The heel section of the Sidas 3 Feet Mid Insole

Sidas 3 Feet Mid Arch insoles
Price: £30 a pair
Material: bamboo top cover; EVA shell
Weight (pair) 90g
Sizes: XS to XXL (shoe size 2-3 to 12-13)
Country of manufacture: South Korea

There’s glamorous outdoor gear that shouts top fashion or high technology.

Then there’s the less sexy end of things: your feet, or more precisely, the footbed they stand on.

For a walker, it’s arguable that the most important bit of kit is what goes on your feet. We deliberate at length about the best boots or shoes to slip on for our outings. Sore feet do not make for happy walking.

Although many boot manufacturers have made great strides in upping the comfort provided by the footbeds that come with their products, Sidas reckon most people will see an improvement in comfort and gait from fitting a pair of their insoles into a pair of boots.

Not only will it reduce the strain induced by the pounding taken by the soles of the feet, it can also improve posture.

When you consider the average person’s feet hit the ground 1,300 times for every kilometre walked, that’s a lot of potential strain – a moderate outing will account for about 15,000 steps.

So why pay £30 for a pair of insoles after you’ve already forked out a small fortune for the latest boot? It’s a good question and will depend to some extent on how happy you are with the supplied footbeds. We’ve spoken to manufacturers who put an awful lot of effort into designing their footbeds, but it’s a fact that some are, well, a bit basic.

The top and underside of the 3 Feet insoles

I’ve undertaken a long-distance multi-day walk in boots with soles so unforgiving that I had to have a five-minute boots-off break to give my soles time to recover.

And the stiffer the boot outsole and midsole, the more of that impact force is likely to be transmitted to the base of your foot.

So French company Sidas provided a pair of 3 Feet insoles for us to put to the test.

The top cover of the insoles is covered in material made from bamboo fibre – sounds painful but actually the fabric is soft and Sidas says it is anti-bacterial to reduce foot odour.

An Eco Ortholite layer provides additional cushioning and the EVA shell of the insole is pre-formed to support the arches.

At the heel, a gel pad provides ergonomic cushioning to match the characteristics of the foot, in my case a mid-arched foot.

Sidas has a method of working out whether you have a low, mid or high arch. You wet your foot, stand on a piece of paper and work out from the pattern which type of arch you have.

There’s a one-minute video to help you work out which type of foot you have. After doing the wet-paper test, it was clear my feet are mid-arch.

I used the onset of winter to fit a pair of 3 Feet to fit two pairs of winter boots that, although great in snowy and icy conditions, have footbeds with very little padding. In practice this makes them very hard on the soles of the foot.

I took the existing footbeds out, drew round them to make the pattern on the Sidas 3 Feet insoles, then cut off the excess with a pair of scissors. Reinsert them into the boots and you’re ready to go.

The front section of the insole is perforated to allow ventilation

Over a period of testing, the boots were used in a variety of conditions, ranging from hard, frosty paths and terrain to full –on winter with crampons.

The difference between walking with the Sidas 3 Feet and without was marked. After walking also in a pair of 3- to 4-season boots, the soreness I might have expected in my soles was absent. Of course, I still had fairly hefty boots on the end of my legs, with all the extra fatigue that goes with that, but in conditions where I would have expected aching soles, my feet were as good as a walk in much softer boots.

With crampons on, in full winter boots on a mixture of frozen paths, snow, hard mixed terrain and rocky outcrops, the usual pressure points where the crampon spikes transmit their concentrated force upwards were just not there.

Even on a prolonged walk in crampons with a fair amount of rocky ground underfoot, the 3 Feet insoles cushioned the impact well and, though I wouldn’t say my feet were fresh as a daisy at the end of the day, they were an awful lot less stressed than without the insoles.

A gel insert cushions the heel

Equally, in the pair of stiffish-soled boots without crampons, the fatigue on the soles of my feet was virtually non-existent.

Now, to be honest, I won’t step out in those winter boots without the Sidas insoles.

More details are on the Sidas website.

We liked:
Performance
Comfort

We weren’t so keen on:
Once cut to fit, may only fit that boot