and are on track to distribute more than 150,000 this year alone. With each bra comes a breast development booklet that gives girls, parents, and coaches the words to talk about body changes and breast development. It’s gotten rave reviews from those who receive it. “It’s almost as impactful as the sports bras themselves,” says Lesko, a family doctor by training with a master’s in public health.

Keeping kids in sports is important for a plethora of reasons. In addition to setting them up to be more active throughout their lifetimes, it has effects on mental health, teamwork, leadership, school performance, life satisfaction, and even future careers.

“We want every girl to think she has a place in sports, and equipment can make such a big difference in feeling like sports are for them,” Lesko says. “In all the outreach that we’ve done, even very early on, you can see what a huge impact it’s making. Especially for girls developing breasts earlier than their peers or who are larger than their peers, the changes are really dramatic. That’s what keeps me doing it.”

The need for supportive undergarments is not a problem that vanishes in adulthood, unfortunately. As I’ve discovered—along with virtually all other women above a certain cup size who participate in high-impact fitness activities—a good sports bra can make or break your workout. And finding one isn’t easy. 

“There are a lot of different levels of support, a lot of different needs for people with varying levels of breast tissue, and not a lot of places to go and get sized properly,” says Jasmine Leidich, an associate women’s designer with Seattle-based Brooks Running.

Breasts don’t have good internal support, so physical activity causes them to move independently. Part of the problem is that they don’t just move up and down or side to side—they move in different ways, depending on your anatomy and choice of activity, but often in a butterfly-like pattern. The bigger your chest, the more pronounced the movement. Up to 72 percent of exercising women experience pain as a result.

While this certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, it is one that hasn’t been studied much. The first sports bra didn’t even debut until the 1970s. “Women’s sports and bodies in general are never on the forefront of researchers’ minds,” Leidich says.

When Brooks is creating a new bra, they’ll typically work on it for three years before they’re ready to launch it. It starts with a need or a problem they’re trying to solve, whether creating a bra from scratch or updating an older version. They host a number of focus groups, and the engineering team works with a third-party facility in the UK to test its designs. They’ll test a few iterations, perhaps with different fabrics or adjustability features, collecting data and opinions along the way.

“The best feedback is that they don’t notice it,” Leidich says. “Every runner who’s run in a sports bra knows how painful it can be—it can affect your stride, cause chafing, and can impact your run and your mentality. Distraction-free is key.”

All the retail associates at Brooks Trailhead in Fremont are trained in properly fitting a sports bra, and Lesko likes The Pencil Test in Renton for those who wear a D cup or larger.

It’s worth finding the right fit, as recent research shows that a poor-fitting sports bra can lead to inefficient running technique, shorter strides, changes in breathing frequency that make you fatigue faster, and increased risk of leg injury from landing more heavily on the ground. Not to mention a bad bra can make us feel embarrassed, the same issue we deal with as kids.

Getting that right fit younger may just be what we need to keep girls in sports—and convince companies to put more resources into women’s athletic needs across their lifespan.