Recent research published within the Journal of Sport and Health Science led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that super spikes, scientifically described as advanced footwear technology (AFT) spikes, may give runners a few 2% edge in middle-distance track races, just like the 800- and 1,500-meters.
“Track athletes began wearing super spikes about five years ago they usually at the moment are commonplace in elite track races,” says Wouter Hoogkamer, assistant professor of kinesiology at UMass Amherst and senior writer of the paper.
“Super spikes have a thicker yet lighter, more resilient and more compliant midsole often combined with a stiff-carbon-fiber plate embedded within the midsole,” further explains Montgomery Bertschy, a doctoral student in Hoogkamer’s UMass Integrative Locomotive Lab and joint first writer of the paper.
“Over the past five years many track records have been broken and that won’t be much different during these Olympics,” Hoogkamer adds. “Many credit the recent developments in spike technology for this, but scientifically, we do not know that they assist. Are athletes running faster since the spikes are faster, or simply because they’re training higher or run on faster tracks?”
To reply this, Hoogkamer brought together a world team of researchers, including Ethan Wilkie, a graduate student on the University of Recent Brunswick in Canada, and Victor Rodrigo-Carranza, a then-graduate student on the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain.
Over a series of experiments, the researchers compared different designs of super spikes with a typical traditional track spike shoe: lightweight in construction with minimal cushioning and no added bending stiffness elements. They found that various designs of super shoes improved running speeds by about 2%, starting from anywhere from 1.8% to three.1%.
This begs the query: How much could a 2% speed improvement influence the competition? “So much,” says Wilkie, “we’re showing that shoes matter and particularly that spikes of some brands performed higher than others. Historically, we will expect to see differences of lower than 0.5% in race time determining who will win the gold, who will get silver, or won’t make the rostrum. Our 2% findings highlight that a few of that could be because some people have barely higher shoes than others.”
“On the Olympics only a few athletes shall be running in traditional spikes, but it is crucial to understand that not all super spikes are equal,” Hoogkamer adds. In the ultimate experiment of the study, the researchers evaluated commercially available shoes. They found that the PUMA evoSPEED LD Nitro Elite+ and Nike ZoomX Dragonfly showed significant improvements in speed of about 2%, but a 3rd model of a unique brand showed just one% improvement and that was statistically not higher than the normal spikes.
While Hoogkamer’s previous research showed the advantage of super shoes in marathons, quantifying this for middle-distance track events got here with unique challenges. To check the impact of super shoes on marathon runners, scientists typically measure the air that runners are respiratory out while they run at marathon pace on a treadmill. “When athletes run at middle-distance race pace, nonetheless, there’s a considerable contribution of anaerobic energy metabolism that we do not capture by measuring the athletes’ breaths,” explains Rodrigo-Carranza. As an alternative, the researchers relied on their very own experiences as (former) competitive middle-distance runners and developed a brand new protocol where they asked athletes to run a series of 200m intervals at self-perceived middle-distance race pace, a typical work-out for middle-distance runners.
Bertschy highlights the scientific rigor that enabled this team to distill the impact of the shoe design from other variables specifically for middle-distance running performance. “From the literature, we all know that shoe mass has a vital effect on the metabolic cost of running, and that every 100 grams added to the foot, increases the energy cost of running by about 1%, which in its turn will decelerate runners by 0.6% at these running speeds,” he explains. So, of their first experiment, they added 200 grams to every shoe of a pair of spikes that was similar to the control spikes to induce a 2% higher energy cost to the runner. They predicted that this is able to lead to a 1.2% decrease in speed. If their predictions were right, it could validate that their methods were accurately capturing the effect of just the shoe. And it did just that.
Over in Spain, Rodrigo-Carranza then assessed the reliability of their recent protocol by asking his participants to run in three different spike models not only once, but on three separate days. When assessing the group differences between the three spike models, the researchers found the very same results on each of the three days, further proving the robustness of this protocol.
As for a way super spikes make people faster, the researchers found that the runners took longer steps, relatively than faster steps. “Our results also indicate that, over a 1500m race, our participants would take 17 to 21 steps less in super spikes as in comparison with traditional spikes,” says Hoogkamer.
Hoogkamer envisions the innovations that include this recent method. “Different brands are literally using this protocol now to judge their spikes and to seek out out what’s best for a selected distance or for a selected athlete that’s either stronger or heavier or faster,” he says. “You possibly can go to a selected athlete, have them test spikes with our recent protocol and discover: do you could wear spike A or B?”
As for what non-Olympians can take away from this study, he says it could actually help people understand that, yes, athletes are training harder, but additionally: it’s in regards to the shoes. “This study is principally going help them interpret that what they see on the Olympics or when world records are broken — that a part of it’s since the shoes are recuperating and higher, and we’ve evidence for that.”
