In partnership with adidas, our researchers are revolutionising sports clothing and equipment – making them safer and more inclusive while supporting talented athletes to achieve world-class success.

Established in 1924, adidas is one of the oldest sportswear and equipment manufacturers – and, today, it employs almost 60,000 people worldwide.

A major player in the field, and a leading innovator, its importance within the world of sport is recognised by its many associations with athletes, teams and global events during the past 50 years.

The company has collaborated with Loughborough researchers since 2002, drawing on their first-class capabilities in engineering, aerodynamics, ergonomics and sports science.

The partnership has pulled together multidisciplinary expert teams – led by Professor George Havenith (environmental ergonomics), Professor Andy Harland (sports engineering), and Emeritus Professor Martin Passmore (aerodynamics) – dedicated to making sport safer and more inclusive while supporting talented athletes to achieve world-class success.

As well as ensuring that adidas remains ahead of the curve, the partnership contributes to Loughborough’s well-earned reputation as a world-leading institution for sports-related research and teaching.  

Evolving over the years, the partnership and the new knowledge it has generated have steered innovation across a range of sports – spanning cycling, football, running, skiing, swimming and wheelchair racing – and addressed a variety of challenges for product designers.

And, of course, the advances made in clothing and equipment for elite athletes inform the design of products for the general population – ensuring that everyone benefits.

With adidas’s apparel team, we are building up invaluable data about how bodies move, and what the implications might be for support garments – including sports bras.

Human bodies come in a glorious range of shapes and sizes, and change as we grow older. Women’s bodies, particularly so.

A report one year after Sport England launched its This Girl Can campaign in 2015, revealed that increasing numbers of girls and women are inspired to get active. However, many – especially those outside conventional athletic norms – are, on the whole, poorly served by sports clothing brands.

Our research addresses this shortcoming. Focusing on breast biomechanics – in other words, analysing how breasts move – we are developing a better understanding of how to provide support and dampen motion. 

This knowledge underpins the development of support garments that work for a wide range of women – empowering them with the right kit to get active.

Team GB’s performance in the velodrome during the 2012 Games was phenomenal: a nine-medal haul – seven gold, one silver and one bronze.

An innovative addition to their pre-race warm-up may have had some small part to play in this – the adidas-Loughborough developed adipower^TM trousers. 

The battery powered pants keep athletes’ quadricep and hamstring muscles warm in the lead up to a race, providing relevant gains in power and sprint performance.

Athletes – including Victoria Pendleton CBE, Dame Laura Kenny and Sir Chris Hoy – as well as their coaching and support team have all praised the “hot pants”, recognising the important role they play in final race preparations. 

Conversely, our research with adidas helps to keep athletes cool as they train and compete.

A combination of physiological processes regulates our body temperature – for example, we sweat when we get too hot. Our Environmental Ergonomics experts have mapped the human form, showing how sweat rates, skin temperature, wetness and temperature sensitivity vary in different parts of our bodies – allowing designers to optimise the clothing for performance, heat loss and comfort.

Their work has also revealed how these natural processes vary across different groups of the population – our age, gender and general health all influence how our bodies respond to activity and the environment we’re in. 

With adidas, we developed the first-ever sweat body maps of males and females, informing the company’s sector-leading Climacool^TM product range, launched in 2002 with running shoes. Climacool adult clothing followed in 2007, and a children’s range has been available since 2016.

Our body mapping research is now accepted as the industry standard across all sports – and guides sportswear designers across a range of brands in deciding how to use specific fabrics and design features to help keep athletes warm in the cold and cool in the heat.

The findings of our partnership’s research have obviously benefited the sporting goods industry enormously, but the knowledge generated has some unexpected applications – some, way beyond the sporting arena.

For example, we’ve applied our knowledge of short duration collisions to sports other than football. The new International Standards governing cricket helmet performance are based on our research. More than 100 conforming helmets have been approved – eliminating facial injuries among helmeted players within the professional game.

Meanwhile, our unique methods developed to study football aerodynamics has some unexpected applications too. Working with Jaguar Land Rover, we have made significant advances in vehicle wake flow measurements – improving vehicle stability, handling, safety and efficiency while reducing drag. Our cutting-edge approach to wake analysis has also been adopted by the Ford Motor Company.

In addition to being the accepted standard within sports, our body mapping research informs the outdoor and protective clothing sectors. We are contributing to a global project to mitigate the impact of climate change on workers’ productivity and comfort in a heating world.

The research also supports the industry-first virtual Human Thermal Model which provides detailed data for populations worldwide. Recent developments include novel work focusing on how temperature impacts different population cohorts – for example the sexes, various age groups as well as people with Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injuries.

Our research has helped adidas to make great advances in product design. Meanwhile, the partnership has been invaluable to the University, contributing to our position as a world-leading institution for sports research, education and performance.

Since 2002, the company has supported more than 40 projects, resulting in 26 PhD theses and 81 peer reviewed publications – advancing original knowledge, applicable within sport as well as across a variety of other disciplines.

Our partnership PhD programme includes an annual three-month industrial placement for students. Regularly immersing our young researchers within adidas greatly enhances their learning and allows them to disseminate their research within the company.

Students on several our undergraduate programmes benefit in a similar way, welcomed by adidas on internships of up to a year, and we’re proud that many of our graduates are now employed by the company in important product development roles.