Many manufacturers will market their products as minimal or barefoot, but models out there are all very different, how can that be? What is really a minimal shoe?
Well, everyone will tell you that barefoot or minimal shoes inspire you to be closer to barefoot as possible. But by definition, shoes are the opposite of barefoot. While shoe manufacturers do their best to answer both needs, to wear shoes and feel barefoot at the same time, they need to decide on which parameter to give more weight and which ones will be ignored. That is why we have gathered all relevant parameters and summarized them into 1 nit table. This will help you determine how minimal the shoe you are interested in buying.
Same for our reviews, we will give a score to every parameter, then calculate the shoe average score, hens the “Minimal AVR score” of a shoe is a number between 0 to 10. This will tell you how much the manufacture really intended this to be a minimal shoe.
Just to illustrate, 0 will be a robust heavy boot that will fit construction workers and 10 is actually no shoes at all.
A low score doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, it may fit exactly what you need. If you aren’t sure what you need, read the review test details to understand if this the shoe for you.
