The effect of footwear type was investigated during the barbell back squat using 3D motion analysis and ground reaction force data. Nine male participants (mean age = 26.4 ± 5.4 years, height = 1.79 ± .08 m, mass = 84.7 ± 16.1 kg) completed 2 experimental testing sessions wearing 2 different forms of training footwear: i) standard sports trainers (RS); and ii) specialized weightlifting shoes (WS). On each test day participants completed a sequence of 5, 3 and 1 repetitions of a barbell back squat using 50, 70 and 90% respectively of their 1RM load in each of the shoe conditions. Shoe order, which was initially randomly assigned for test day 1, was reversed on test day 2. Significant main effects were found for peak dorsiflexion of both left (p <0.001) and right (p < 0.001) ankles. Pairwise post-hoc comparisons showed that the RS condition exhibited significantly more dorsiflexion compared to the WS condition in both the left and right ankles. There was also a significant main effect of load (%1RM) within the left ankle (p < 0.01) with post-hoc comparisons showing that there was a significant increase in peak dorsiflexion angle from 50% to 90% (p < 0.05) and 70% to 90% of 1RM (p < 0.05) but no difference between 50% and 70% of 1RM (p = 1.000). These findings indicate that further investigation is necessary in order to substantiate claims regarding the benefits of wearing weightlifting shoes during resistance training exercises targeting the squat movement.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 317. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 21 February 2026.
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Altmetric has tracked 34,307,719 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
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