So, you watch my episode on how to choose a running shoe and now you want to know what's a neutral shoe? What is this thing that I'm talking about? Well, I'm Jesse Funk and on today's episode of Runner's High, I'm going to tell you exactly what a neutral shoe is and who can actually be wearing it.
So like I showed you in my how to choose a running shoe episode, I showed you what I'd been wearing which is this shoe from Nike, the Lunarepic Flyknit 2, discontinued for a couple of years now, but I keep stock of shoes once I find one that I really, really like.
This is a neutral shoe and a neutral shoe, by definition has no posting in the midsole. So, there's a lot to kind of cover here. What am I talking, what's a midsole, what's posting, what the heck am I talking about?
Okay. So, a midsole is all the actual cushioning here in the shoe. If I could cut the shoe in half, we could see, you know, inside of the shoe, back here, chop this in half, we can see all this padding in here, that's the midsole.
So, posting is some kind of physical foam differential or an actual physical post of some sort. There's something in the shoe that causes it to be stiffer on one side or the other.
But a neutral shoe contains none of that. So, a neutral shoe is just meant to roll neutrally. It's for somebody who has a neutral gait, which is where your foot rolls forward and pronates just slightly. |We are supposed to pronate, that's a natural motion.
Now, you can tell them pretty much by their look, because like you can see on this one. There's nothing you can see on the outer part of the midsole. It's all one seemingly same foam. I do believe they use a couple of different foams in this on the inside.
But often with a non-neutral shoe you'll see some kind of color differential here or a ?? 2:18> on the outside, something there. So, neutral shoes are for people with neutral gaits and want to run without any extra support, laterally in either direction.
So that's the long and short of it. Check out the next video if you want to know what a stability shoe is, and the two different types of stability shoes that might be important for you.