Don’t we just love a complicated solution, to what’s essentially a non issue, on this forum?!
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You vetted the method of chat gpt? Don’t blindly trust it’s solution or sporoaches…
Now think about what you actually need to build to measure that properly… You need fake leg and foot where you can set the power because you need to measure the power before it goes into the shoe the the spring and if you want to check how it behaves over a pedalszroke you would need to make that rotating… It’s probably easier to just do a gas exchange analys of the Rider…
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… or temperature of the shoe.
You mean the one on whether you are faster climbing with your suspension open vs. closed? Yeah, that was clever, a misdirect to point to something more fundamental.
Especially on MTB shoes, you may want a bit more flex at times. My previous MTB shoes were Bont Riot+ MTB, a road shoe with SPD cleat interface and some rubber glued to them. On the bike, they were excellent, almost as stiff as my S-Works 7. However, they were not great to walk in to put it mildly.
Previously, I have owned Velokicks MTB shoes and these were amazingly comfortable. Now I am using a pair of Lake MX169, which are about as far away from the Bonts as possible. Since I use them on my commute and when I go shopping, they are a better fit. I will eventually get another pair that is stiffer, though.
I say we can just end the thread and buy these eye wateringly expensive new S-Works Ares 2. Omg the marketing claims. 
A shoe that improves your lactate threshold! AND makes you faster because you FEEL faster. It’s literally a shoe that Roglic says makes your bike “jump”! All that for ONLY £479!
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The only buzzword missing from that article was “AI”….and just pathetic “journalism” from road.cc.
There is plenty of new tech to help explain the price premium, which we’ll dig into further down the page
No, there really isn’t. They literally mentioned no “new tech” further down the page. They just spewed out Specialized’s PR points.
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But when has Specialized ever restrained themselves from blowing their own horn? Their promised benefits from ‘a shoe’ would make Rube Goldberg blush. I also have their incredible invention that the summarily abandoned: The Future Shock Stem. I have what was called a Gen 0.5, and the dealer couldn’t get any information from Specialized and what they did get was either for the original version, or the next version, so they were stunned and apparently pissed off someone there as they were, likely coincidentally, dropped as a dealer. They left with mixed feelings I’m sure. They were talking about all the ‘issues’ they had with Specialized, mainly support issues.
And who is going to stomp on such outrageous claims now? I wonder what the mechanism that would increase a leg’s power output? Can someone still walk on that shoe? 
And yet someone trotted out the asperger victim ChatGPT to come up with a way to test shoes. AI is the biggest ghost product in software in decades! Time after time ‘AI’ has been proven to be of highly questionable value for use in anything. It may get better, but at what cost. Reports of AI attacking various parts of government/society, AI giving out ideas to take out vital parts of society, etc… And oh boy, they want to use AI to run the US government. 
AI is THE shiny sticker corporations are using to call attention to their inept designed/engineered turd. 
It’s GREAT!! It has AI!!
No, but apparently they help Tadej jump!
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Primoz. 
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Even if it had springs in them it would be a HUGE JOKE!!!
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Oops!
Meh…hard to keep those Slovenians straight.
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So I have the Ares 1 and the tech is the exact same. Specalized have had varus wedges, insoles and metatarsal bumps for at least 10 years (they also say Retul scans everytime they make a shoe). I find varus wedges suit me so I like them, not everyone does though.
And it is a shame as the Ares 2 should be a good shoe, wide toe box but able to be tightened up at the heel and the top of the foot without being uncomfortable. It is exactly what I want from a shoe. We don’t need this hyperbolic marketing and ridiculous price though. It’s just a better fitting Torch (having not tried them on yet so I could be wrong). At least a white paper would be nice.
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I still haven’t stopped laughing at “Specialized clarifies that the wattage gain (presumably over the previous Ares shoe) is due to “improved lactate threshold” because the shoes have better footbeds, cleat position and internal wedges.” (bolding is mine)
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No that’s not what Im saying. You can measure the deflection of the shoe sole using a strain meter and also measure the force output with the power meter pedals they already have. From that you can calculate the hysteresis of the shoe sole and subsequently power loss. You don’t need to measure force input into the shoe so you can have any rider do this (no fake leg or foot). Thats the advantage with my proposal.
Measuring O2 consumption is too indirect to get better than a couple watts ( double digits seems more likely). And temp rise is tough to control for outside influences. There is a reason power meters dont measure temp rise to determine power output.
Overall this is an interesting problem and having a method that can give quantitative results is a fun challenge.
Your proposal boils down to using two power meters (not a criticism, just saying). When you measure the deflection of the sole, you could also infer the force applied to it. For small deflections the relation between strain and stress is linear. It’d be trickier as Young’s modulus will depend on the location on the sole, etc.
Independently of how you do it, I reckon this problem will be very hard in practical terms as I expect the losses to be very small. Ordinary power meters have an accuracy of 1–2 %, which limits what effects you can actually measure.
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The losses should be small. Does anyone know? But irregardless, carbon soles provide stability and incredible support. For people that put out smaller watts, no massive regular peaks, a plastic or nylon shoe is probably going to be fine (if they don’t flex the sole/shoe).
I, when I posted their video, thought they could be using it to influence the high end shoe market. By declaring ‘they were the same’, many buyers could/would be dissuaded from buying higher end (carbon) shoes. Why GCN would be trying to influence the shoe market is a topic of interest on its own. If people are buying carbon shoes to ‘look pro’, they are possibly wasting their money. Why would GCN care. How could GCN, and their hired lab, totally miss the idea that they were not measuring REALITY, that they were not even close to proving anything. It couldn’t look worse for GCN, their journalists, and their management. How did this happen, and what were they hoping to influence by releasing it. A post mortem would help… 
That and in my experience they do a better job at avoiding hotspots. That’s a comfort thing, and as such could lead to better performance. But then the argument would be more comfortable shoe ==> better performance, but since stiffer ≠ more comfortable, it still wouldn’t work.
Maybe they got caught in a corner. Typically, they do advertainment/infotainment stuff, i. e. they have a sponsor with new product X and they should make an entertaining video about it. Perhaps Pirelli sponsors a video and wants them to showcase their new 40 mm road tires. So they do a test where they “scientifically” compare how fast/slow the 30 mm, 35 mm and 40 mm versions are. It doesn’t matter which tire wins as long as Pirelli tires are featured.
Now they have tried to something really scientific and the expectation they set themselves is that the comparison should be scientific. Only to find out that this requires much more thought, care and capability than GCN had at its disposal.
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The weird bit is that no one working at the wind tunnel at Silverstone , which you’d think might require a physics degree, noticed they were totally wasting their time 
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