At the other end of the footwear spectrum, you would have footwear that attempt to use technology to control and stabilize the foot, extensive cushioning that Nike Air Pegasus 83 Mujer dampens impact shock (but also impedes ground feel), greater heel-forefoot differential, typically heavier weight, and less flexibility. I don’t know what would be the best term to describe this end, but “maximalist” has been thrown about a bit here and there. Perhaps something like “Technological” might be more palatable, or “Cushion/Control.”A shoe at the “Cushion/Control” end of the spectrum is one that attempts to do the Nike Air Huarache Womens work for you (whether it succeeds in this is an entirely different discussion…). It is a shoe that people use because they cannot or do not desire to rely on inherent control of things like cushioning and stability. You might view the extreme at this end as a walking boot used to treat stress fractures – a completely restrictive and controlling form of footwear.
The reality is that nobody is going to run in a walking boot, and few are going to run barefoot with any regularity. So, if we view the footwear Adidas Falcon Mujer spectrum in the context of running shoes, we might have motion control shoes like the Brooks Beast at one end, and barefoot-style shoes like the Vibram Fivefingers at the other.Until recently, the vast majority of shoes found at shoe stores sat firmly on the left-hand side of this spectrum, with a few racing flats sprinkled Nike Air Max TN Mujer around over to the right. With the recent influx of lightweight and more minimal shoes, the full spectrum is starting to fill out a bit, and a diversity of options are available to each runner (this, to me, is the most significant outcome of the minimalist movement). There are certainly shoes that will be hard to place along a spectrum like this (e.g., Newton shoes, the Altra Instinct), mainly because shoes can vary in so many ways. You might have an extremely lightweight shoe like the Brooks T7 Racer that has considerable cushioning and a standard 12mm heel lift. You might have a shoe with a small heel-forefoot drop that is fairly inflexible (e.g., New Balance Minimus Road) or that has pronation control technology Nike Air Max 97 Femme (e.g., Saucony Mirage). Furthermore, within this spectrum there are also fairly well defined sub categories. Motion www.danemill.co.uk control shoes, stability shoes, racing flats, trail shoes, cross-country flats, and barefoot-style shoes (my preferred term for what some call the “minimalist” category) are all reasonably well-recognized groups.Ultimately, I think a more complex way of classifying shoes might be helpful. Given enough quantitative data on a given suite of shoes, it might be possible to apply a multivariate statistical method like principal components analysis to identify clusters of similar types of shoes (would love to try this, but need to find the shoe data…). You could input parameters like weight, heel-forefoot differential, midsole durometer, midsole thickness at various locations, forefoot width, forefoot depth, etc. and get a sense of which shoes are most similar. I’m a stats geek, so this kind of thing intrigues me.Finally, I think Nike Air Max 270 Femme it’s important to emphasize that minimalist need no be the end goal for all runners, particularly if they are doing just fine in their current shoes. There are transition risks involved with running in shoes at the minimalist end of the spectrum. Similarly, a barefoot runner who suddenly decides that the Brooks Beast will be their next footwear choice should be just as wary. Bad things can happen when a dramatic change is made too quickly.I’m not sure if this is at all helpful, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time, and given the amount of time that I spend writing about “minimalist” footwear, I thought it might be helpful to better explain how I view things.I find them particularly hard to classify. They have the low heel to toe drop, but in every other respect don’t seem to qualify as minimalist. In fact, their “stability” models even have medial posting Nike Air Max 90 Femme for pronation control, which is what led me to their shoes in the first place (I wanted a shoe to promote a forefoot strike that also had some medal posting as I am a big overpronator on one side).
Along with two weekly barefoot runs (in which my overpronation does not seem to be any sort of problem), these  are the only shoes I am using anymore! I got into trouble with all of the barefoot type shoes, including vibrams and merrels, as I think they make you think you are barefooting but you really lose important proprioception that would otherwise stop you from doing too much too soon (I found this out the hard way and am only recently fully back from a severe case of posterior tibial tendonitis cause by TMTS in Merrels )