Regardless if you’re involved in the sports world, it’s impossible not to hear a mention of sports shoes. Whether it be in ads, memes, or fashion trends, sports shoes have become a staple in pop culture. While most people have heard of a specific shoe allowing the best performance, a question has always lingered in the general atmosphere: Are there any substantial benefits to a particular type of shoe for its respective sport?
With the end of our high school’s football season, it seems fitting to cover this sport first. The sports shoes used for this sport are called cleats. Their main job is to provide friction for their players. The interesting part comes with how athletes choose which aspects to change. As Stoughton High School Head Football Coach Jason Becker explained, “Shoes have gotten a lot lighter over the years.”
In many sports, there has been a general trend of players preferring lighter-weight shoes. There’s a belief that wearing lighter-weighted shoes can help with performance:
“They feel that [the lighter weight shoes] allow them to be faster and … be a little bit more agile than they used to be … I think it is probably more of a placebo effect, but at the same time, I think if it is allowing a player to feel like they’re playing faster, it’s probably a positive effect on the game because they’re not thinking about it,” Becker said.
A study published by the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance showed the same results in basketball shoes. They had two groups; one group was aware of the shoes’ weight, while the other wasn’t. In the aware group, there was a 2% increase in performance, while the blind group was unable to feel a difference. What the two excerpts have in common is the placebo effect, which is when a person’s perception of something influences their performance rather than what they believe is influencing them.
Cross country is another sport that has a relationship between performance and sports shoes. Their main sports shoes are spikes and daily trainers.
Most research on these types of shoes has focused on how they influence athlete performance. Spikes are shoes with something coming out of the bottom of the shoe to provide additional grip and stability. Another shoe similar to spikes is super spikes, which also affect an athlete’s performance. The University of Massachusetts Amherst did a study about these spikes. Assistant Professor Wounter Hoogkamer described it as a “thicker yet lighter, more resilient and more compliant midsole often combined with a stiff-carbon-fiber plate embedded in the midsole.”
The group of researchers went through a series of experiments comparing different designs of super spikes. Their data showed that super spikes can increase an athlete’s speed by 2%. While that number is low, it can be a big difference in higher-tier races and events. Head Girls Cross Country Coach Susan Zaemisch also mentioned a spike called Dragonfly. She said they “are proven to make the runner’s 5k time faster by 10-15 seconds per mile.”
There’s been a general push in shoe technology for the running scene, mainly in improving the running economy, which is basically how much energy a runner has to use to go fast. One noticeable shoe was the Nike Vaporfly. Hoogkamer and his team found that the shoe improved the running economy by ~4%.
The relationship between sports shoes and athletes is not widely thought about by the general public. Sports shoes are a tool used to provide slight benefits, but to a high school athlete, it’s more about skill than the shoe. Outside of high school athletes, the same can generally be said; however, technological advancements, new features, and designs can make a difference between winning or losing a game. As seen with the super spikes and Nike’s Vaporfly, the slight increase in performance shouldn’t be ignored. The shift in the dynamic between sports shoes and athletes can be seen as a microcosm of the changing relationship between humans and technology as a whole. As people keep pushing the limits of what technology can achieve, technology can help people reach new heights in return.