While wearing basic appropriate clothes for hard exercise is recognized as a basic matter of comfort and efficiency, there are some people who overlook the most important part of the wardrobe when it comes to aerobics: the shoes. Aerobics are based in large part on the rapid, accurate, and steady movements of the legs. That means that there’s nothing more crucial to your outfit than shoes that help your feet perform at their best.

Shoes can be bad in many different ways. They can be too tight, too lose, inadequately supportive or too thickly padded. Each kind of aerobics exercise works best with a pair of shoes made expressly for that exercise, and if you go without you could find yourself getting chafed, blistered, or sore just by going through your typical workout routine. At the very least, bad shoes will make it certain that you don’t perform at your best, thus crippling your body’s cardio development. Don’t be a slave to your shoes! Make your shoes work for you and do what you want them to do. That means knowing what you need from shoes when you’re out shopping for them.

Comfort is very important. Your shoes should feel like a natural extension of your body, rather than distracting your concentration from the workout or hindering your movements. They should feel good to wear at all times. Good shoes will make you forget they’re even there until you look down and remember how much they’re helping you.

However, comfort should also be coupled with firmness and strength. You can get away with slightly loose, overly roomy shoes when you’re just walking around, but when it comes to exercise such things are just an obstacle. To get the best from yourself during your exercise routine, you require shoes that will be gentle but firm-fitting on your feet. They should also help keep an equally firm grip and balance on the ground, no matter what you’re running across and no matter what angle you’re tilted at. The latter is particularly important if you go running outdoors in bad weather. When there’s an icy or slick patch you don’t see, shoe quality can mean the difference between safety and nasty injuries. All it takes is one bad fall to suck all the fun out of sprinting in the winter!

Shoes should have good absorbing qualities and protective padding, while not suffocating your feet or feeling too large and clumsy. This in large part will vary depending on what kind of socks you wear with your shoes. Thicker soaks means your shoes need less padding, and on the opposite end thin soaks will require more thickly-padded shoes. Take both parts of your outfit into account and find shoes and soaks that work well together to protect and support your feet even during highly strenuous activities.

Last of all, as an elaboration of an aforementioned point on the necessity of different shoes – pay attention to the basic structure of your shoes and how they let you move! Different kinds of exercises will want you to move in different ways. This, in turn, is reflected in basic shoe design, which will vary depending on their intended purposes. There is no one shoe design to accomodate all forms of aerobics, so instead of looking for a magical one size fits all, select a few different shoe designs that will specifically help you out with your favorite exercises. Then you can be sure you’re performing at your best all the time.