Activewear’s body confidence promise isn’t backed by science

The activewear industry has built a substantial part of its brand equity on a single claim: that wearing its products makes women feel better about themselves. Confidence. Empowerment. Body positivity. These messages are the central narrative deployed by leading brands to justify premium pricing, justify lifestyle positioning and justify the category’s extraordinary expansion from gymwear into full everyday dress.

A peer-reviewed study published in April 2026 in the journal Behavioral Sciences puts that claim to a rigorous test. The verdict is uncomfortable for any brand whose marketing depends on it.

Ross C. Hollett and colleagues at Edith Cowan University in Australia surveyed 829 women across student and community samples, measuring their activewear engagement across four dimensions – wearing frequency, spending, online browsing and social media brand following – alongside a broad battery of psychological outcomes. The study looked at two feel-good outcomes brands often talk about: body confidence and self-esteem. It found no meaningful link between being more into activewear and scoring higher on either measure in either group.

The fitness link held up. Women who wore and purchased more activewear also reported more hours of exercise per week – a commercially relevant finding. But fitness activity, the study found, did not in turn translate into higher self-esteem or body appreciation. The chain of beneficial effects that activewear marketing implies – wear it, move more, feel better about yourself – is not supported by the data.

Does a broken promise sit at the heart of a $450 billion market?

A category that left the gym

Before addressing the psychological findings, the study offers market intelligence that matters in its own right: activewear is no longer primarily exercise clothing. Women in both samples reported wearing it for exercise less than 50 percent of the time on average. Errands, social events, working from home and university collectively account for the majority of wearing time.

Only around 10 percent of women in the study wore activewear exclusively for exercise, with no other contexts.

This is not a niche consumer behavior. Between 76 and 87 percent of participants had worn activewear in the previous month; between 71 and 82 percent had purchased it in the previous six months. Between 56 and 67 percent had browsed for it online, and between 40 and 48 percent followed at least one activewear brand on social media.

The category has achieved something few apparel segments accomplish: near-universal penetration across a demographically broad female audience, with purchase cycles that sustain consistent revenue.

The market scale is commensurate. Global activewear sales are projected to reach $450 billion by 2028, according to data cited in the study, with women consistently outspending men. In Australia alone – the study’s geographic context – the category has grown to encompass close to 100 brands. LSKD, one of the country’s most prominent activewear labels, has been estimated at around $150 million in annual turnover in late 2025/early 2026 and has stated a target of $1 billion by 2032.

The hidden psychological toll of activewear culture

If the fitness link is the study’s one favorable finding for the industry, the rest of the correlational picture is more challenging.

Activewear engagement – particularly wearing frequency and spending – was significantly associated with aspirations to have a muscular or athletic body and, in the community sample, with aspirations to be thin with low body fat. These goals align with what researchers classify as idealized body image internalization: the tendency to measure one’s worth against an externally imposed physical standard.

Women who wore activewear more frequently also scored higher on appearance comparison tendencies – the degree to which they evaluated their own bodies against those of others. In the community sample, more frequent wearing also correlated with greater perceived media pressure on appearance.

Taken together with the body idealization findings, the data supports a coherent pattern: the more women are embedded in activewear culture, the more they are exposed to the appearance standards that culture promotes, and the more those standards shape how they see themselves.

The study also examined why activewear use is linked to stronger “thin/low-fat” beauty ideals. The biggest driver was media pressure, which accounted for 68 percent of that link. Comparing looks with other people accounted for 48 percent.

These are not small effects. They suggest that the mechanism by which activewear wearing influences body idealization runs substantially through the media ecosystem that surrounds the category – the imagery, the social media presence, the brand communication.

The study asked women who wear activewear regularly how often they feel uncomfortable about their body while wearing it. Most — around 70 percent — said rarely or occasionally. But nearly one in three reported that body discomfort was present at least half the time. That is not a fringe result. It comes from the category’s most committed consumers, the women already wearing the product, already buying it, already following the brands.

For them, putting on activewear triggers a persistent awareness of how their body looks — not sometimes, not in passing, but as a recurring feature of the wearing experience.

Who is most at risk – and why it inverts industry assumptions

The activewear industry targets young women. Its marketing aesthetic, its social media strategy and its product design are calibrated for a younger female consumer. The assumption built into this approach is that younger women are more engaged with, and more vulnerable to, the category’s psychological effects.

The study’s age analysis suggests the reverse. When the community sample was divided at the median age of 40, the associations between activewear engagement and adverse body image outcomes were stronger and more consistent in the older group. Women over 40 who wore activewear more frequently showed higher appearance comparison scores and greater perceived media pressure than younger women doing the same.

The protective factor that age might be expected to provide does not appear to be operating here.

For brand strategists, this finding has direct product and communication implications. The segment being most heavily marketed to is not the segment showing the strongest negative psychological signal. The segment being relatively ignored – women in their 40s and beyond, a demographic with significant purchasing power – is carrying a disproportionate body image burden from a category whose marketing has largely been designed around someone else.

Is this psychological burden on women over 40 just collateral damage?

What brands can do, and what they risk by not doing it

The study is explicit that its correlational design cannot establish causation. Based on this evidence alone, wearing activewear does not cause body dissatisfaction. The relationship is more likely reciprocal: women with stronger appearance comparison tendencies may be more drawn to activewear, whose design and marketing then reinforce those tendencies.

But that does not lessen the accountability question.

The study’s authors note existing research showing that sexually objectifying advertising does not improve purchase intentions – and that women report higher purchase intent when advertising avoids sexualized imagery. Brands that deploy objectifying marketing to drive sales may be doing so at a cost to consumer wellbeing, without the commercial upside they assume.

The body positivity movement, meanwhile, is generating real consumer pressure on brands to align their imagery and messaging with diversity and inclusion. Women are actively creating counter-content – unfiltered images in activewear, deliberately unflattering angles, rejection of edited ideals – as a form of market-level pushback. Brands that engage with this shift authentically are building a different kind of consumer trust. Those that treat it as surface compliance are accumulating a credibility deficit that peer-reviewed evidence will increasingly make harder to defend. And several sources confirm that, globally, inclusive imagery seems to have been quietly retreating over the last couple of years: a cultural backlash?

The strategic implication is not to abandon the fitness and wellbeing message. The fitness link is real, and it matters. The opportunity is to rebuild the brand narrative around what the data actually supports – active lifestyles, physical capability, functional performance – and to retire the body confidence claim. More positivity, less pressure.