Study: PEBA spikes gave 2.4% time improvement vs traditional spikes in 3K TT for 16 trained male runners P=0.013

That study is crap. If true, Komen, with the new shoe technology, would have run 7:10, which is equivalent to back to back 3:52s.

Worthless without names of actual shoes.

Yeah, no. That's worth six seconds in the mile.

Have mile times dropped six seconds across the board? Have you seen any established pros who suddenly dropped their mile time six seconds when they switched to super spikes?

Any super shoe study is going to have too many variables with too much uncertainty to tell you anything more than super shoes are faster. A much better method world be to simply average the before-and-after times of mid-career runners who made the switch.

issuehere is many people adopted the superspikes during covid, trained in them for a year and then raced. Because covid introduces this year gap when compared pre vs post superspike results, changes in results can't just be put down to the spikes, for example changes in training methodolgy resulting from the year off competing, higher uptake of road supershoes during training allowing for higher volume ETC...

meant to reply to person above me

If you read more than the title, you will know the names of the shoes.

The study is not crap. These are not world-class runners. Research has shown that faster performers get modestly less % gain in race velocity (there is a study that gives reasonable correlations) at a given gain in running economy, however, they will still get gain in race velocity.

This is a prospective study comparing performance results in the different shoes in real time.

See my post above regarding velocity gain conversions. Every study is flawed, but this provides reasonable information in a more apples to apples manner, ie, controlled environment, no change in fitness between shoe tests, non-strategic racing elements, etc.

Interesting that the female runners were actually fastest in the peba 'unplated' spike. It sounds like these were the spikes they were comparing for 'peba' and 'peba plated'.

The 'peba' one DOES still have a plate though, by virtue of it being a spike, the plastic outsole is adding stiffness. It just doesn't have an add'l carbon plate. The study might indicate that the female runners, because they're probably smaller and not as fast as the male runners, are putting less force into the ground and maybe not getting the snap of the carbon that the males are.

Agreed. Also, it has been documented in research by Kipp et al, in 2019, that running at slower velocities permits greater gains in % velocity at the same given running economy. Females also have been documented in a retrospective study by Senefeld et al, in 2021, to have greater % velocity gains vs males in road supershoes at the marathon distance (2.6% vs 2.0%, respectively) in part, at least, owing to the same reason as above.

What’s the point of the study if it’s not applicable to elite runners?

Although they did not use elite runners in the study, there are other studies that have given a method of extrapolating improvement conversions based on relative running velocities. Also, it is a good study because it is isolating out variables to compare apples to apples, to a decent degree. Even though the test subjects weren't elite, consider that 99% of athletes who compete on the track are not elite athletes either, and they may see a point to this study, even if they had your mindset and didn't consider extrapolating based on if they were not better runners than those in the study. But the finding in this study that I've shared is limited in that it is providing data points representing a sub-group of runners: male runners who average about 5 min/mile pace for 3000m, wearing one specific model of super spike vs another specific traditional model of spike, running one specific distance. Further studies can compare different brands and models of super spikes, or runners at different levels of ability , or performance at longer or shorter distances, keeping other variables controlled. There is not one study that gives you all the answers to everything. This study is giving an average for a group of runners at a similar level of ability, but . within the group, some got substantially better benefits from the superspikes than others, as compared to the traditional spike. One even performed worse in the superspikes than the traditional spikes.

How are those with advanced degrees in psychology, physical education and physiology taken seriously?

Do you have any idea, the sample size for U.S. Department of Labor, B.L.S. in order to produce c.p.i. reports? What if U.S. Department of Labor, B.L.S. sampled 14 to 16 males and 14 to 16 females, would you take their reports seriously?

Completely different. This is a controlled study. Imagine being a coach and having 15 athletes do traditional training for a year and a different 15.just cross train for a year and then have them run some time trials. The runners make great improvement while the cross trainers get slower. Tour logic woukd say that the results are meaningless because the test only included 30 people. Everyone else would know that the results are sound.

Can you provide a link to the study? As you pointed out, sometimes the individual results can be informative.

Those shoes are so different that it’s hard to attribute the improvements just to PEBA or PEBA+plate. Different masses, very different midsole thicknesses, very different physical characteristics. Obviously, the testers are constrained when choosing to work with commercial models, but this hasn’t really settled anything about the performance of the foams/plates. So even though the thread title is literally true, the data don’t support how people will interpret/oversimplify and trumpet the results.

They only used one pace for women, 4.44 m/s, which is 90-second 400m pace and one pace for men, 5 m/s, which is 80-second 400m pace. The conclusions are only good for those paces.

I did a little analysis based on World Athletics data last year that showed that super spike were worth more the slower the pace. See post #35 in that thread for my summary based on men's data (I didn't post the women's data. . . yet). Read the thread from the start if you want to know how I did the analysis:

Here was the takeaway for men:

400m paces
oldspikes/superspikes/benefit (all in seconds)
55 54.7 0.3
56 55.6 0.4
57 56.6 0.4
58 57.6 0.4
59 58.5 0.5
60 59.5 0.5
61 60.4 0.6
62 61.4 0.6
63 62.3 0.7
64 63.2 0.8
65 64.2 0.8
66 65.1 0.9
67 66.0 1.0
68 66.9 1.1
69 67.8 1.2
70 68.7 1.3
71 69.5 1.5
72 70.4 1.6

This study has results for 80-second 400 pace. 2.8% improvement for men at 80-second pace means:

80 77.8 2.2

That looks totally reasonable, as if the 55 to 72 second 400-pace results were extrapolated out to 80-second pace.

At 3:43 mile pace, the benefit of the superspikes is more like 0.4 second per lap or around ~1.5 seconds total for the mile based on my analysis. That doesn't contradict this new study which is about much slower paces.

Covid was 4 years ago. That effect is gone. Compare 2019 times to 2023 in HS and this matches up pretty well. Yeah you really like more samples but if you just think of this as one more piece of evidence amoung a half dozen, it is looking like that is in the ballpark for slower runners.

It would be nice to have numbers for a dozen elite guys but I sort of doubt anyone will ever do that study. Maybe if someone like Nike thinks they can tune each shoe to the athlete (weight + landing?) and they test everyone before making an optimized shoe.