Too bad the Adizero Adios Pro wasn't tested.
Too bad the Adizero Adios Pro wasn't tested.
Charlesvdw wrote:
Too bad the Adizero Adios Pro wasn't tested.
They wanted to include the Adidas shoes, but were unable to acquire them due to lack of availability.
My instinct would be 6 minute miles are too slow to test the shoes properly. I've run in Vaporfly, meta speed sky and Hyperion elite 2. All are much more responsive and feel better close to 5 minute per mile pace. I don't really feel any benefit running outside 6 minute pace in them. I also had some carbon X and they were good in the 5:30 to 5:40 range but not good much quicker. Of the 3 I'm always surprised how quick I'm running in the Nike's, the ASICS are good too but not quite as good for me. I enjoyed the Brooks but they made the least difference compared to flats although still well cushioned light and responsive.
Magical burrito wrote:
How much of this effect is due to the lengthening of the legs that the cushoning creates??
Nontrivial much. The Tempo Next%, their training shoe companion, is a good inch taller than my less maximalist shoes. One inch is 3% of 3 feet and 2% off 4 feet stride length. But it’s a difficult question to answer because of other confounding factors or caveats like below.
Caveats:
- Unless you are a heel striker, it’s the forefoot stack height difference that matters more, and that is 10mm (or nearly a half inch) less because of its heel drop.
- I don’t seem to get the same benefit with a shoe like the Novablast that is also fairly maximalist, so there seems to be more to the Next% than shoe height alone.
- The compressibility of all foams under higher landing pressures would remove some of the height advantage observed while standing at rest.
Props to the authors for this:
Competing interest
The authors declare no competing interest. All shoes used for the study were purchased and no
funding was provided by any shoe company.
Flat Stanley wrote:
My instinct would be 6 minute miles are too slow to test the shoes properly...
Too slow for anyone or just for you? Not being snarky; I've seen a lot of people say that super shoes mainly help at paces faster than X, but I assume that X varies from person to person and what they really mean is that the shoes help more once you get closer to, say, marathon race pace. The test subjects were 16:00 (+/- 0:40) 5K runners, so 6-minute miles may have been closer to their race paces than to yours.
ATEA4RE wrote:
Raggedman wrote:
Interesting read. If you go beyond the charts and tables you see that the low and non-responders are those who are already more efficient runners. The person who had the highest cadence and lowest vertical oscillation had no increase in RE in the Alphafly.
With N=12 I wouldn't make too much of the results re: non/responders.
The only way you can criticize their n is if you did your own power calculation and determined that 12 is not enough. Did you do that?
billbob98 wrote:
ATEA4RE wrote:
With N=12 I wouldn't make too much of the results re: non/responders.
The only way you can criticize their n is if you did your own power calculation and determined that 12 is not enough. Did you do that?
Read the first paragraph on page 15 and then get back to me.
Your position makes sense.
Thanks for reading our paper. I think you guys are arguing about different things. The study was adequately powered at 12 subjects to achieve the intended purpose of comparing running economy across shoes. It was not designed to determine statistical differences between responders and non responders.
dj
lab rat rundown wrote:
Thanks for reading our paper. I think you guys are arguing about different things. The study was adequately powered at 12 subjects to achieve the intended purpose of comparing running economy across shoes. It was not designed to determine statistical differences between responders and non responders.
dj
Thank you. Yes, that’s all I was trying to say…no intention of making claims about the stats power of the main outcomes (as a nonstatistician).
Hi lab rat,
Any surprising takeaways or insights for you?
Also, anything you would do differently in a future study?
Hey now, not offended if you trash our research, but never forget the greatness that is Auhmad Robinson and the SFA 4x400:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSzB1_-00_U
dj
Thanks for doing this study btw and it's a bummer on the Adidas thing.
For people on here saying the shoes only work at pace X, I'd disagree as a lot of the NYTimes/Strava stuff makes it feel exceedingly unlikely that it isn't helping runners of all speeds. Yes how big a responder might be more affected by what type of runner you are (which could be correlated to your footstrike etc.).
So we tested a fairly homogenous group of individuals, so harder to get at this idea but there is still individual differences in the magnitude of responsiveness among our subjects. One thing to clarify from some of the comments I've read is while there are differences in the magnitude of responsiveness (say one guy gets 4.5% benefit from Nike AF and another only 2%), there is not really much variability in what shoes are best. For example, for all 12 subjects, the either the Nike AF, Nike VF2, or Asics MS was the best shoe on an individual level (See Figure 2 in paper). So I think the idea that some of the other shoes might be better more economical for different people is unlikely outside of those top 3 we tested. We couldn't make the statistical conclusions we did if that were the case.
You are right. It is very much about the foam. This is one of my favorite recent papers where the sliced up the plate of the VF and still saw same benefits as intact shoe:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34280602/
As for as not making you faster, that is certainly not true. Whether we look at the retrospective, observational studies or the lab based research, the effective shoes definitely help performance. One comment I keep seeing come up across different platforms is the idea that the shoes simply save your legs from muscle damage so help for longer duration efforts like a marathon or repeated days of training. That is probably true and the anecdotal evidence is strong, interestingly there is less lab research to back that however. The lab research overwhelmingly support the idea of improved running economy. If you improve running economy, you don't just decrease the energy cost to work at a set speed. You are able to run faster at the same physiological intensity. In this sense, improving economy should improve performance over any distance that is primarily aerobic.
Unfortunately we had to go with the present day Hyperspeeds. Would have been awesome if we could have secured an old Ryan Hall pair though. On that note, check out this old Lestrun interview with Hall about the Hyperspeeds. I love it.
Ryan added that even after Asics made him custom racing shoes for the 2008 Olympics that he “gravitated back to the Hyperspeed just because I like it so much. I think it speaks really highly to that shoe. It’s an amazing shoe. I’ll probably run every single marathon the rest of my career in that shoe.”
JamesD2 wrote:
Flat Stanley wrote:
My instinct would be 6 minute miles are too slow to test the shoes properly...
Too slow for anyone or just for you? Not being snarky; I've seen a lot of people say that super shoes mainly help at paces faster than X, but I assume that X varies from person to person and what they really mean is that the shoes help more once you get closer to, say, marathon race pace. The test subjects were 16:00 (+/- 0:40) 5K runners, so 6-minute miles may have been closer to their race paces than to yours.
Good point. It would be interesting to see if there was any difference if elites tested the shoes although very difficult to do I appreciate. I guess anecdotally I agree with the findings from my own experience (don't class myself as elite by the way) but would be interesting to know if the benefit comes when a person is running at a fast pace relative to their ability or if there is more advtange for people running at faster paces outright.
Adios Pro was one shoe I really wanted that I wasn't able to get my hands on when acquiring shoes. Was right between 1s being sold out and 2s being released. I hope to get a pair to at least case study test. Getting some of the @bygolly.molly Puma Deviate Nitro Elites to test soon. The Endorphin Pro and RC have v2s out since we started this project, but as far as I know they use same plate and foam as the first versions. Although some claim the higher stack on the RC2s feels more responsive, I'm skeptical based on the current data.
In reality though, the goal of this project wasn't necessarily to test every possible shoe, it's not feasible and it's an ever changing environment. We wanted to know across the broad landscape of the shoe industry have the rest of the crowd leveled up. We can say with some confidence now that is unlikely.
You can check out my lab's testing updates and some of the case study stuff I do here:
While we only tested at 16 kph, the magnitude of the benefits observed here in the Nike VF have been shown consistently across speeds of 14-18 kph in other studies. I would expect these results to hold up over those ranges. We are doing a follow up currently to see how much they help at slower speeds in the 10-12 kph range.