Fresh Foam X: the soft one, and what a tape measure finds
New Balance’s everyday foam is soft, tall and comfortable, and its name sits on a wider range of shoes than almost any other foam here. What it does not come with is a figure – which makes it one of the few technologies where measuring somebody else’s pair tells you more than the maker does.
Soft is the whole proposition
Fresh Foam X is the cushioning in everything New Balance makes that is not a race shoe. It is moulded in one piece, it is tuned softer than the average running midsole, and the rest follows from that: long easy miles are kinder on the joints, the shoe feels tall underfoot, and very little of the step comes back to you. It is a foam for distance and comfort, and New Balance has never pretended otherwise.
The foam that was designed from data
Fresh Foam arrived in 2014 with a claim that was unusual for a midsole at the time: that it had been shaped from measurements of real runners rather than drawn and then tested. New Balance put it plainly in their own announcement – the design team had combined the experience of a human designer with computer software to study “the strike and impact patterns of runner’s data”.
Two years later, bringing the foam to the 1080, they described what had been collected: “a select group of runners’ biomechanics, force patterns and wear tendencies”. What came out of it was a one-piece midsole, an embossed top bed and flex grooves placed where the data said the foot bends.
That is worth reading carefully, because it is a claim about shape, not about chemistry. The data decided the geometry of the sole. It did not produce a new material, and in none of that announcement material does New Balance say what the foam is made of. The X that arrived later is described the same way: the 1080v13 release promises “supreme soft cushioning” and “increased midsole stack heights” without attaching a single number to either.
What the box says, and what a tape measure finds
When a maker publishes no figures, the only numbers in circulation are the ones other people produce by buying a pair and measuring it. For the 1080 – the flagship, and the shoe most people mean by Fresh Foam X – an independent laboratory has done exactly that, and the results are a fair illustration of why it is worth doing.
None of it is a scandal. Every maker measures with its own method, and New Balance has been saying so since 2014: the footnote under that first announcement reads that “due to variances created during the development and manufacturing processes, all references to drop are approximate”. A maker telling you its own numbers are approximate is being straight with you.
What it does mean is that if you choose a shoe by its drop, the figure on the box is not the figure under your foot. And the figures are one pair, measured once, by one lab with one method – worth more than nothing and less than a promise.
The 1080v14, stated and measured
Weight: stated 298 g, measured 285 – lighter than claimed, which is the direction nobody complains about.
Stack: measured 37.0 mm at the heel and 32.8 at the forefoot, so a 4.2 mm drop against a stated 6.
Softness: 28.5 on the Asker C scale, where the average of the shoes that lab has tested is 35.4. Lower is softer, so the reputation is deserved – and the same test found this version slightly firmer than the one before it.
One name over a very wide range of shoes
The 880, the 1080, the More, the trail Hierro and several others all carry the same two words. They are not the same ride: the stack heights differ by a centimetre and more, the firmness differs between models and between versions of the same model, and a trail shoe with a rubber outsole underneath behaves nothing like a tall road cruiser.
So the name tells you which family the foam belongs to and roughly what it is trying to do. It does not tell you how the shoe feels. Two Fresh Foam X shoes can be further apart than a Fresh Foam X and something from another brand entirely – which is the same problem Saucony’s buyers have with the four foams called PWRRUN, arrived at from the opposite direction.
One more thing the name does not cover: New Balance’s faster shoes do not use it. When the brand wants a racing midsole it reaches for a different foam with a different name, and that is the clearest signal available about what Fresh Foam X is for.
Who it suits
Easy miles, long slow runs, recovery days and standing up all day. That is the list, and it is a long list – most of what most people do in running shoes is on it. The independent testing lines up with the marketing here: strong scores for daily running, weak ones for tempo work and racing.
A soft, high-volume foam also takes more of the landing before it passes anything on, which is why it gets recommended to heavier runners and to anyone coming back from a sore knee. The honest counterpart is that soft and tall is also unstable: the taller shoes in the family move under you on a rutted path or through a quick change of direction, and nothing in a soft foam fixes that.
It suits least well if you want to feel the ground, if you run fast often, or if you want the step to come back at you. A foam this compliant absorbs more than it returns – that is not a flaw in it, it is the job it was given.
Where you’ll find it
Shoes on this site built on the foam. They are examples of what it does in practice, not a catalogue.
No shoe on the list carries it yet.
Look for it in the full table, where you can filter by activity, material and price.
Similar and competing technologies
Softness can be bought with the material, with gas, with a cavity or with a springier plastic, and what you pay for it differs every time.
| Approach | How it works | What it trades |
|---|---|---|
| Soft moulded foam · Fresh Foam X | The material compresses a long way and takes the impact rather than handing it back. | Comfort over distance; little return at speed, and a tall soft stack is never stable. |
| Gas-infused foam · DNA Loft, NITRO | Nitrogen blown into the foam makes it lighter at the same softness. | Soft without the weight; it still absorbs more than it gives back. |
| Beaded PEBA · PWRRUN PB and similar | Fused beads of a very springy plastic return more of each step. | The fastest-feeling foams there are; expensive, and built light rather than durable. |
| Fused TPU capsules · Boost | Capsules of TPU give the step back and do not stiffen in the cold. | Springy rather than plush, and heavy for the softness you get. |
| Hollow pods · CloudTec | A moulded cavity collapses on landing, then closes and goes firm. | Cushioning by shape instead of softness; a two-stage ride not everyone takes to. |
The foam is the midsole itself rather than something added to it. How an arch-support maker from Boston became the brand that measures its runners before it draws a shoe is told in the story of New Balance.