Are ‘super shoes’ worth the money? It depends on your running skill.

So-called “super shoes," which are high-tech sneakers that companies claim help wearers run faster, have taken over the running world. Professional and elite runners say the shoes have helped them break records, and amateur marathoners buy them in hopes of running a personal best.

One of the best-known super shoes on the market, the Nike Vaporfly line, can sell for $250 or more. Now a team of exercise scientists has authored a study that aimed to answer the question: Should average runners bother with these shoes?

“Most of the research that had been done was on people and paces that would be relevant to people who were running like sub-three hour marathons, which is a really small fraction of runners,” said Dustin Joubert, the study’s lead author. “And yet these shoes are marketed to everybody.”

Super shoes typically have a lightweight, compliant and highly resilient midsole foam with a curved, rigid plate often made from carbon fiber embedded within the foam.

“A shoe with just the foam is not quite super, and a shoe with just the plate is not super,” said Geoff Burns, a co-author of the study. “Together, they’re magic.”

Or at least, it seemed that way. A Nike-funded study published in 2017 found that among 18 runners tested, the shoes improved running economy — the amount of oxygen required to cover a certain distance — by 4 percent on average. That study looked at running speeds ranging from 14 to 18 kilometers an hour — or runners who can sustain between a 5:22 to 6:54 mile pace.

An independent study published in 2022 by Joubert compared different brands of super shoes and found that the Nike Vaporfly improved running economy by about 2.7 percent at speeds of 16 kilometers an hour (or 6:02 mile pace) compared to a control shoe.

But Joubert, an assistant professor of kinesiology at St. Edward’s University in Austin, hypothesized, based on case study testing on himself, that at slower speeds, the super shoes would not be as beneficial.

For the new study, the researchers tested 16 runners — eight women and eight men — at far slower paces than in the previous studies. These runners moved as fast as 12 kilometers an hour (an 8:03 mile pace) and as slow as 10 kilometers per hour (a 9:40 mile pace). (A four-hour marathon is a 9:09 mile pace.)

As in the earlier studies, the focus was running economy. Burns, a physiologist with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and an adjunct assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Michigan, describes running economy as "very similar to your fuel economy in your car.”

The runners completed one set of four repetitions of 5-minute trials on a treadmill, moving at the 10 km an hour pace followed by a similar set of repetitions at the 12 km an hour pace. There was a 5-minute break between each 5-minute trial.

Subjects wore either the $250 Nike ZoomX Vaporfly Next% 2, which represented super shoes, or the $90 ASICS Hyper Speed, which served as the control shoe representing a more traditional racing flat. Each runner ran twice in each shoe style, completing multiple reps at both paces.

The researchers found that the subjects improved their running economy by just a fraction — suggesting that the shoes do more for you, the faster you run. In the study, runners running at 9:40 mile pace improved their running economy by .9 percent, on average, while they improved by 1.6 percent at 8:03 mile pace.

Joubert also pointed out that five of the subjects did worse while wearing the super shoes. Their running economy was worse in the Vaporfly while running at the 10 kilometers per hour speed.

Nike didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post reached an ASICS America spokesperson, who said the company did not want to comment on an independent study.

Burns speculated that average runners may not be maximizing the benefits of the foam at slower speeds. “The faster and faster you run, the more force is put through the shoe,” Burns said. “At slower and slower speeds, you no longer fully compress it and you’re not really using the full potential — literally and figuratively — energy of it."

He also noted that the curved, carbon-fiber plate embedded in the foam of the shoe may not offer the same benefits at slower paces. “There could also be a speed dependency to that plate," Burns said. And it’s possible the stiff plate may negatively impact a slower runner, he speculated: “You need to have some level of speed threshold to kind of really not be working against the plate or fighting it.”

Burns added that one limitation of the study is that the runners were all about the same size. It’s possible that runners of different weights might produce a difference result.

Both Joubert and Burns said that they believe the results from this study would be applicable to super shoes by other brands.

“If you don’t like the shoe or get on with the shoes well, it’s not a guaranteed benefit,” Joubert said.

Wouter Hoogkamer, who conducted the 2017 study funded by Nike, called the new study “very well-executed” but said he found the results “somewhat surprising." The ASICS control shoe could have made a difference, he said. Hoogkamer’s study used a different control shoe.

“I think at these slower speeds, the control shoe might be fine,” said Hoogkamer, an assistant professor in kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts who was not involved in the recent study. “So it’s not necessarily that the Vaporfly shoes are not as good; it’s more that the control shoe might be enough shoe to work well if you’re not running that fast.”

Lisa Levin, a Road Runners Club of America certified running coach, said she tells her clients to get fit for shoes at a specialty running shoe store and that the most important thing is that the shoes fit a runner’s biomechanics. Comfort is also important.

“Because if you get injured or the shoe is hurting you or not a good shoe for you, it is definitely not going to make you faster," she said.

Levin added that sometimes, being in a super shoe can give runners a mental boost.

“I would hate to say, ‘This is only a shoe for fast people.’ That feels very elite," she said. "But again, our concern as coaches is, don’t just jump into a shoe that you don’t even know is going to work for your biomechanics.”

Joubert said the findings add to our understanding of the role of shoes in running performance, and shouldn’t necessarily discourage slower runners from trying them. For some runners, the approximately 1 to 1.5 percent potential improvement in running economy might also be worth it.

“The effects are still meaningful," he said. "I think you might expect that they’re not going to get as large of a benefit as some folks running at faster speeds, but if you had the money and you’re looking for a racing shoe, and you liked the feel of the shoe, I think you stand to have some benefit from it.”

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