Everything we hate about our active wear and what to do about it

What We're Thinking is a weekly take on the fashion issues and questions on our minds – from what we adore to what we abhor.

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There was a time when the most annoying thing about sports gear was the washing machine eating one of your socks (and always from odd pairs?!).

These days, since it's more common to wear one's active wear to eat brunch than to do bench presses, we make our gear work a lot harder than when we simply used exercise attire for … actual sport.

Last year, Australians spent an estimated $2 billion on active wear, according to the Australian Sporting Goods Association. And that means that we're wearing it for longer periods, and having more gripes with it.

Common complaints from peers included tights that dig in (try higher waisted styles to avoid "band belly"), chafing around the inner thigh (try seamless styles), and a lack of selection for men. (Check out the ratio of men's to women's wear at your nearest Lululemon and the case is clear.)

For me, the biggest annoyance is when the pads in my crop tops perform a 180-degree rotation, coupled with doubling over themselves until they resemble a folded-up slice of pizza after a wash cycle.

Why has no one invented a crop top with pads that don't move? And what form of modern-day torture are the manufacturers up to when they make the slits for re-insertion so impossibly small that it's nearly impossible to get them back into their original position? And why, oh why, do you mostly only discover said "pizza-pad" when you are half-way through your warm-up at yoga?

I went searching for answers to these questions (OK, maybe not the last one) but the news wasn't great.

One of my active wear contacts admonished me for washing the crops with the cups inside. Apparently you're meant to remove them before washing. (Yes, and you're also supposed to hand-wash and flat-dry your T-shirts. But does anyone actually do that?)

But seriously, when it comes to replacing the pads after wash, it's the fashion equivalent of threading a needle, or putting on your doona cover while wearing a blindfold.

Some brands have handy "L" and "R" symbols to help you work out which way to pop in the pads. Otherwise, another handy idea is to get a fabric marker and write your own prompts. Or, as some homemaker websites suggest, a couple of small stitches ought to fix the pad in place, if that's your priority over keeping them in pristine condition.

And if your crop has succumbed to "pizza pad", it may be time to buy new ones (they are available for a few dollars from habedashery stores), or perhaps it's time to just happily surrender to "uniboob". Apologies in advance to my yoga classmates.