Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

I ran across this column about unwanted bouncing during exercise. And not just of breasts:

For many overweight exercisers, every step of a workout comes with an unintended cascade of motion — breasts bounce, belly fat shakes and thighs rub. The added jiggle and friction of moving body fat is more than just bothersome. It can alter people’s gait and make them more prone to injuries and joint problems. The discomfort prevents many overweight people from exercising altogether.

“Almost all of my clients end up expressing this, how uncomfortable the bouncing around feels,” said Kelly Bliss, a fitness instructor and author in Lansdowne, Pa., who works with overweight people. “They say, ‘I turn right and part of me is still going left.’”

Oh, boy, is that familiar. Body-fat management is one of my personal bugaboos. For instance, while the biggest jiggly bits I have right now are my breasts, properly supporting them during exercise (or, let’s face it, just during the workday) creates other issues — particularly with back fat,* which does not sit comfortably on either side of the bra band. I can have the band above the back fat and sacrifice some support, or I can tug down the band, which keeps the breasts up better but pushes the fat up into my armpits and causes rather irritating rolldown on one side. But there are other issues as well, notably my thighs and hips, which start to remind me that they’re jiggling after a while, particularly when I’m retaining water before my period.

Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a whole hell of a lot of research done on the way body fat moves — even the way breasts move, which you’d think someone might have noted before now since they’re right there on the fronts of female athletes:

But the jiggle factor, familiar to the overweight and the large-breasted, has been largely ignored by exercise researchers and most sports-gear makers. Only a handful of studies have tried to document the challenges and strain endured by large bodies in motion.

“There’s very little research on the biomechanics and locomotion of obesity,” said Ray Browning, research instructor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, who has conducted several exercise studies of the overweight and obese….

Recently, British exercise researchers found that breasts of all sizes move far more during exercise than previously realized. Joanna Scurr, a scientist at the University of Portsmouth, studied breast biomechanics in 70 women for two years, using cameras and light beams to measure breast movement during various activities, including standing up from a chair, climbing stairs and jogging. Her research, presented in September to the British Association of Sports and Exercise Sciences, found that women experienced an average of about four inches of total breast movement, and some experienced more than double that amount.

And while most breast research has focused on vertical movement during exercise, Dr. Scurr’s study showed that breasts moved in three dimensions: up and down, side to side, and even in and out as breasts compressed against the chest and heaved outward during movement.

I say “not surprisingly” because even as fat people are harangued ever more shrilly to get off their asses and exercise, the model of a person who exercises is an already-fit, thin, most likely male athlete, and nobody bothers to accommodate anyone else with research dollars or gear. About the *only* sports gear I can buy from mainstream suppliers are socks and sports bras, which for some reason I can buy in more-or-less my size (almost nobody makes an actual G cup, so I just go up a band size and down a couple of cup sizes, which *really* does not help with the armpit situation) from, say, Title 9, even though they don’t sell a single shirt that will then fit over the bra they just sold me. Athleta is a bit better, but they still don’t have much of anything that will actually fit me (their sizes stop around 20). Which leaves Junonia, and I’ve found their order-fulfillment less than optimal (I’ve ordered from them twice now, and each time at least one item that was listed as in-stock mysteriously winds up being on backorder).

But, hey, if you can’t work out because it physically hurts, you must just be a lazy fuck who doesn’t want to exercise because you’re too morally weak, right?

I will say this: one thing this column misses is that, as bad as the jiggle factor can be when you’re fat, it can be much worse when you’ve lost significant amounts of weight. I lost about 130 pounds during college and was left with sagging, hanging skin that was much, much worse in terms of motion and jiggle than fat-filled skin was. There was a lot more slack, so it could whip around a lot more. I’ve since had a good deal of it trimmed off, but certain areas — such as my hips and thighs — didn’t get done because I just didn’t have the money. I kept that weight off for something like 15 years before I regained a bunch of it in a depression-trauma-injury-and-alcohol-fueled downward spiral in the past few years, and I’ve definitely noticed that my now-fuller thighs are less of an issue while I’m running than they were the last time I did much running, about 70 pounds ago. Even in the water, that felt weird, because it would ripple around as it met the resistance of the water. I always sort of wondered if I was doing damage to myself; it hurt too much to think that I wasn’t, but not enough to stop.

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* There’s a tagger in my neighborhood whose nom du Krylon is “Back Fat.” Every time I see one of his tags, I mentally check my bra.