It's not marketing. It's science. What you train in matters.
Especially when we’re already so deliberate about everything else that affects performance.
We can optimise our sleep. Fine-tune our nutrition. Experiment with cold plunges and nasal breathing.
But unless we’re training at a playa nudista, we still have to wear clothes.
Which means what sits against our skin for an entire workout becomes part of the performance equation.
And when we’re already stressing our bodies, it makes very little sense to add unnecessary heat, friction and discomfort to said equation.
So it seems worth asking:
What are we actually training in?
Most activewear today is made from polyester, lycra or spandex. Plastic.
It’s durable, inexpensive and easy to manufacture.
But when the body is hot, moving and sweating, is it really the material we want wrapped around it?
Heat matters to performance.
The body is already working hard to keep cool.
Exercise produces heat. A lot of it.
As body temperature rises, blood flow to the skin increases and sweating ramps up as the body works to dissipate that heat, placing greater demand on the cardiovascular system.¹
And hotter conditions can have a measurable effect on performance.
In one study, trained cyclists completed a time trial in both cool and hot conditions. Before heat acclimatisation, their average power output was around 16% lower in the heat.²
Different environment, but an important point:
Managing heat matters when we’re asking the body to perform.
And clothing sits directly between the body and the outside world.
The fabric we train in influences how air, moisture and heat move through that layer.
Not all fabrics behave in the same way.
This is where bamboo gets interesting.
Research into bamboo knitted fabrics has examined properties including air permeability, water-vapour permeability, thermal conductivity and thermal resistance.³
Fabric construction matters too. Yarn, knit structure and density all influence how a garment behaves once we start moving and sweating.
Which is exactly why simply printing performance on a synthetic T-shirt doesn’t make it high performance.
At Airoc, we’ve spent years developing bamboo-based fabrics specifically for movement. Highly breathable, soft against the skin and engineered around the heat, sweat and friction that come with training.
Clothing doesn’t create performance.
But the less the body has to compensate, the better the conditions we give it to perform.
Less plastic. More intelligent performance.
1. Racinais, S., Périard, J. D., Karlsen, A., & Nybo, L. (2015). Effect of heat and heat acclimatization on cycling time trial performance and pacing. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 47(3), 601–606.
2. Prakash, C., Ramakrishnan, G., & Koushik, C. V. (2013). A study of the thermal properties of bamboo knitted fabrics. Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry.