A cup of coffee before a workout is always a good way to jump start the ole motor before pressinโ€™, pullinโ€™, bendinโ€™, flippinโ€™, kickinโ€™, scratchinโ€™, jazzercizinโ€™, freestyle runninginโ€™, or whatever your preferred form of physical activity may be. And now you can WEAR coffee during a workoutโ€”if womenโ€™s sportswear is your sartorial choice for getting active, that isโ€”thanks to Rumi X, a company using recycled coffee grounds to make their sports bras and yoga pants.

According to Bustle (perhaps the most appropriately named news source to break such a story), the womenโ€™s activewear brand was created by Melissa Chu, a San Francisco-based former yoga instructor who โ€œwanted to create sportswear that was environmentally responsible.โ€ Each item of clothing in Chuโ€™s line is made using 16 recycled plastic bottles. And of course coffee. Used coffee grounds get sent to a recycling facility, where they are stripped of their oils to remove the coffee smell (a good or a bad thing depending upon where you stand on smelling like coffee), shaped into pellets, and then made into thread.

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More than just environmentally friendly, the use of coffee grounds in sportswear has quite a few practical benefits, according to the article. Thanks to the coffee, the fabric has three times more odor control than cotton or polyester. So while you wonโ€™t smell like coffee (again, not sure if that is a good or bad thing), you also wonโ€™t smell like an unkempt version of yourself. Additionally, the garments offer five times the UV protection of regular cotton thanks to coffeeโ€™s โ€œnumerous microscopic pores.โ€

Prices for the garments range from $40 to $80, which may be a lot, Iโ€™m not really sure; my workout attire consists primarily of shirts I purchased at the Salvation Army over a decade ago when I thought wearing thrift store t-shirts was ironic and cool (full disclosure: I still wear many of those shirts out in public, but more from inertia than because I think itโ€™s cool).

For more information on the garments or the upcycling of coffee grounds process, check out Rumi Xโ€™s official website. And maybe leave them a note to ask for a still-coffee-smelling line.

Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.

*top image via Rumi X

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