Sam Snead used to play golf barefoot, and he might have been on to something. The latest golf shoes are trying to support the way your foot naturally wants to move.
"The key is to make the shoe and foot work as one unit," says Dr. Steven Weinfeld, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York who specializes in the treatment of foot and ankle disorders. "That optimizes the transfer of force from the foot to the ground."
New shoes from ADIDAS (Tour 360 3.0), ECCO (Classic GTX) and FOOTJOY (SYNR-G) were designed with this idea in mind. All three seek to improve lateral stability with the use of thermoplastic urethane (TPU) in internal and external design features, including a beneath-the-insole bridge in Ecco's Classic GTX. In addition, each shoe features a way to keep the heel in place, including an external-molded TPU frame on the heel of the Adidas Tour 360 3.0 and a friction-reducing internal silicone heel pad on FootJoy's SYNR-G.
"If the foot is moving even a little within the shoe, you've got an unstable situation," says Weinfeld, who believes that shoes without metal spikes are actually healthier, too. "Metal spikes stick in the ground, and that's where we've been more likely to see injuries."
