If you are the kind of person who often fantasizes about winning a gameshow by spouting out some obscure fact or you are looking to shave any additional weight off of your clothing game to optimize your walking speed, you might be curious about how much shoes actually weigh.
Though there is no golden ratio when it comes to shoe design, most shoes do fall within a specific kind of weight range, more or less.
Unfortunately, the factors that contribute to how much a shoe weighs varies so severely that the range itself isn’t so much a range as a “well it sure feels like a shoe” kind of weight.
Fun fact: A size 10 Yeezy Boost 350 “Turtle Dove” weighs 12.66 ounces.
| Type of Shoe (only one shoe) | Size | Weight (Ounces / Pounds) |
| Yeezy Boost 350 “Turtle Dove” | 10 | 12.7oz / 0.79lb |
| Jordan Superfly ’17 | 10 | 12.8oz / 0.8lb |
| Kyrie 4 | 10 | 13.0oz / 0.81lb |
| Jordan 32 Low | 10 | 14.6oz / 0.91lb |
| Lebron 15 | 10 | 14.7oz / 0.92lb |
| Harden Vol 2 | 10 | 15.0oz / 0.94lb |
Above we have listed the weights of various Adidas and Nike models. Even though there is not one designated weight for all footwear, that does not mean that you have to abandon all hope when it comes to finding lightweight shoes for running or heavier shoes for kicking assailants or whatever it is that people use heavy shoes for.
Check out: Everything You Need To Know About Shipping Shoes
Is there an average shoe weight?
A completely random but fun to think about topic of debate on popular running forums is this obsession with whether or not the weight of your shoes will actually impact your overall performance.
When it comes to trimming seconds off of your mile, runners and experts alike are split evenly between people who believe that it matters and people who believe that it does not.
Now, that isn’t to say that anyone is saying if you run in combat boots it won’t impact your speed, but rather that no one has ever really thought about making heavier running shoes, and the reality is that most running shoes are fairly similar.
Basically the two camps in this fight are caught in “0.02 ounces is a big deal” and “just buy running shoes and you’ll be fine” discussions.
Fortunately, from this obsession with the weight of shoes, running enthusiasts have determined that the average weight of a normal men’s running shoe is 9.5 ounces, which means we can expect all other shoes to fall somewhere around that number on average.
Possibly. More or less. In all reality, the runners seem to be the only people who thought to look for this average at all, so it’s all we have to go off of unless you want to gamble on the average shipping weight of a shoe package, which is honestly probably less exact than the forum guys.
Related: These Benefits Of Walking Barefoot Will Shock You
Why size really does matter
When it comes to considering factors that might actually impact the overall weight of a shoe, this is one area where size truly does matter.
A bigger shoe means more materials and more materials means extra weight. Learning how to determine how much shoes weigh is part completely guessing and part thinking about the common sense factors that would force it to weigh more.
While it makes sense that a bigger foot might not feel the proportional weight impact that comes with accommodating that size, the weight itself would literally shift because there is simply more shoe to be accounted for.
If you buy one shoe in a size seven and one shoe in a size thirteen, chances are the size thirteen is going to weigh a good deal more than their smaller counterpart.
This means that the averages obtained for any kind of shoe weight are likely also relying on an average shoe size, meaning there will always be heavier and lighter shoe outliers waiting in the wings. The plot thickens the more you look into it.
What impact shoe materials have on weight
Aside from the size of the shoe, the biggest contributor to shoe weight is actually the materials that the shoe itself is made out of.
There is a reason why your foam flip-flops are more likely to be carried off in the wind than your snow boots, and that is because of the kinds of materials and amount of materials being used to make these kinds of items.
A major concern when it comes to weight is the type and amount of rubber being used to create the shoes.
There is absolutely a notable difference between the weight of a shoe with a thin rubber bottom and a shoe that has three inches of rubber on the bottom designed to make you spontaneously grow for your next big speech.
Beyond the amount of rubber being used, the primary materials of the shoes themselves can have a significant impact.
For example, a shoe that is mostly cotton and synthetics designed for running likely weighs quite a bit less than a sturdy pair of leather dress shoes.
This light weight feature of cotton and synthetics is actually why those materials are used for running shoes in the first place.
The amount of padding in a shoe is another factor that might impact the overall weight. Shoes like Converse that have almost no padding likely have a lighter weight than a fully padded sneaker equivalent.
Conclusion
Though there are few reasons that anyone who doesn’t frequent a running forum would need to know the exact weight of their shoe, thinking about how much your shoes weigh is a fun exercise when it comes to considering details that you probably otherwise never would have thought of.
Depending on the size, materials, and amount of sweat soaked into your shoes, the weight of your footwear is prone to shifting dramatically from style to style.
In fact, it is likely that you could even buy two pairs of the same shoe in the same size and still find yourself with shoes that weigh differently because it is simply inexact.
What we know for sure is that if you want lighter shoes, there are plenty of pairs of foam flip-flops just waiting to give you blisters, and if you want heavier shoes, steel-toed boots are a surprisingly inexpensive option that will allow you to do whatever it is you plan on doing.
The overall weight of shoes is dependent on who you are, who they are, how big your feet are, and probably eighty other factors that we just don’t know about.