But there are still limits to how well super shoes are understood.
For one thing, said Hoogkamer, much of the research on their biomechanical benefits was funded by shoe companies. That means there is little independent comparison, for example, of which features work — or don’t — across different models and brands.
And given the time needed for academic labs to complete research on a shoe, companies may well have produced a newer model before they can incorporate any findings.
Hoogkamer is not a paid consultant to any brand, but labs he has worked in have received funding from Nike and Puma.
Studies tend to focus on elite athletes, said Hoogkamer. More research is needed on recreational runners. Scientists are intrigued by evidence that some runners respond better to super shoes than others, and believe more study is needed to understand why that is.
“This is all easy to do in the lab where we measure for five minutes in each shoe, and we do that a couple of times to get good numbers,” he added. “But running a marathon is a different thing.”
Heath said Nike worked with “more than 300 elite Nike athletes and everyday runners” in countries from the US to Ethiopia and Japan to develop the Alphafly 3.
Among everyday runners, he said, “many told us they struggled to land with different foot-strike patterns”. That informed adjustments to the design.
More feedback came from female runners, who were sensitive to shoe discomfort, prompting engineers to tweak the arch support and upper materials.
Both Nike and Adidas said they were committed to developing ever-better footwear — within the rules.
Nava at Adidas said that while he supported the regulation of footwear for competitions — “you can’t just put an engine in a shoe” — development would eventually reach a point in which all the dollars, research and labour poured into creating new shoes would not yield legal performance gains.
He said: “Eventually there will be a conversation between World Athletics and the major sporting goods companies, [saying]: ‘OK, where do we want to go from here?’”
