Right Support, Right Sport: What to Wear for What You Do
Running, cycling, five-a-side, lifting, racquet sports and contact sport all ask different things of your underwear. A sport by sport guide to getting it right.
What to Wear Under Cycling Shorts
What to wear under cycling shorts is nothing, and here is why: the pad is built for bare skin, seams cause saddle sores, plus honest exceptions for commuters.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend. More on how this works.
A man buys his first pair of proper bib shorts. They cost more than he expected and they feel faintly ridiculous when he holds them up. Then he does the thing every new cyclist does, which is put a pair of briefs on first, because the alternative seems unhygienic and slightly mad.
Ninety minutes later he is walking oddly and wondering whether cycling is for him.
This happens constantly and it is nobody's fault. Nothing about a pair of cycling shorts announces how it is supposed to be used, and the instruction, when you finally hear it, sounds like a wind-up. So this article takes the long way round: what the garment is, what it is doing, and why the standard advice is what it is. Then the situations where that advice does not fit your life, because the internet is unhelpfully absolutist about those.
What the chamois actually is
The pad in a pair of cycling shorts is called a chamois, pronounced "shammy", and the name is a fossil.
For most of the twentieth century it was exactly what the word says: a piece of chamois leather stitched into the seat of a pair of wool shorts, used essentially unchallenged until technical fabrics displaced it in the 1980s. Thermomoulded pads and gel inserts followed in the early 1990s, and by around 2000 the elasticated, multi-density pad had become standard. Leather had one virtue and several miseries: it moulded to the rider, and it had to be washed by hand, kept supple with cream, and dried carefully or it went hard as a biscuit.
A modern chamois is a layered, shaped component rather than a lump of foam: open-cell polyurethane foams of different densities, thicker under the sit bones and thinner or channelled through the middle, faced with a stretch fabric chosen for low friction and moisture transport, and tapered at the edges rather than stopping abruptly. Many have a bacteriostatic treatment in the facing fabric, sometimes using carbon thread, for reasons that will become obvious shortly.
What the pad is doing, which is not cushioning
The word "padding" does the chamois a disservice, because cushioning is the least important of its three jobs.
It manages friction. On a bike you are not sitting still. Each pedal stroke rotates your pelvis slightly, and over a two hour ride that is several thousand small movements of skin against fabric. The chamois is designed so the sliding happens between the pad and the shorts, or within the pad's own layers, rather than between the pad and you. That requires contact.
It manages moisture. Wet skin is softer, weaker and far more easily damaged by friction than dry skin, which is the mechanism behind most chafing anywhere on the body. The facing fabric of a chamois moves sweat away from the skin into the foam and out, and a good pad keeps the contact surface drier than any cotton garment would.
It distributes pressure. This is the cushioning bit, and it matters, particularly the shaping that relieves the perineum and directs load onto the sit bones. But a pad doing this well and failing at the other two will still give you problems.
Two of those three functions depend on the pad touching your skin. Put a garment between them and you have not added protection. You have inserted a layer that interrupts moisture transport, moves independently of both surfaces, and reintroduces exactly the sliding the pad was engineered to eliminate The Sweat Article: Moisture-Wicking Fabrics, Explained Properly.
Saddle sores, and where they come from
A saddle sore is not one thing, which is why the advice about them is often confused.
Cycling medicine describes several overlapping mechanisms. Straightforward abrasion, where repeated friction damages the skin surface. Folliculitis, where a hair follicle is irritated mechanically, bacteria get in, and the result is the classic angry lump. Swelling and bruising from sustained pressure, particularly where a rider sits on soft tissue rather than on the sit bones. And deeper problems from damaged capillaries and lymphatic drainage in an area compressed for hours.
Almost all of it starts with the same two inputs: friction, and moisture that softens the skin so the friction does more damage. Which is why prevention advice converges on a short list. Get the saddle and the fit right, keep the skin dry, minimise anything that rubs, and do not sit around in the kit afterwards.
Now consider a seam.
The seam problem
A pair of briefs has seams, and it has them in precisely the wrong places.
Take a standard brief. Two side seams over the hip, a leg opening finish around each thigh, and, on nearly all of them, a join across the seat or where the back panel meets the gusset. Under trousers none of these matters. On a bike, a raised ridge of stitching between the pad and your skin concentrates load onto a narrow strip of tissue and then moves back and forth across it a few thousand times an hour.
An overlock seam, which is what most underwear uses, creates a small raised ridge on the inside of the garment by design; that is what wrapping two overlapped raw edges does. It is fine under trousers. It is a chisel under a chamois Anatomy of a Brief: Every Panel, Seam and Stitch Explained.
The leg hem is worse. A folded and coverstitched leg opening tends to curl and rope as its internal elastic ages, and a roped hem sits as a twisted cord right across the crease of the thigh, which is one of the two places saddle sores most commonly appear.
The fabric matters as much as the seams. A cotton brief under a chamois is close to a worst case: cotton absorbs sweat and holds it, so instead of moisture moving out through the pad you have a wet layer pressed against softened skin for the whole ride The Fabric Bible: What Your Briefs Are Actually Made Of.
So the answer, for anyone riding in proper shorts for more than about half an hour, is nothing. No briefs, no boxer briefs, no liner. Cycling shorts are designed to be worn next to the skin, and every mainstream cycling publication and coaching outfit says so without qualification bib shorts.
The hygiene objection, answered
The most common resistance to this is not comfort. It is the feeling that wearing an unlined garment against bare skin is unhygienic, and that a layer of cotton somehow makes it cleaner.
It does the opposite.
The chamois is washed after every single ride, exactly as underwear is, and is often treated with an antibacterial finish in the facing fabric. It moves moisture away from the skin rather than holding it. A cotton brief does neither: it holds moisture against you and creates a warm, damp, static layer, which is the environment bacteria want.
The hygiene rules that actually matter are simple and most riders break at least one. Wash the shorts after every wear, without fabric softener, which clogs the wicking structure of both the facing fabric and the foam How to Wash Underwear Properly. Get out of them as soon as you finish; sitting around in a damp chamois for an hour after a ride is a far bigger risk factor than what you wore underneath. And shower properly.
Chamois cream, honestly
Chamois cream began life as a conditioner for leather. Modern versions are skin products: thick emollient bases, often with an antibacterial component, applied to the pad or the rider or both.
They help some people considerably. They also get oversold. A cycling dermatologist quoted by BikeRadar described chamois cream as "a big myth", allowing that it may help as part of a combination approach but pushing back hard on the idea that it solves saddle sores on its own, and noting that it can make some skin conditions worse. Medical-grade emollients are sometimes recommended in preference to the cycling-branded ones.
The reasonable position: chamois cream reduces surface friction, and for long rides it is genuinely useful. It does not fix a badly fitting saddle, a bad bike fit, a worn out pad or a habit of sitting in wet kit, and if you have persistent saddle sores those are the things to look at first chamois cream.
Apply it to the pad rather than emptying a handful onto yourself, and wash it out of the shorts properly afterwards.
When you genuinely cannot go without
Here is the part that gets skipped, because the absolutist version of this advice assumes everyone reading is a road cyclist with their own bike and a shower at the other end.
The commuter. Thirty minutes to an office in ordinary trousers, no shower. There is no chamois here, so the question does not really apply; wear what you normally would, but synthetic or merino rather than cotton, and preferably with flat seams The Best Merino Underwear.
The spin class. Studio bikes, forty five minutes, a saddle you did not choose. If you do these regularly and it hurts, the fix is a padded liner short worn without underwear rather than underwear worn without a pad padded liner short.
The hire bike, the holiday, the borrowed kit. Do the best you can and accept that a short ride in the wrong kit is a nuisance rather than a medical event.
The genuine hygiene constraint. Shared kit, a multi-day trip with no washing facilities, a medical reason. These are real.
When you must wear something under a chamois, the requirements are specific. Seamless or bonded rather than stitched, with no rear seam and no seat seam of any kind. Synthetic or merino, never cotton. The leg opening must be a raw bonded or laser cut edge rather than a folded hem, because a folded hem will rope. And it should be close fitting, because a loose garment will rumple and a rumple under a pad is a pressure point seamless bonded brief.
That garment exists; every serious sportswear brand makes one, usually described as a bonded or laser cut brief. It is a compromise rather than a solution, and a considerably better one than a cotton brief from the multipack drawer Brief, Slip, Tanga, Jock: A Field Guide to Supportive Underwear.
The support question
Riders who come from running or team sports often ask, because in most other endurance sports the underwear question is a support question Right Support, Right Sport: What to Wear for What You Do.
Cycling is unusual: you are seated, the pelvis is rotated forward, and the vertical impact loading that makes support essential in running is almost entirely absent. A well fitting pair of bib shorts is compressive enough to do what is needed. Adding a jockstrap under a chamois combines the seam problem with a thick waistband across the lower abdomen, in the position where you are folded forward over the bars, which is a bad idea for reasons you will discover twenty minutes in The Jockstrap Never Left the Locker Room.
If you are getting movement and discomfort on the bike, the variable to change is the shorts. Bib shorts with a wide, well anchored leg gripper hold the pad in place far better than waist shorts, which is most of why serious riders wear bibs.
The actual answer
Nothing, and it took two thousand words to earn that because "wear nothing" is not an instruction anybody believes on first hearing.
The chamois is a friction and moisture management system designed around direct contact with skin. Insert a layer and you break both functions, add seams in the places most likely to cause saddle sores, and, if that layer is cotton, hold moisture against skin that friction is already working on. It is not tradition or machismo. It is what the garment was drawn for.
If you cannot go without, go seamless, go synthetic, and go without a rear seam. If the problem persists, the culprit is the saddle, the bike fit or the pad itself, and no brief on earth will fix a saddle that is the wrong shape for your sit bones Underwear for Big Thighs: The Chafing Problem Solved.
And take the shorts off when you get home. All of the above is undone by an hour on the sofa in a damp chamois.
Questions people ask
Should you wear underwear under cycling shorts?
No. Cycling shorts are designed to be worn directly against the skin, and every mainstream cycling publication says so. The chamois manages friction and moisture, and both functions depend on the pad and your skin moving together and on sweat passing out through the pad. A brief underneath interrupts that transfer, slides independently of both surfaces, and adds seams in exactly the places where saddle sores develop. If it is cotton it also holds moisture against softened skin, making friction damage worse.
What is a chamois in cycling shorts?
It is the shaped pad sewn into the seat of the shorts. The name comes from the chamois leather originally used, which remained standard until technical fabrics replaced it in the 1980s. A modern chamois is built from open-cell foams of varying density, thicker under the sit bones and often channelled through the centre, faced with a low-friction fabric that moves moisture away from the skin. It manages friction and moisture at least as much as it cushions.
Why do seams cause saddle sores?
Because a raised seam concentrates load onto a narrow strip of skin and then moves across it thousands of times during a ride. Saddle sores arise mainly from friction and pressure, often starting as abrasion or as inflammation of a hair follicle that then becomes infected. A stitched ridge under a chamois delivers both, in a spot that is warm, damp and already softened by sweat. Folded leg hems are especially bad, because as their elastic ages they curl and rope across the thigh crease.
Does chamois cream actually work?
It reduces surface friction, which genuinely helps on longer rides, but it is oversold. A cycling dermatologist quoted by BikeRadar called it "a big myth" as a standalone solution, allowing it may help as part of a wider approach and noting it can aggravate some skin conditions. If you get persistent saddle sores, look at saddle shape, bike fit, pad condition and how quickly you change after riding before you buy more cream.
What can I wear under cycling shorts if I really have to?
A seamless or bonded synthetic or merino brief with no rear seam, no seat seam and a raw laser cut leg opening rather than a folded hem. It must be close fitting, because anything loose rumples into a pressure point, and it must not be cotton, which holds moisture against the skin. Most serious sportswear brands make a bonded brief of this kind. It is a compromise rather than a fix, but far better than an ordinary cotton brief.