Review: APL Concept 3

I want to jump higher.

What basketball player doesn't? Getting up is good for rebounding, shooting, lay-ups, and, of course, the big daddy of all sports moves—dunking.

Not that I can dunk.

What I can do though, is lace up a pair of Athletic Propulsion Labs basketball shoes, which have a unique distinction: They are banned by the NBA for their ability to improve a player's vertical leap.

The shoes do this, the company claims, through a special mechanism called the Load and Launch. Basically this is a hard plastic spine that runs through the middle of the sole, connected to a sort of plastic spring embedded in the toe of the shoe. The idea is that, combined, these features increase responsiveness and bounce right where you need it most – under the ball of your foot. The result, APL says, is up to 3.5 extra inches of vertical on a good jump.

The company's latest shoe to feature Load and Launch technology, the Concept 3, are already selling out in almost all sizes.

But do they work?

I recruited a friend of mine and former college player named Shonn to help find out. We both tried out a pair of bright green Concept 3s, which, well, let’s just say these will draw some attention to you on the court. They are friggin' bright.

The first thing we noticed is that on the outside, the Concept 3s seem slightly cheap. Not crappy, but these are $175 shoes, and when I pulled them out of the box, they definitely felt plastic-y compared with the space-age material of the Nike Kobe 8 shoes I normally wear. That said, once I slipped them on my feet they felt soft and comfortable – almost too much so. It felt a little like I was getting ready to play in a pair of fuzzy Uggs. They also ran small – both Shonn and I had to go up a size from what we normally wear.

Finally we started playing, and I gotta say, they felt pretty great. The extra padding I noticed at first didn't bother me that much. OK, they still felt a little bulky, but they also felt extremely responsive. And, yeah, it felt a little easier to jump.

But was I getting higher?

After a few games, and even a few dedicated leaps to the rim, the only thing that was clear was that we needed a more empirical way to test.

That's when Shonn had a brilliant idea—Post-it notes. We gathered a bunch of small Post-its, and marked some with large "X"s. We then performed a series of jumps, sticking the Post-its as high on the backboard as we could. Plain notes for our normal shoes, Post-its with an X on them for the Concept 3s.

To make sure warmup and fatigue weren't a factor, we alternated between shoes. Five jumps in our normal shoes, followed by 5 in the Concept 3s, followed by 5 more in the normal shoes, and so on.

By the end we had each stuck 20 or so Post-its to the board. The results were conclusive: The Concept 3 X Post-its were distinctly higher than the normal Post-its for both of us. In fact, mine were, on average, a full Post-it's width higher, which when I measured them is roughly an inch and a half of difference. The shoes worked. OK, it was still less than half of the claimed 3.5 inches, but hey an extra inch is an extra inch.

Interestingly, I did a second test with standing jumps—no run up. Here I saw absolutely no difference. The Post-its overlapped completely. This tells me two things. First, it tells me that the shoe’s thick sole wasn’t a factor—at first I considered the extra standing height might be translating to extra jumping height. Second, it tells me that the more down force you create, the better results you will see—the more spring you get. So yeah, perhaps a high-level athlete could get 3.5 extra inches.

I'm not exactly sure how much difference an inch or so makes in a game, but I'll tell you this: Once you know that these shoes deliver that extra lift, it becomes tough to opt for anything else. Because even though going up an extra 1.5 inches sounds trivial, going down 1.5 inches seems devastating. So while I don't necessarily like the look and external feel of the Concept 3, I still seem to lace them up for every game.

WIRED They actually do help you jump a little higher.

TIRED Feel slightly cheap on the outside. Don't have the refined good looks of modern Nikes or Adidas. No low-top version. Expensive.