Inspired by bean bags, Nike team has created Nike Joyride – a new cushioning innovation with thousands of TPE beads – that makes running more joyful than ever before.
It may seem a little wild to seek inspiration from bean bags to design a shoe’s sole, but that’s exactly how far and wide the Nike team explored to devise its latest cushioning platform. The resulting sole apparently makes the runner feel they’re running on bubbles and quite aptly it’s been named the Nike Joyride!
Nike Joyride joins Nike Air and Nike React as the latest proprietary innovation among the company’s range of diverse cushioning platforms. Work on Nike Joyride started due to a common request from runners to make running easier. “Every runner faces the same problem: stress from pounding the pavement. We knew we needed a completely new cushioning system,” said Will Moroski, Senior Product Line Manager for Nike Running. Moroski and his team had a lot of fun coming up with this unique sole and after finding inspiration in a bean bag, spent years obsessing over finding the right shape, size and feel of the beads. Along the way they tested one hundred and fifty materials before finalising on TPE – a copolymer of plastic and rubber – for the beads.
So, with every step, thousands of these beads move around your foot to provide personalised cushioning and support and then bounce right back to assist you in moving forward. This responsive mechanism ensures a soft, comfortable ride and helps keep the legs fresh thanks to the amazing impact absorption as well as energy return.
This personalised underfoot experience has been achieved not just by the beads but also by zonally-tuned pods within which the beads are placed. They allow these beads to expend in all directions but ensure that the beads don’t crowd in areas where they aren’t really required. This is possible because the pods are scaled according to how a foot strikes the ground. So, the heel pod is much bigger than the rest to help absorb impact and the one at the forefoot is designed to facilitate the transition to the next step. For instance, if a shoe has 8,000 beads, then nearly half of them are in the heel and only about 5% towards the toe. Further, Nike engineers have tuned the pods differently to meet the varying requirements of different models offered with Nike Joyride.
The dynamic bed of the Nike Joyride adapts to your foot and offers a fun, unique running experience. More importantly, it makes the entire body feel good and fresh. When compared to some of Nike’s best running shoes, including Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 36 and Nike Epic React FK2, Joyride offers 14% better impact absorption!
Nike Joyride shoes have been launched worldwide on 15th August, 2019. So, if you would like to find out how much fun it would be to run on bubbles, visit Nike.com and order your Joyride.
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