The new Brooks Glycerin Flex running shoe provides a mix of minimalism and maximalism.
Brooks
A movement toward running shoe minimalism swung the other direction over the last five-plus years as the maximalism era has taken root. Brooks Running, the #1 brand in U.S. specialty running sales, is ready to usher in the next wave: essentialism. And they’ll do so with the new Glycerin Flex shoe in early 2026.
While the Flex Zone technology makes its debut in Brooks’ popular Glycerin silhouette, Carson Caprara, Brooks Running’s senior vice president of footwear and apparel, tells me it’s a technology that can span any franchise and moves Brooks toward the best of both the minimalism and maximalism worlds by introducing a grooved Flex Zone.
“This Flex Zone is designed to allow the shoe to actually separate in the rearfoot and the forefoot independently and allow the shoe to control the foot through transition and toe off,” Caprara says. The idea is to embrace the natural movement of the foot without losing the benefits of the advanced cushioning foams of today’s shoes.
An underfoot S-groove in the Brooks Glycerin Flex decouples the forefoot and rear foot for better ground feel.
Brooks
“It feels different,” Caprara says. “That is the most important thing right now. When you put this shoe on, it won’t feel like anything else you’ve seen on the shoe wall. You will feel the natural movement of the foot again that you don’t get in today’s running shoes. You will get it in an instant, a connection with the ground and feel a connection with your body again.”
The concept of the Flex Zone came amidst the maximal movement, where many runners lost the natural signals of their foot’s movement as it was locked up in a shoe’s intense cushioning. Some runners felt disconnected from the ground. Creating the Glycerin Flex, then, was a way for Brooks to bring back the natural feel while embracing the nitrogen-infused chemical compounds making up today’s elite running shoes.
MORE: Lululemon Developing New Materials And Products For Milan Olympics
To make it work, Brooks has spent roughly a decade working on the theory, with early iterations appearing in concept shoes over five years ago. The redefined technology, based on biomechanics, positions the Flex Zone groove to match the bone structure of most runner’s feet. Caprara says this allows the right amount of release so the forefront can become rigid for toe-off.
Caprara says the mistakes of the minimalism was simply creating a hyper-flexible, mobile shoe with no intelligent breaking of the foam to midsole. The maximalist shoe went too far the other way for some, disconnecting the foot with biomechanics. He says that the groove allows the foot to flex into the ground, recoil and become a lever for toe-off.
Brooks calls the new Glycerin Flex the start of the essentialism era of running shoes.
Brooks
While Caprara says the stack is still relatively high, the decoupling allows the shoe to move naturally, all part of what he calls the new era of essentialism. Minimalism was about listening to natural human motion when footwear became heavy in support technologies. Maximalism embraced technology again to improve performance and reduce some runners’ knee pain, but it disconnected from the natural motion of the body. “Essentialism is merging of the human and technology in a way that hasn’t been done,” Caprara says. “Blending them together and ushering in a new era.”
The Glycerin Flex features the brand’s popular DNA Tuned foam with a 26 mm stack height in the rear and 20 mm in the forefoot. While this would have been the brand’s thickest shoe roughly five years ago, the Flex Zone detailing embraces the ground-feel without losing the benefits and energy from the foam.
DNA Tuned is a nitrogen-infused foam that allows the brand to tweak the chemical structure for more stable or more responsive cushioning based on needs across the midsole. Most high-level foams in the industry now use nitrogen infusing to better tune the cells at a chemistry level.
Caprara says the Feb. 1 launch of the Glycerin Flex establishes Brooks at the forefront of a new era. “The next era for Brooks is that we can do both, fast follow when needed, but also lead,” he says. “We put a ton of time and energy into understanding human motion. We believe we are leading the industry into the next era of running product in a way that doesn’t exist.”
MORE: Asics Expands Blast Running Shoes With New Foam And Two New Styles
