So you’d like to be as comfortable as an Olympic speed skater when you tackle the ice rink at Millennium Park. Or as cool as Lance Armstrong after your 20-mile cycle along the lakefront. Or simply warm and dry after a hefty sprint to the bus on a frigid winter day.
No sweat.
A mind-boggling array of technologically souped-up clothing called performance wear promises to, among other things, battle sweat and keep you warm in the winter, cool in the summer and sweet smelling all year long. Used by professional and elite athletes for several years, such garments are winning over the casual athlete.
A heavyweight in the arena, Under Armour, says it more than doubled its sales last year, to more than $115 million from $50 million in 2002.
Under Armour’s dominance in the performance clothing line known as compression wear is being challenged by other sports apparel makers, including Nike and Reebok. Compression wear is a subspecies of performance clothing designed to fit the body snugly and, one manufacturer says, help “postpone muscle fatigue.” Nike rolled out its Pro Vent concept in its Pro Compression line at retail last fall, and Reebok introduced its NFL Equipment line roughly a year earlier, generating headlines such as: “Nike, Reebok and Under Armour Lock Horns in a Bid to Win the Compression Game.”
This doesn’t surprise Mike May, communications director for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA) in North Palm Beach, Fla. “Within the overall sports apparel market, the biggest area that we’re seeing improvement is in the performance sports apparel market,” he said.
According to the SGMA, a decent chunk of the almost $36 billion that consumers spent on sports apparel last year was for performance wear. Sales in that category tallied about $8 billion, as consumers bought everything from rain-repelling Gore-Tex jackets and warmth-trapping pants to high-performance underwear.
It’s the high-performance athletic underwear, the type that sits against the skin and is sometimes called a core or base layer, that has won over many athletes (weekend warriors included), thanks to constantly evolving fibers, fabrics and construction.
They are sleeker than Granddad’s waffle-weave long underwear, of course. Some have anti-microbial properties that fight odor. And, most important, newer fibers and fabrics wick perspiration–move it away from the body–for evaporation more efficiently than ever before.
Skipping cotton T-shirts
That’s why Scott Baumgartner, a 19-year-old freshman at Benedictine University in Lisle, rarely wears cotton T-shirts–which can get heavy with sweat during a workout–as a first layer. Performance wear “seemed to breathe better. It pulled the sweat away from your body.”
And in warm-weather workouts, “if there was a breeze, it would cause the shirt to get cold. If it was hot out, it would touch your body and cool you down,” he said.
Baumgartner, who played football at Benet Academy in Lisle and last fall at Benedictine, learned about Under Armour from his football-playing older brother Michael. He has worn Nike and Reebok items, compression and loose versions.
He wears Under Armour for workouts and for working outdoors in frigid temps in the family’s construction business. Then, of course, he layers it on with a flannel shirt, a sweat shirt and a jacket.
Craig Bradley, 29, general manager of the Holmes Place health club in Chicago, has been wearing Nike Dri-FIT tops for several years. He wears them for spinning, cross training and running in summer’s steamy temperatures.
“You feel a sensation of the perspiration moving away from the skin,” he said. “It does make a genuine difference in comfort in the same way that Gore-Tex does in its resistance against wind and rain.”
The reason so much attention is paid to managing a body’s moisture and temperature comes down to one word: comfort.
“Comfort is going to have a big impact on the body’s ability to perform either athletically or to keep someone mentally alert,” said Rebecca L. Davis, an associate professor in the fashion and textiles program at California State University at Los Angeles. “That’s why so much of the early research on comfort was done by the armed forces, because it came out of their research to keep soldiers functioning in extreme conditions.
Good for skiers
“Having a lot of moisture next to your body is uncomfortable, either in a hot situation or in a cold situation,” she said. “But it becomes especially important for active sports in cold environments like skiing.”
You work up a sweat coming down the slope, then stand in line or sit on a chair lift, she said, adding: “You’re damp and you can get chilled very quickly. It’s important to move that perspiration away from the body to the outer layers of the clothing where it can evaporate.”
How big is this matter of sweat? Later this year Russell Athletics, which has a Power Performance collection with Dri-Power and Stretch-Power items, will introduce Sweatless Sweats–sweat shirts and sweat pants that pull moisture away from your body.
Most manufacturers have developed systems to describe the benefits of their products, a mix of information and marketing and trademarked names (or technologies) that can sometimes get confusing.
The most widely available feature involves “moisture management” (a promise to help wick perspiration from the body) and includes Reebok’s Play Dry, Nike’s Dri-FIT and Hind’s DryLete.
Manufacturers may then categorize such garments according to environmental/climate conditions. For example, Under Armour calls its stuff “Gear”–HeatGear, ColdGear, AllSeasonGear.
Finally, there are compression and loose versions. Compression garments (think bicycle shorts) fit the body snugly and “postpone the muscle fatigue because your muscles aren’t bouncing around so much,” said Steve Battista, marketing manager at Baltimore-based Under Armour, which says it was the first to take the compression concept from shorts to tops.
Because not everyone was comfortable with that look, companies came up with looser versions.
“Most people wear [compression clothing] under their uniforms or pads if they’re playing on the field. You have to an exceptional body to wear it outside as one layer,” Battista said.
Confused? Blame rapidly changing technologies that tweak fibers and fabrics and construction into new products in a matter of months.
“It’s like flat screens. It’s like computers,” said Battista of Under Armour, which introduced 80 new items at a sporting goods industry trade show in Orlando last month. “The HeatGear shirt you bought a couple weeks ago is probably a different fabrication from the one you bought a year ago.”
Olympics’ impact
The idea for Nike’s Pro Vent concept for its Pro Compression line, with “zoned application of materials and technology,” came out of its Olympic program, particularly the 2002 speed skating suits that incorporated 13 materials in areas that needed to be more aerodynamic or breathable, according to Nate Tobecksen, spokesman for Nike of Beaverton, Ore.
“That concept is now translated to the everyday athlete, and that’s what you’re seeing in Pro Compression,” he said. “Different fabrics [are] used where you know the body tends to heat up or needs areas to cool down quicker.”
Tune in to today’s Super Bowl and you may see players sporting Reebok’s NFL Equipment clothing with its Play Dry technology.
“NFL Equipment at the pro level is the exact fabrications that we bring to the retail level,” said Chris Gallo, manager, NFL Equipment Performance Apparel at Reebok, based in Canton, Mass. “[It’s] what they train in, what they work out in and what they wear underneath their uniforms.”
Although the concept of performance apparel is not new–Gore-Tex started showing up as a moisture-managing fabric in the 1970s–many of the latest innovations have come about in the last 10 years when the technology became available and the clothing became increasingly popular, according to SGMA’s May.
It’s about the time, say textile experts, that manufacturers began tacking the word “performance” in front of fabrics and fibers to differentiate them from purely fashion items.
Which is why many casual athletes wear them.
“The demands of the weekend warrior are no different than the demands of a player for the Chicago Bulls. It just so happens, the basketball player for the Bulls plays the sport more often than the weekend warrior does,” May said. “But the demands [on the athlete] in many respects are no different. . . . They want comfort and they want to feel as if they can perform as well in the end as they do in the beginning.”
