Basketball Insoles
By Henrick Norremark
What Actually Matters in a Basketball Shoe (Hint: It's Not Just the Cushioning)
Basketball puts more force through your feet, faster, than almost any other sport most people play — jumping, landing, cutting, and absorbing contact from other players, over and over, for the length of a game. It's no surprise that foot and ankle injuries make up a large share of basketball injuries at every level — published studies put the figure at roughly 22% to 50% depending on the population studied, consistently the single most common injury site in the sport.
Basketball shoes have chased a solution to this for decades — air pockets, pumps, coils, every cushioning technology imaginable. But cushioning is only solving one part of the problem.
Why Cushioning Alone Isn't the Whole Answer
Basketball players are especially prone to plantar fasciitis — inflammation of the band of tissue running along the bottom of the foot, often felt as a stabbing pain in the heel that can sideline a player fast. Here's the part cushioning doesn't touch: plantar fasciitis usually isn't caused by too little padding. It's caused by that tissue being asked to do a stabilizing job it wasn't built for.
Think of it like a mattress that's genuinely too firm for your back — adding a soft topper makes it feel different, but it doesn't fix the frame underneath. Cushioning changes how impact feels; it does nothing about how your foot actually rotates when it lands.
What's Actually Happening at Landing
Your heel doesn't land flat and stay still — it rotates on a diagonal path with each step, a job that belongs to the subtalar joint just below your ankle. On a flat, hard court surface, wrapped in a shoe with a flat, symmetric footbed, that joint has nothing to rotate against. The motion it should be handling gets pushed onto nearby tissue instead — very often the plantar fascia — and in a sport with as much repetitive high-force landing as basketball, that mismatch shows up fast and often.
Why Custom Orthotics Aren't Always the Answer Either
Rigid custom orthotics, built for stability in everyday shoes, often don't hold up well to the repeated high-impact loading of a full-contact sport — they can be too stiff to flex with the shoe and the motion basketball demands, which is part of why many athletes end up not using them at all during play.
What to Actually Look For
A basketball insert needs to do two things at once: stay thin enough not to crowd the shoe, and be shaped to guide your heel's actual rotation rather than just cushion the landing. Landing Gear's heel cup is shaped to match that diagonal rotation directly — the T-100 in particular is thin enough to fit inside most basketball shoes without changing the fit, while still addressing the mechanical mismatch a flat footbed can't.
In independent 3D motion capture testing (BioMechanica LLC, Dr. Martyn Shorten, 2019, n=31), 28 of 31 people landed with their heel rotating correctly in Landing Gear's M-100, compared to just 3 of 31 in standard foam — a measured difference in what the joint does at the exact moment of landing, which is the moment that matters most in a sport built on landing over and over.
You don't have to give up your favorite basketball shoes to address this — Landing Gear fits inside most shoes with a removable insole, cushioning included.
This article is for general information only and isn't a substitute for evaluation by a doctor or podiatrist, especially for pain that persists or affects your ability to play.