Special Care Instructions to Make Your Suits Last Longer

The following are care instructions for taking care of your standard polyester/lycra swimming suits, both workout style and fashion.

Please note that these are not the care instructions for technical suits. Those suits must be taken care of differently. For those instructions click here. 

The biggest part of making sure that you are taking care of any type of suit is having the proper fit. The water will find any place on your body to get in under the suit and fill it up thus stretching out your suit and shortening it's life. To prevent this you can use our Basic Suit Sizing Guides or our Technical Suit Sizing Guides. If you ever have any questions on sizing or taking care of your suits feel free to contact us. 

To aide in wearing the proper size suit check out our tips and tricks for getting comfortably in a suit. 

• Keep the suit protected during your swim
• Wear drag shorts, suits, or tights over the suit. This will not only protect your suit from snagging, but will aide in your training.
• Be mindful of how you get in and out of the water as well as how you interact with the bottom and edges of the pools. Brushing up against any porous surface (i.e. plaster, rock, tile, etc.) will cause snagging and will harm your suit. Thin suits will even rip under the right circumstances. 

• After you are done swimming
• Rinse the suit off in the shower with fresh water. 
• DO NOT ring the suit out or try to get water off of it in any way. It will stretch the suit and damage the material
• Lay the suit flat on a towel and roll the suit up inside the towel. Avoid bunching the suit up as much as possible. 
• DO NOT use the suit dryers. They stretch the suit out and bake the chlorine in it making the damaging affects of the chlorine happen faster. 

• Once you get home 
• Take the suit out of the towel you rolled it up in 
• Either drape your suit over the towel that you rolled it up in over a banister, chair, open door, or shower.
• Keeping the suit on the towel will dry the suit faster as well as keep your suit and towel with each other so you won't forget either one when you head back to the pool. 
• Avoid hanging the suit by the straps or crotch to drip dry because the weight of the water in the suit will stretch it out in odd ways. 

• Washing your suits 
• Your suits don't need to be washed like normal clothing. They are getting disinfected every time you are in the pool. 
• We recommend only washing your suits 3-4 times a year. Our manager, Kenzie, only washes her suits in the summer when the straps get sticky and gross from sunscreen.
• We recommend that you avoid using the washing machine because the nature of them can cause the suit to be stretched as they are washed. When Kenzie does wash her suits, she use a machine with like colors.
• If you do wash your suits NEVER use the dryer, for the same reasons as listed above. Dry them the same way that you would when you wear them.
• If you do feel like your suits are getting gross with the chlorine there are products out there that will take the chlorine out of the suits. We don't recommend using them all of the time, but the one that we have found to be the most effective is Malibu C SwimWear Care Crystals.

Be aware that the biggest impacting factor in how quickly your suit will be destroyed is the chlorine levels of the pool you are swimming in. Regardless of how well you take care of your suits, the higher the level of chlorine the faster your suits will be destroyed. We recommend that you check the pools in your area and only go to the one with the lowest average levels. As a basic rule of thumb, pools with UV Filters can legally have less chlorine in them then pools without the UV Filters. 

Note: The best trial and error way to make your suits last is to rotate them. We recommend that you always have at least two suits in your wardrobe that you like to wear. The more time that you can put between uses in the water the longer your suit will last. For example, Kenzie, back when she was spending 3-5 hours a day in the pool 6 days a week training would rotate between 5 to 8 different polyester suits. Some of those suits lasted her up to 5 years.