New research published in Journal of Sports and Health Sciences and led by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst show that superspikes, scientifically engineered spikes made with AFT (Advanced Shoes Technology), can give runners a 2% advantage in middle-distance races such as the 800 and 1,500 meters.

“Track and field athletes started wearing superspikes about five years ago, and they are now common in elite track and field events,” says Wouter Hoogkamer, assistant professor of kinesiology at UMass Amherst and senior author of the paper.

“Superspikes feature a thicker but lighter, more durable, and more flexible midsole, often combined with a stiff carbon fiber plate embedded in the midsole,” explains Montgomery Bertschy, a doctoral student in Hoogkamer’s UMass Integrative Locomotive Lab and co-first author of the paper.

“A lot of track records have been broken in the last five years, and it won’t make much difference at the Olympics,” Hoogkamer adds. “Many attribute this to recent advances in spike technology, but we don’t know scientifically whether it helps. Are athletes running faster because the spikes are faster, or because they train better or run on faster tracks?”

To answer this question, Hoogkamer assembled an international team of researchers, including Ethan Wilkie, a postgraduate student at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Victor Rodrigo-Carranza, then a postgraduate student at the University of Castile-La Mancha in Spain.

In a series of experiments, the researchers compared different models of superspikes with typical traditional spiked running shoes: lightweight in construction, with minimal cushioning and without additional elements to increase bending stiffness. They found that different models of supershoes improved running speed by about 2%, ranging from 1.8% to 3.1%.

So the question becomes: How much could a 2% speed improvement impact the competition?

“A lot,” says Wilkie. “We’re showing that shoes matter, and in particular that some spike brands have performed better than others. Historically, we’ve seen differences of less than 0.5% over the course of a race decide who wins gold, who wins silver, and who doesn’t. Our finding of 2% suggests that some of that may be due to some people having slightly better shoes than others.”

“Few athletes will be running in traditional spikes at the Olympics, but it’s important to recognize that not all superspikes are created equal,” Hoogkamer adds. In the final experiment of the study, the researchers evaluated off-the-shelf shoes. They found that the PUMA evoSPEED LD Nitro Elite+ and Nike ZoomX Dragonfly showed significant speed improvements of around 2 percent, but a third model from a different brand showed only a 1 percent improvement and was statistically no better than traditional spikes.

While Hoogkamer’s previous studies have shown benefits of supershoes in marathons, quantifying this in middle-distance events has presented unique challenges. To test the effects of supershoes on marathoners, researchers typically measure the air runners exhale while running at marathon pace on a treadmill.

“But when athletes run at middle-distance pace, there’s a significant contribution from anaerobic energy metabolism that we don’t capture by measuring the athletes’ breathing,” Rodrigo-Carranza explains. Instead, the researchers relied on their own experiences as (former) middle-distance runners and developed a new protocol in which they asked the athletes to run a series of 200-meter intervals at their self-imagined middle-distance pace, which is a common training routine for middle-distance runners.

Bertschy emphasizes the scientific rigor that allowed the team to isolate the impact of shoe design from other variables, particularly in middle-distance running performance. “We know from the literature that shoe weight has a significant impact on the metabolic cost of running, and that every 100 grams added to the foot increases the energetic cost of running by about 1 percent, which in turn slows runners by 0.6 percent at these running speeds,” he explains.

So in their first experiment, they added 200 grams to each shoe of a pair of spikes that were identical to the control spikes to induce a 2% higher energy cost for the runner. They predicted that this would result in a 1.2% decrease in speed. If their prediction were correct, it would confirm that their methods accurately reflected the effect of the shoe itself. And that’s exactly what they did.

In Spain, Rodrigo-Carranza then assessed the reliability of his new protocol by asking participants to run in three different spike models not just once but on three separate days. When assessing group differences between the three spike models, the researchers found exactly the same results on each of the three days, further demonstrating the robustness of the protocol.

As for how the superspikes make people run faster, the researchers found that the runners took longer strides, not faster ones. “Our results also indicate that in a 1,500-meter race, our participants would take between 17 and 21 fewer steps in the superspikes compared to the traditional spikes,” Hoogkamer says.

Hoogkamer imagines the innovations that this new method will bring. “Different brands are now actually using this protocol to evaluate their spikes and figure out what works best for a specific distance or for a specific athlete who is stronger, heavier, or faster,” he says. “You can go to a specific athlete, have them test spikes with our new protocol and figure out: Do you need to wear spike A or spike B?”

As for what non-Olympic athletes can take away from this study, he says it can help people understand that yes, athletes train harder, but also: it’s all about the shoes.

“This study is primarily to help them interpret what they see at the Olympics or when world records are broken — part of that is because shoes are getting better and better, and we have the evidence to back that up.”