Tag: court shoes

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Choosing Squash Shoes

Squash Shoes
Come into our store and get some advice from our experts.
Whether or not you choose to have a designated pair of shoes just for squash (squash shoes) or a general pair of shoes that you use for multiple indoor racquet sports (indoor court shoes) is entirely up to you. The principles remain the same regardless of the decision you make.

Squash Etiquette

Squash etiquette (which is backed up by rules in most facilities) requires players to wear clean shoes with non-marking soles. This means that the shoes you play in should not be the shoes you wear while traveling to or from the squash court.

Outdoor shoes are not squash shoes; they are not squash shoes because they are dirty. Dirty shoes make dirty courts. Dirty courts become slippery courts and slippery courts are dangerous courts to play on.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.

Not Suitable for Squash

Basketball shoes are not squash shoes either. Nor are cross-trainers or running shoes. Almost without exception, black-soled shoes are not suitable for squash.

Badminton shoes or racquetball shoes can be substituted for squash shoes. However, tennis shoes are not squash shoes and should not be used for squash under any circumstances.

Gum Rubber Outer Soles

Squash shoes and indoor courts shoes typically have outsoles made of a blend of synthetic rubber and gum rubber. Pure gum rubber is blonde in colour and soft to the touch; however nobody makes pure gum rubber outsoles anymore. Virtually every manufacturer now uses a blend of gum and synthetic rubbers that is soft to the touch and sticky on hardwood floors.

The first thing you should be looking for when shopping for indoor court shoes of any kind is soles that are soft to the touch. If the shoes you are looking at have soft rubber in their outer soles, they are made for use on indoor courts.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.

Things to watch for:

Shoes that are too short may cause you to lose a toenail. The repeated pounding of your toenail against the end of the shoe will damage the nail bed. Eventually, the nail will loosen and fall off.

Shoes that are too tight will cause pain when your feet swell. Keep this in mind when trying shoes on in the store. Remember that your feet swell during a typical squash match.

Shoes that are worn out on the inside will cause your feet to hurt the next day. If your feet hurt signficantly the day after you play squash, check the inside of your shoes for wear.

Rule of Thumb

Serious squash players replace their shoes in a season as many times as they play per week on average. In other words, squash players who play squash three times per week will replace their shoes three times per season.

Of course, not every player wears shoes out at an equal rate. Players who toe drag, for example, will replace their squash shoes more often than players who do not drag their toes.

Shoe Selector For a full list of shoes in this category, please check out our ONLINE SHOE SELECTOR. You can sort by sport, gender, brand, size, weight, balance and more.
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How to Pick Court Shoes

YONEX POWER CUSHION AERUS 3R COURT SHOE BLACK

Just about every day, somebody who comes into our store to buy court shoes spends more time looking in the mirror than they do listening to our experts about court shoes. This is unfortunate. Court shoes are not about fashion. They are about performance. With that in mind, these are what your priorities should be when shopping for court shoes.

#1 Traction

Without question, the single most important factor to consider when purchasing a court shoe is traction. Court sports require sudden changes in direction. Sudden changes in direction require one thing above all else: traction. Mess this up and you could get seriously hurt.

Traction is also the most important consideration for our court shoe buyer. He understands that our players need shoes with excellent traction. So he examines every shoe we purchase carefully to ensure that it will serve our players well. If the brand or the model don’t offer sufficient traction, we don’t carry it.

#2 Fit

It may surprise you to learn that fit is actually a more flexible standard than most people think. In fact, most modern court shoes are designed in a way that permits players to wear their actual size or even one half-size bigger. When problems start to occur is when players try (and about half of our customers do) to cram their feet into shoes that are too narrow or too short for their feet.

Shoes are not skates. The rule is this: if you want to avoid foot problems when you are old, wear shoes that fit when you are young. Your toes cannot be crowded; they have to have room to move up and down and even spread out a little inside your shoe. Also important: your circulation should not be cut off, especially on the top of your foot. If you crank your laces like you do when you are tying skates or ski boots, you are cutting off circulation to your feet. A shoe should fit like a winter glove, not a pair of yoga pants.

#3 Function

Most court shoes are multi-functional. For example, badminton shoes can work for squash, volleyball, tennis or pickleball. However, not all court shoes work well for all sports. For example, there are almost no Mizuno volleyball shoes that our experts would recommend to squash, badminton or pickleball players.

In order to figure out which shoes are right for your sport, you really need to ask our experts. Once you pose the initial question, they will ask you a series of questions back. Once they have your answers, they will be able to help you narrow down your choices.

#4 Brand

Brand is almost, but not entirely, irrelevant when it comes to choosing court shoes. “Almost” because there are a few brands that do not make court shoes, or if they do, do not make them very well.

Our expert advice to customers is to ignore brand completely. The reason for this is simple. Too many customers get tunnel vision when it comes to brands. As a result, they end up buying shoes with inferior traction or shoes that don’t fit right or don’t function properly just because they want a particular brand. Teens and tweens are the worst for this. All too often, their top priority in court shoes is brand — not traction, not fit, not function.

#5 Style

Customers in our store often have the luxury of choice when it comes to style. Unless their feet are unusually large or unusually small, we will usually have plenty of shoes in stock that offer the right amount of traction in the right size and for the right sport. After that, it becomes a matter of choosing brands or styles to help narrow down their choices.

Unfortunately, customers with wide feet or other special needs, will never have the same style selection available to customers with “normal” feet. Wide court shoes are extremely hard to find and when our buyer does find them, they are usually bland. So if you have wide feet, focus on traction, fit and function only. Forget about brand and style. Those shouldn’t matter to you at all.

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Best Shoes for Court Sprints

Shawn asks: “My coach wants me doing five sets of court sprints during every practice. Should I be wearing running shoes or court shoes?”

Good question, Shawn.

If you are not sure what he is asking about, watch the video below.

Court sprints are a foundation drill for squash players. Squash players at every level do them. The higher the level, the higher the intensity, but all serious squash players do a lot of court sprints.

Do court sprints involve running? Yes, obviously. But more important, they require stopping and changing direction. If you watch the video again, you will note that he is stopping and changing direction laterally. In order to do this safely, a court shoe is required.

Asics Gel-Blast 7
Asics Gel-Blast 7
Unlike running shoes, which are designed for constant forward movement, court shoes are designed for movement in all directions. Moreover, they are designed for rapid changes in direction.

If you look at the outside edge of the forefoot on this Asics court shoe, you will see that the sole flares out significantly. This flare is important to the core function of the shoe because it prevents ankle rolls on sudden lateral stops. Running shoes do not have this feature because running shoe designers do not expect runners to be stopping laterally.

Perhaps more than any other court sport, squash players need to be able to stop and change direction suddenly and explosively. Therefore they need shoes that offer maximum traction and maximum stability.

Court sprints are considered a foundation drill in squash because they mimic one of the game’s core movements perfectly. For that reason, it is essential to be doing them in court shoes, not running shoes.

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Badminton Shoe Buying Tips

YONEX POWER CUSHION AERUS 3R COURT SHOE BLUE
Not all badminton shoes are created equal.
We sell hundreds of pairs of badminton shoes to players at all levels every month. And since most of our customers are repeat customers, we get a lot of feedback and we get many opportunities to see firsthand which shoes customers choose to buy again and which they do not. In addition to that, most of our staff play badminton themselves. So we get to spend a lot of time around people who play a lot of badminton and we get a chance to see what works for them and what does not.

YONEX NOT THE ONLY BRAND

Yonex ™ is our top selling brand of badminton shoes. There is no question about that. Yonex’ dominance in this category is partly deserved and partly undeserved. It is deserved in the sense that they make good quality badminton shoes worn by some of the world’s best badminton players. However, it is undeserved in the sense that other manufacturers make equally good badminton shoes that some players refuse even to consider as badminton shoes.

Asics, for example, like Yonex, is headquartered in Japan and is renowned for making top quality court shoes which are perfectly suitable for badminton and other court sports. In fact, some of their models, are made specifically for badminton. And perhaps most importantly, Asics shoes are designed for North American feet and therefore tend to fit North American feet better than Yonex shoes. Yet many badminton shoe customers completely overlook Asics badminton shoes because they don’t association the name Asics with badminton.

Asics is not the only brand to suffer this fate, though. Babolat, for example, makes slightly roomier shoes than either Yonex or Asics which are perfectly suitable for both recreational badminton and North American foot shapes, but few players even consider Babolat when looking for badminton shoes.

So our first piece of advice for customers shopping for badminton shoes generally is to take off the blinkers look at brands beyond the narrow world of Yonex. While there is no question that Yonex makes excellent shoes, there is also no question that Yonex shoes are designed primarily for the Asian market while other brands are equally good and tend to be better fits for North American feet.

NOT ALL SHOES ARE MADE FOR ADULTS

Shoe companies are smart. They understand their customers better than their customers understand themselves. For example, they all understand that they don’t have to make all of their shoes equally well because not all customers are going to wear their shoes for an equally long period of time.

Every year, for example, major brands like Yonex and Asics release one or two models that are designed for teenagers who will generally outgrow their shoes before they have a chance to wear them out. Naturally, these shoes are of lower quality than shoes which will be worn by adults over long periods of time. They have enough grip to last for a month or two.

They are built well enough to last through a typical six-to-eight-week high school badminton program. However, they are not built well enough to be suitable for adults who will be wearing them over the long haul. Nevertheless, they come in adult sizes and there are always adult players willing to buy them because they think they are getting a deal. They are not.

Therefore the second tip in our buying guide is to make sure that you are buying the right GRADE of badminton shoes. If you are buying for a teen who will only be playing for a short period in a school program, you may be able to get away with BUDGET grade badminton shoes. However, if you are an adult whose feet have stopped growing, avoid BUDGET grade shoes and go straight to RECREATIONAL or COMPETITIVE grade shoes instead.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU LISTEN TO

Finally, while many players tend to get their information regarding shoe purchases from other players, other players are usually not the best source of information when it comes to badminton shoes. Why is this? If you look around the courts where you play, you will see that most players are wearing shoes that are more than two seasons old any many have not purchased shoes in four years or more.

Think about the cell phone or computer you had four years ago. Shoe technology has been changing equally fast. So do you really want to make a decision about your footwear technology based on information offered by a customer who last bought shoes four years ago?

Materials and technologies are changing so quickly that even large department and box stores cannot keep up with the latest developments. In fact, large sporting goods stores order their shoes so far in advance that the shoe technology they offer is sometimes out of date before it even hits their shelves. The Yonex Aerus is a great example of this phenomenon. By the time most of the major sporting goods stores had Aerus shoes on their shelves, most of the high caliber players had already decided that the shoe was not a good one and were already moving on to the next big thing.

As a shoe buyer, your best course of action is to come into our store and try some shoes on. Our staff will find out where you are playing, how often you are playing, the level you are playing at and other important details. They will then be able to recommend a category of shoes that are suitable for your needs.

We carry a variety of badminton shoes in a variety of width suitable for both Asian and North American players. We know the difference between budget, recreational and competition grade shoes and we are completely up-to-date on the latest shoe technology.

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Yonex Eclipsion Best Stability Award

Tennis_Magazine_ECLIPSIONTennis Magazine, the No. 1 tennis publication in the world*, has awarded the POWER CUSHION ECLIPSION with the Editor’s Choice for Best Stability in their 2016 Shoe Guide. This award comes hot off the heels of the ECLIPSION receiving the gold medal in French magazine tennis addict. The shoe has received high accolades for its exceptional cushioning and shock absorbance provided by the POWER CUSHION. The shoe’s extraordinary performance has also earned the trust of top players, such as World No. 4 Stan Wawrinka, who talks about the shoe here.

The Tennis Magazine Shoe Guide looks at 13 new shoes from a number of different manufactures and puts them through extensive performance tests. The tests are carried out by several players of various physical builds, skill level and play style on varying surfaces to get a well-rounded picture of each shoe’s performance. Along with Best Stability, other awards included Best Technology, Best Lightweight Shoe and Best New Line.

Impressions opened with praise for the POWER CUSHION, “Its three-layer cushioning system provides superior padding on harsh impact and gave noticeable spring into the next step.” The review continued, praising the shoe’s Toe Assist Shape, “Yonex created a new toe-support design by adding additional room in the forefoot, relying on the foot’s natural movement for stability.” The shoe was also lauded for its combo of the POWER CUSHION and DURABLE SKIN which locks players into the shoe even during harsh movements, and its versatility across varying surfaces was also praised.

Yonex ™ gear has been a hit in Tennis Magazine, which recently awarded the VCORE Duel G 97 with Editor’s Choice for Best Heavy Hitter.