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ASICS ARTICLE WITH DR CHRIS BISHOP Athletic Footwear: A Synergy of Performance Dr Chris Bishop
Director of Biomechanics—The Biomechanics Lab & Independent consultant for ASICS Australasia. A lot of people don't give footwear enough credit. Not only is footwear a powerful manipulator of human movement, but it can also have a drastic effect on human performance. So what goes into the design of a shoe that can have such an effect? A lot of hard work, innovative thinking, creative design and calculated execution. Every two years, the footwear biomechanics symposium brings together the best footwear scientists around the world, from both industry and academia, to share a mutual love of footwear for 3 days. What I often find frustrating about scientific meetings is when companies or individuals get on stage, share 5% of the story and leave you hanging. But sometimes I am left amazed, inspired and proud of the innovative work being performed to positively influence human performance. So I want to share with you my experience from FBG, and how some of the research that was presented (namely Prof Roger Kram’s keyone address) can be translated directly into practice. And to do that, I am going to use a framework that was presented called the synergy of performance (Credit to Emma Farina from NIKE for the term). There are three ways in which footwear can influence human performance (through a surrogate measure of running economy): Shoe mass Longitudinal bending stiffness Cushioning Maximizing all three creates what a 'Synergy of Performance." So is light mass all the rage? Firstly, we know light shoes influence performance. This was originally proposed by Ned Frederick back in the 1980s, with the finding of increasing shoe mass by 100g had a negative effect on running economy in the order of magnitude of 1%. Roger Kram and his lab have validated this finding (see Franz et al. 2012), which makes Ned's experimental findings even more impressive given the lack of equipment and knowledge 30 years ago compared to now.
Figure extracted from Franz et al. (2012)
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