Of all the products we sell, our Rupture Signature Rash Guards are by far our most popular items.  People really love them – and it’s not just grapplers.  Surfers, runners, weight lifters, and apparently softball players.   One of our staff thought it might be a good idea to write an article on what makes a perfect compression rash guard.  Incidentally, it’s a blue print on how we make our rash guards .

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Why are compression rash guards important?  They help fight the elements, combat fatigue, speed recovery and prevent injury.  To fighters and grapplers, they’re as essential as pain killers or running shoes.

However, just like many other products in the marketplace, there are good and bad rash guards.  Below is an article on what makes a great rash guard, and what you should look for when you purchase one.

Fabric and construction

- Fabric: A nylon/lycra blend is preferred over polyester. Nylon/lycra is more expensive, but definitely worth it in the long run, for both durability and yield. It also has a much nicer hand (softness and feel). Polyester wears out much faster and tends to retain odor. One advantage that polyester offers is better moisture management, but moisture wicking technology has more than equaled the playing field.

- Construction: Look for flatlock stitching on the fabric panels and triple stitching on the sleeves and bottom piece with reinforced backing. This will ensure your rash guard doesn’t fall apart at the seams after you roll a few times.

Design vs. Functionality

- What are the top 2 complaints regarding rash guards? Without a doubt, the runaway winner is that grappling rash guards ride up on your stomach, back and sometimes chest while you roll or fight. The second is badly placed seams that chafe athletes during training. Just like the badly constructed gi jacket with the seam down the middle of the back, rash guards have similar issues. I’ve recently seen a rash guard that has a unique design with seams running in the middle of the back and chest. Guess what – that will bother grapplers when they’re rolling.

The primary purpose of a great rash guard is to protect the athlete wearing it, not inhibit their performance. It is the first line of defense between skin on the athlete’s upper torso and everything else. Grappling rash guards should be tailored longer and be constructed so that rolling upwards during training is minimized or eliminated. As well, seams that meet under the arm pit, across the back or across the chest make for interesting designs and bad functional rash guards.

A 6 panel fabric design is optimal for both long and short sleeve rash guards. This ensures maximum mobility and fabric yield under wet and dry conditions. Chest and back panels should be constructed of one vertical piece. Side panels should not have seams under the arms like long-sleeve t-shirts – that is the highest friction point of any upper body garment due to arm movement – and instead should run down the length of the sleeve. The last two panels should be above the shoulder area, where the athlete encounters the least amount of friction.

Chemical Treatment

Moisture wicking technology and anti-microbial treatments are standard and should be expected in any high quality rash guard. Note: anti-microbial does not mean leave your rash guard in your gym bag for a few days then wear it the next class – you know who you are . SPF protection is great for surfers or outdoor athletes that prefer to train in rash guards. It is not as important for grapplers or MMA fighters unless they train outside quite a bit.

Design or Logo Printing

Dye sublimation is preferred whenever possible. Unlinke plastisol with a stretch based additive, sublimation is permanent and will not peel off. We’ve all seen the rash guards with logos half hanging off or peeling after a few uses. Sublimation is easy on polyester and notoriously difficult on nylon/lycra, though that is changing due to advancements in technology. In cases where sublimation is not possible, a water-based ink for synthetic materials should be used during the printing process. This does not “quite” equal sublimation, but the ink will bleed into the fabric, ensuring a logo that lasts and doesn’t peel off.

The Rupture Signature Rash Guard meets all of these criteria. Our US-made rash guards have been widely recognized as the runaway leader for quality and price by the grappling and MMA community. Make sure your next rash guard is constructed and designed to these standards.

Cheers,

Nick

P.S. Some random nag points:

Hanging neck tags do not belong on rash guards. Period. One of the most annoying things about buying a rash guard with a hanging neck tag is the constant scraping across the neck by a hard tag. T-shirt manufacturers got wise to this long ago and started printing tagless shirts.

Tight compression fit across chest, loose fit bottom. Please pick one or the other. What’s the point, really?

I actually spend a lot of time thinking about what we do on a day to day basis to live up to our slogan.  Since founding Rupture Clothing two years ago, it sometimes seems that we deliberately did everything right the hard way.  And although many things have changed as we’ve grown, our four founding pillars still remain the same:

• Make better quality gear than anyone else in the market.
• Offer it at a better price than anyone else in the market.
• Deliver greater value than anyone else in the market.
• Produce everything in the USA, under ethical working conditions.

Believe it or not, it’s relatively easy to enter the clothing business.  Try finding a company that manufactures rash guards.  A quick search on alibaba.com or tradekey.com gives you instant gratification from many foreign countries.  You’ll get promising emails, guarantees of satisfaction, desires of “long lasting relationships”, even free samples. It is a statistical fact that between 95-97% of clothing sold in America today are made overseas. Why is soft goods importing so attractive?  In a word, cost.  But what’s the price we really pay?

We all know the US economy hasn’t been great, so let’s take the US unemployment rate first:  It’s currently hovering at around 10%.  Then, there’s this:

“The number of child workers around the world remains extremely high with 73 million children from 10-14 years old now employed worldwide, more than 13 percent of all children in this age group, the International Labour Organization (ILO) announced today in Geneva.

These figures only tell part of the story, warns the ILO. No one really knows how many children under 10 are working and no statistics are available on the number of girls engaged full-time in domestic work. If all were taken into account, the total number of child workers around the world today might well be in the hundreds of million.”

These are staggering statistics. Can you imagine sending your 7 year-old to work in a factory instead of going to school? Here’s a video of a child working in the Hanes factory - I could not make it halfway through.  Global competition for cheaper commodities feeds this vicious cycle.   Someone said to me once: “My clothes come from China, and my tax money go to weapons factories.   I don’t like either one, but that’s reality.”  Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth in that statement – it is up to us to change that.

A lot of you know the reason behind our company’s name.  It originated from a torn pair of board shorts, incidentally made in China.  Our slogan, however, is an entirely different story.  Being “A Genuine American Brand” is something we take extremely seriously.  And it comes at a price, both monetarily and from an opportunity standpoint.  Finding overseas manufacturers is easy.  Now try finding a decent cut and sew facility that does the same in the United States – your luck starts running out quick.  Anything from grappling shorts, T-shirts, hoodies, even packing accessories and hang tags.  Your choices are extremely limited, because soft goods manufacturing in the USA is close to extinction.  And, just as in every other industry, there are the good companies and the not so good companies.  Finding the great ones from a smaller sampling is quite a bit more difficult.

US-based manufacturing is not only more expensive, it limits the products we can offer.  Expanding our product line is our most difficult undertaking.   We receive hundreds of requests a month for sparring gear (gloves, shin guards, etc.), gi’s, even shoes.   We could probably triple our business overnight and cut costs in half by outsourcing the manufacturing of our products to a third-world country.   The monetary incentives are there in black and white.  So why haven’t we sold out?

Well, because of this: We’re pretty damn proud of the fact that every time we sell a product, an American gets to keep their job, or an American family gets to send their son or daughter to school rather than to a factory.  We have dealt with the same US-based suppliers and manufacturers since we have been in business, and everything we make is proudly made in the USA. We also take an enormous amount of pride in the quality of the products we make.  To date, we have had two single returns in two years out of the thousands of products we have sold, and only one was due to a manufacturing defect.  Every day we exist, we prove that America can still compete, even in an industry where it’s outnumbered by over 9 to 1.  And not only compete, but crush the competition.  We not only promise uncompromising quality and durability, we deliver it – day by day, garment by garment.  Our gear constantly rates higher than every other company, and we’re the fastest growing brand in athletic apparel, specifically in MMA and grappling.

It’s not easy to do the right thing.  It hardly ever is.  But the feedback we get from our customers for being a true “Made in the USA” company is overwhelming.  We can’t change the way our government spends our tax dollars, but we don’t have to perpetuate the problem of importing goods made under unethical conditions.   On the contrary, in the coming months we will announce efforts sponsored and funded by Rupture Clothing to combat the problem of child labor.   After all, we’re a company started by fighters.  And we’re not about to back down from this fight.

Rupture Clothing is extremely proud to announce our partnership with Bullshido.net to become Bullshido

A review of our signature fight shorts and rash guards by Luigi Mondelli – ATT Black Belt:

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