The recent explosion of interest Nike Air Max 90 in minimalist running shoes has brought along with it an interest in specific shoe design features that probably rarely crossed the mind of most runners just a year ago (before the publication of Born to Run by Christopher McDougall got people thinking about these kind of things). One of these is the concept of heel-to-toe drop, sometimes also referred to as heel-toe offset, heel-toe differential, or heel-toe lift (you sometimes also see “forefoot” substituted for “toe”). So what exactly is heel-toe drop, and why are people interested in it as a shoe design element?

My conclusion is that it is often hard to know what the thickness numbers being reported by manufacturers include – i.e., just midsole, midsole + outsole, or insole + midsole + outsole. Seems to me the latter is the most accurate representation of where the foot would sit relative to the ground in any given shoe, and that’s what I have reported here (with potential inaccuracies noted above). I should point out that a 1mm discrepancy is very small, Nike Free Run UK and probably negligible from a performance standpoint (and not to mention, also probably well within the margin of error).





Other things to consider – I often find that I have to do “surgery” on heel counters in the training shoes in those runners I treat – some shoes are worse than this than others (such as Saucony’s Fastwitch 4) – pulling down the upper off of the heelcounter and trimming down the back of it – some shoes require just plain cutting off the heeltab, as any pressure that presses on Nike Roshe Run Online the achilles above the insertion will cause more problems.