Flip your shoes over. If the wear is heaviest on the outside edge of the heel and along the outer sole, your foot is rolling outward as you move. That is supination — also called underpronation — and it is far less common than the opposite problem, which is why almost every insole on the shelf is designed for the opposite problem.
Pronation, the inward roll, is the body's shock absorber. A foot that supinates does not roll inward enough, so impact does not get distributed. It lands hard on the outside edge and travels up. People who supinate tend to have higher arches, stiffer feet, and a specific complaint: things hurt after activity rather than during it.
Supination and high arches usually travel together, which creates a compounding problem. A high arch needs a taller support to make contact at all, and most insoles are built around a medium arch because most feet are medium. So the person who most needs the shock absorbed gets an insole that never touches the middle of their foot.
PerseveranX is built for the tall end of the arch range. Not because taller is better, but because for this foot, shorter never makes contact.
There is a second half to this. A high, stiff foot pressed against a high, stiff insole is a lot of rigidity in one place, and that is where high-arch insoles earn most of their complaints. Two things keep ours from behaving that way. Your arch rests on open-cell foam, not on structure — the support sits underneath it. And that support is not a solid plate: the TPU frame wraps the heel and runs forward along the inside of the arch as a U rather than a continuous shell, so it carries load along the edges and still gives as your arch loads through a step. We did not soften the material to get that. It is the stiffest TPU we use, shaped to flex.
Turn one over and you can see straight through the arch.
What a supinating foot needs is not correction. It is cushioning that survives, and an arch that actually reaches.
That second part is where most insoles fail. Almost all of them are built from closed-cell foam — sealed gas bubbles in a rubber matrix. Under repeated load the bubble walls collapse and stay collapsed, a process the industry calls pack-out. For a high arch this is especially costly: lose three millimetres and the arch is no longer touching anything. Back to a gap, with an insole that still looks new.
We call this the Pack-Out Problem.
PerseveranX uses open-cell foam, whose interconnected cells let air move as the foam loads and unloads. It displaces instead of crushing and recovers between steps, which means the arch that made contact in week one still makes contact in month four. Check it with your thumb before you ever put it in a shoe.
Which one: Bouncy is the pick — our highest-rebound foam, which returns energy on a strike that lands hard and lands outside. If your activity involves repeated impact rather than steady miles, HoneyComb firms up specifically on hard landings and stays soft otherwise.
If you run or train, we have a page for that: Insoles for Running & Sport.
FAQ
How do I know if I supinate or pronate?
Outside-edge wear means supination. Inside-edge wear means pronation. Even wear across the sole means neither, and you do not need to worry about it.
I have high arches and my feet hurt after running. Related?
Frequently. A high, rigid arch absorbs less shock, and the load has to go somewhere. Cushioning that stays cushioned is the thing to look for.
Should I get a motion control shoe too?
Motion control shoes are built to limit inward roll — the opposite of what a supinating foot does. Usually the wrong direction.
