Enhancing performance with breathable sportswear

In several cases, more than a garment's appearance, the properties are the vital factors that make it popular. The workplace norms make it compulsory for some to wear special safety garments, nevertheless, when it comes to sports, the garment choices that sportspersons make directly affect performance. The ease and comfort of the clothing are linked to performance. Consequently, ensuring that sportswear has certain properties is quite palpably beneficial. The most basic property that sportswear must have is breathability. Here, breathability denotes the ability of the garments to transfer the moist vapor through the pores of the garments. Breathable sports garments ensure rapid moisture vapor transmission through garments, thus making any physically strenuous activity comfortable.

The term breathable implies that the fabric is actively ventilated. Breathable fabrics are all about Moisture Vapor Transmission Rate (MVTR), which is the measure of how quickly or slowly moisture passes through a fabric or other substance. MVTR is measured in g/m/day, or the mass of moisture that passes through a square meter of fabric in a day.

Sportswear combines multilayered fabric. The inner layer fabric is capable of whisking away the moist vapor and perspiration from the skin to the outer layer. This process keeps the garment dry, with moisture only on the outer layers. When the objective of sportswear is breathability along with keeping the body warm, the inner cover is usually a microfleece, which is a soft and napped synthetic wool material, usually made from polyester. This keeps the body warm, and in countries where the mercury levels drop drastically, like in European countries, the need for such clothing is important. The players need garments having multilayers as a defense against extremely cold weather. This layer ensures insulation in the body and lets the body breathe by letting perspiration pass through the fleece to the outer layer. As a result, the wearer remains safe from extreme cold conditions and also the excess moisture released by the body. The outer layer of the sports garment must allow sweat molecules to exit through the garment while keeping the wind out.

Moisture can pass through a fabric either by ventilation and solid-state diffusion. For ventilation, a porous fabric is used, as it ensures that air passes directly through it. The air may carry moisture in the form of vapor. In solid-state diffusion, some non-porous fabrics permit the transmission of moisture. In other words, the type of fabric used in manufacturing breathable sportswear is also equally important. There is a school of thought that believes that in getting rid of the perspiration, the basic attribute of the fiber to absorb the moisture plays an important role. Thus, those who support this school of thought believe that cotton or viscose is a necessary element for sportswear. While there is another theory that says that fibers in breathable garments should not absorb moisture so that moisture or perspiration is guided away from the skin to outer layers of clothing from where it can evaporate. As per this theory, synthetics must be the preferred choice in the clothing of active sports as synthetics do not hold moisture, and thus the garments weigh lighter even after the release of excess sweat. Also, fast drying is a must-have trait that breathable sportswear must have, following which, today, modern textile materials use the basic idea of capillary action.