Nike Joyride releases first in the Nike Joyride Run Flyknit. Designed for all runners, the soft cushioning and smooth transition helps ease impact — important whether you’re a seasoned marathoner taking a shake-out run or a novice looking to find your true stride.
Nike Joyride joins Nike Air and Nike React as the latest proprietary innovation within the company’s diverse array of cushioning platforms. Joyride is engineered to help keep legs fresh by delivering a personalized underfoot experience with great impact absorption in a surprisingly light, energy-returning package.
Nike Joyride is a Nike-only, proprietary cushioning system made of thousands of TPE (a copolymer of plastic and rubber) beads. Joyride is the result of intense, iterative trialing; 150 materials were tested before landing on a TPE for the beads.
The beads are placed within zonally-tuned pods, which lets the foam expand in all directions — Nike calls this “multi-dimensional displacement.” Engineering the Pods also helped solve the problem of the beads migrating too much around the foot and becoming uncomfortable. With Pods, Nike designers were able to create a zonal-tuning for each respective iteration of Nike Joyride.
The system creates a dynamic footbed that forms to your foot and feels personalized to you.
The pod scale is based on how the foot strikes the ground when in motion. The heel pod, for example, is bigger to absorb impact, while those at the forefoot are prepared to facilitate a smooth transition forward. Beads are dispersed within the pods to match the zonal-tuning that aligns with the performance needs of specific points in your stride. (For example, if there are 8,000 total beads in a running shoe, some 50% of the beads would cover the heel strike while 5 percent would offer cushioning at the toe.)
Future silhouettes featuring Nike Joyride, tuned specifically for their unique purposes, include the Nike Joyride NSW, Nike Joyride NSW Setter (which debuted during Matthew Williams’ SS20 ALYX show at Paris Fashion Week), the women’s-exclusive Nike Joyride NSW Optik and the Nike Joyride Kids Nova, expressly engineered for the needs of young athletes.
