Natural Running Symposium – Part 4

John: Leading in to that, could you just talk a little bit about the Newton technology and how it works?

Danny: Well first of all, it starts off by next to your foot there’s actually a firm plate, right next to the foot itself inside the shoe. There’s a firm plate for 2 reasons. In all foam shoes you have the biomechanics of your forefoot, as well as your rear foot. So if you land under your body, you don’t have to worry so much about your rear foot’s biomechanical movement.

But if you have a forefoot misalignment, called vares, or valgis, or short first metatarsal, or Morton’s foot tight, there’s only a few things that could happen, dropped third metatarsal or dropped metatarsal.

When you’re in foam, foam creates more of a rotational force as you break it down with your forefoot rotation. Because I’ve seen that for so many years, I’ve put a firm plate right next to your forefoot. Everybody goes, “Wow! It’s firm! That’s going to hurt!” No it’s not. Because your foot can deal with a firm surface. And it activates the technology underneath.

So they way our lugs protrude from the surface, as soon as those start to touch the ground, they move into an elastic membrane, which is just like your muscle and tendon. We’ve worked with Dupont, and the membrane that we’ve used is Dupont High Trail and it can store and retrieve 80 to 90 percent of the energy that goes in, just like your muscles and tendons. So all of our research tried to build…what is the
best things about your feet and your body, and how can we match those up with a shoe?

So as soon as we have a ground engaging technology. So as soon as the lugs start to microtouch the ground, movement starts. So a greater movement on impact is the greater cushion in physics. The more something moves on impact, the greater the cushion is. So our lugs can move into this hollow chamber on the stretch membrane up to about 8 and a half millimeters, that’s insane! Other company’s foams like 5, no matter how thick you make foam, it’s only going to be about 5 to 6 millimeters of compression, and that’s unstable as well.

So we have plate for communication, afferent feedback, and activated technology, very safe and biomechanical so you don’t rotate all around the top of it and compress down on the foam. Then from the ground up, as soon as you touch the ground, concrete or asphalt, moves up to absorb.

The beauty then is we allow you to lever your entire body mass right over the forefoot. So leverage again, it’s all Newton’s laws, all gravity and all science. We lever your whole body mass, then you lift off the ground as opposed to push. You don’t push off. That would strain your calf, achilles and fascia.

Once you lift, boom! There’s a little burst of energy that comes out of the shoes that’s stored from the vertical movement.

And so our shoes scientifically move with less energy.

So I know that more than you’ve probably wanted to know.