This is the best visual explanation I’ve ever seen for carbon plate running shoes (video)

Wow.

I don't like technology gimmicks making the racing dishonest.

They do make you a lot faster compared to other gimmicks I've tried.

You shouldn’t try spikes then

Am I missing something? The plate shoes spring 10 meters but the carbon plate shoes do nothing? It certainly demonstrates a difference, but can somebody explain please?

Our feet don’t bend that way though.

I get what it’s trying to show, but I don’t really see how that is the best visual explanation of the improvement in running economy, especially when the movement shown isn’t even close to any running specific movement.

It reminds me of the old Adidas Boost bouncing ball commercial. Both look cool, but artificial. There is no practicality in launching a steel ball or an empty shoe into the air.

Welcome to 2018, I guess?

The video is cropped. If you click it and play it full screen, the captions make sense.

Great, so carbon plates improve stride length by like 3x. Sub-5 5k’s are a coming.

CF works but doing that doesn't demonstrate anything running related. It was already proven in 2016 that its a combination of the super soft foams ie peba and especially Nike's patent for PEBAX in combination with the rigidity of the plate.

So many mfgs have made hard plated only shoes that suck donkey testies which proves the point.

^^ this. Great foam that springs back very fast with very little damping, coupled with plate that distributes the force over that foam.

It is fake.

You can see him throw the carbon plate shoe.

The biggest difference I notice between racing in old flats and super shoes is that there is no loss in responsiveness or weight despite the added cushion. Vaporflys essentially combined the stack and protection of a Hoka with the weight and responsiveness of the Streak flat. The foam is very a noticeable change because the bounce is a really tuned in blend of comfortable/soft and fast/propulsive. I am still not totally what the performance breakdown of the plate vs the foam is but to me it seems mostly the foam.

The way I thought of it is that super shoes are track spikes for the road. The carbon plate is similar to the plate, either carbon in something like the old Victory Elite or pebax in more standard Victorys, and the foam is like carrying your own section of track surface with you to make the hard road more bouncy and responsive. I am not sure how long this concept had been floating around but surely ideas like Adidas boost flats were operating under a similar concept but the large issue is that the weight of the foam would not be worth performance benefit until the ZoomX blend was completed.

I see this aspect as being the real super part of super shoes, rather than the bending energy return of the carbon (but I'm sure carbon plate has its place). As there have been old shoes with carbon and graphite plates before but none were as performance enhancing.

This does not explain how carbon plates function in shoes, visually or otherwise.

How about this... natural elastic recoil tendencies in the achilles and ITB tendons. No shoe can beat that for spring.

I just went and did the same thing with a carbon plated shoe and the farthest I could get it to go forward upon release (without actually tossing it) was about a foot or so.

what a tosser