Athletes, especially those at the top, will stop at nothing to improve their performance. Powerlifters use lifting belts to stabilize their spines, and some go as far as sniffing salt before big lifts. Meanwhile, runners have been known to train at altitude to increase VO2 max and focus on recovery, relying on top trackers to determine readiness and ice baths to stave off muscle soreness. Another key? The best of the best running shoes. That includes the somewhat controversial running spikes.
Spikes are a must-have for sprinters’ racing shoes. They help provide traction. They are considered the core of the kit, and they are not controversial. Unless, of course, that’s what we’re talking about Super spikes.
According to a recent study; Journal of Sports and Health Sciences According to a study led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, super-spiked shoes give middle-distance runners up to a 2 percent advantage over those who don't wear spiked shoes.
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“A lot of track records have been broken in the past five years,” says Wouter Hoogkamer, assistant professor of kinesiology at UMass Amherst and senior author of the paper. “A lot of people credit recent advances in spike technology for this, but scientifically, we don’t know if they help. Are athletes running faster because the spikes are faster, or are they simply training better or running faster tracks?”
Running shoes are designed to help runners run faster. They are lighter than other running shoes and help runners (especially sprinters and middle-distance runners) gain more traction. They are said to have been invented in the late 1800s by Reebok founder Joseph Williams Foster, but did not become mainstream until athletes such as Jesse Owens and Harold Abrahams wore them in the Olympics in the mid-1900s.
“Super-spiked shoes have a thicker but lighter, more durable and flexible midsole, and are often combined with a rigid carbon fiber plate embedded in the midsole,” said Montgomery Bertschy, Hoogkamer's doctoral student in the UMass Integrated Locomotive Laboratory and co-first author of the paper.
While super spikes can be used by any runner, they’re most commonly used by serious sprinters, but Hoogkamer and Victor Rodrigo-Carranza, then a graduate student at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, wanted to measure their benefits in middle-distance track events.
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To determine whether super spikes really are the reason for faster running and more record-breaking runs, Hoogkamer and his colleagues compared different super spike designs to a traditional track spike.
The athletes were then asked to do a series of 200-meter interval runs at their self-perceived middle-distance race pace, a common training for middle-distance runners.
“Our results also show that in a 1,500-meter race, our participants would take 17 to 21 fewer steps on super spikes compared to conventional spikes,” Hoogkamer says.
So, not only did using super spikes help runners improve their cadence, but they also helped them run faster overall. So which super spikes came out on top?
The researchers found that the PUMA evoSPEED LD Nitro Elite+ and Nike ZoomX Dragonfly led to an increase in running speed of approximately 2 percent (range 1.8 percent to 3.1 percent).
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