Reebok Pure Move review

There have been few meaningful technological advances in sports bras since Champion released the first one in 1978. Reebok’s Pure Move bra is a technical piece of gear that uses advanced materials creatively incorporated to solve the biggest sports bra challenge: how to provide support for a variety of activities without being so tight the wearer can’t breathe.

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Reebok’s answer was to use a material similar to D30, popular in mountain bike protective gear, in the cups. In kneepads and elbow pads, D30 feels like almost nothing—a thin, flexible gel layer. But fall off the bike and land on your knee or elbow, and the material hardens on impact to protect you from the rocky ground. In bra cups, the material functions similarly, hardening imperceptibly with each bounce for surprising support with a very different quality than other bras.

The Pure Move has a V-shaped scoop neck, but it’s still full coverage. It’s contoured in the front, but not so low-cut that you’ll fall out when riding, stretching, or doing deadlifts. The cups have material under and over the gel layer, while the straps and back of the bra are a single, stretchy soft layer of a burly synthetic that even in a year of wearing hasn’t lost its elasticity.

While the bra isn’t “seamless,” it has few seams, with the thick-ribbed elastic baseband sewn straight to the cups for superb support. In the front, flatlock stitching parallels the shape of the cups to add a subtle design detail that makes this bra pretty even though it’s simple. This bra does, however, have a high uni-boob tendency.

The Pure Move has laser cutouts between the cups, as well as in the racerback, to help move moisture. This bra didn’t dry quite as quickly as some others. But when we were deep in activity we never felt wet. It also has more compression than other bras we love. Compression isn’t always necessary or comfortable for cyclists, but compression in this bra worked. On the bike, testers weren’t thinking about their bras. And, while we didn’t want to leave it on all day after riding, and it’s surely not casual wear, we weren’t ripping it off the moment we finished a ride.

This bra got exponentially more testing hours than the others—we’ve been wearing it for a year. Since we received it, testers wore this bra for day-after-day epic rides, and one tester wore a single bra for a two-week gravel tour. The straps sometimes rolled when we wore this bra multiple days without washing, though they were easy to straighten out and usually stayed put after a correction. As the bra ages, the cups become inclined to fold under at the band unless you keep the band pulled down, and when we put the year-old bra next to a new one of the same style, it’s clear that the old one, which has more than 150 days on it, should be retired.

Reebok’s Pure Move was one of our favorite bras, not just for the simple and clean design, the all-weather comfort, and its works-for-all-cup-sizes versatility, but because of the innovation in materials that provided a different bra-wearing experience. When it designed this bra, Reebok addressed the sports bra as a truly technical piece of gear.