What’s the damage if you do keep running in crappy, unsupportive sports bras? Well, it’s potentially quite extensive.

“It is hypothesised that if breasts are unsupported, that repeated stretching of the supporting structures of the breast (the skin overlying the breast and cooper’s ligaments within the breast) may lead to irreversible damage,” Dr Brown warns. “Therefore, wearing appropriate external support (in the form of a bra) to support the breasts may reduce potential damage.”

It’s not just the breast tissue that can become damaged from wearing the wrong kind of sports bra, either. Pomfret warns that “if you don’t support yourself properly, you can cause back and shoulder problems. It should never be painful to exercise, so if you feel any discomfort, you might be wearing the wrong bra.”

Performance-wise, rubbish sports bras can seriously impact our speed while running. Research conducted by Brooks Running and led by the University of Portsmouth has found that women who run in a bra with poor support shorten their stride by 4cm. That’s like running an extra mile or 1.5km over the length of a marathon. In other words, the worse your bra, the more you’re having to work for your exercise goals.

You’d think that actual athletes would be immune from rubbish sports bras and the damage they can pose, but that’s not true. More than a quarter of elite female GB athletes have experienced such crippling breast pain from ill-fitting bras, that their ability to train and compete has been hampered.

The research by the English Institute of Sport (EIS) at the University of Portsmouth (again) found back in March that three-quarters of British female athletes had never been fitted for a sports bra. As a result, the EIS has been busy working on equipping 100 British Olympic and Paralympic athletes with bespoke bras ahead of the games.

Sports bras: do our sports bra and breast support needs change with age?