There’s a new set of smart insoles in town and they want to help you run better and avoid injury. But are Nurvv’s foot-based trackers really the best way to hit your next PB and stay niggle-free? Here’s the full – and it is full – Nurvv Run review.
Running form tracking
The recent history of connected running-form tracking tech is littered with products that promised much – better technique, fewer injuries, personal bests – but ultimately failed because they couldn’t convince enough runners they really needed them.
From Lumo Run’s belt clip, and Nike’s connected shoes, to the Runvi soles, Sensoria socks and Lifebeam’s Vi headphones, they’ve all had mixed success. I’ve tested them all and the story is usually the same, an exciting concept but in practice the products are all too often overpriced, fiddly to use, complicated to understand and hard to apply to reap any real running benefits.
There are some successes – the Stryd running footpod is one – but not many.
Nurrv is the latest brand to try and convince us that we need more than a just good GPS running watch, a balanced training plan and some healthy commitment to run at our best.
Nurvv’s smart insoles promise to help you run more efficiently and make it easier to look after your running health. So has Nurvv finally cracked this nut and created a product that runners actually need? And more importantly are they worth a significant wedge of cash – £249.99 to be precise?
I’ve been testing them for a few months and here’s my detailed Nurvv Run review.
Nurvv Run review: TLDR
No time to get into the details? Here’s the cut-to-the chase overview.
GOOD
- More durable than Arion Running smart soles
- Phone-free tracking (but not coaching)
- Shares data with Garmin and Apple Watches
- Useful indoor tracking mode
BAD
- Soles are fiddly to fit
- Insights and recommendations are complicated to understand and apply
- Real time coaching is limited to pace-focused runs and indoor runs
- No heart rate
- Short battery life
- Limited features and analysis compared to watches and apps
- Expensive
Watch: Nurvv Run review video
Hit play to watch my full Nurvv Run video review for The Run Testers. Or jump in at any of the points below.
@1:04 – Form-tracking smart soles explained
@2:23 – Nurvv Run design
@9:22 – What doe Nurvv track?
@13:24 – Features: Running Health tested
@17:30 – Features: Pace Coach
@20:00 – Accuracy
@20:53 – Battery Life
@21:48 – Should you buy the Nurvv Run soles? The Run Testers’ Verdict
What is Nurvv Run, what does it track and what are the benefits?
Nurvv’s sensor-laden smart insoles slip into your running shoes and capture a range of running metrics from the foot – arguably the best place to do so. These include:
- Cadence (aka steps per minute)
- Footstrike (heal, mid or forefoot)
- Step Length (the distance between each foot strike)
- Pronation
- Balance
You also get a selection of regular running stats such as pace, distance and route maps. Nurvv also claims to be more accurate at measuring your real time pace and distance than your GPS watch.
Over time, Nurvv uses your tracked runs to monitor what it calls Running Health – a window into your training from an injury risk perspective.
It also offers a real-time coaching, though this is limited to one feature called Pace Optimiser that aims to help you run better and faster by improving some of your most important running mechanics.
Nurvv Run design
These are not the first smart soles we’ve tested. Arion Running launched some a couple of years back and Nurvv’s combination of a sole, Bluetooth-enabled tracker unit and app system is a very similar.
The Nurvv system is made up of two smart insoles, each with 16 precision pressure sensors placed strategically throughout the foot. These capture detailed information – 1,000 times per second – including pressure-map style insights into where your foot strikes the ground. There are also two tracker units that house the GPS and Bluetooth chips. These clip onto the collar and wall of your shoes with a metallic hook and velcro clip.
The soles come in half sizes men’s UK sizes 5.5 to 14 and women’s UK 2.5 to 12. They’re pretty thin – about 1.2 mm thick – so you don’t notice them underfoot once they’re in place under your main soles.
You do, however, notice the trackers. They’re big. Much bigger in fact than the Arion Run with quite an old-school chunky design. The first thing most people jokingly ask when they clock them – and they always do – is whether you’re wearing a police tag. Subtle they are not.
The GPS-toting trackers weigh 22.7g each and along with the soles add a total 70g to the weight of each shoe. That’s 30 per cent of the weight of a shoe like the Nike Zoom Pegasus Turbo 2. To put that into context studies have shown that adding 100g to you shoes can negatively affect performance by 1%.
Arion’s system by comparison adds between 35g and 40g to the weight of each shoe and a Stryd footpod is even lighter at a negligible 9g.
Nurrv Durability: How robust are they?
The soles are far more durable than the Arion soles we tested. There’s a more robust outer layer of protection on the sole and the cable that connects the sole to the trackers is wider and better protected too.
In terms of life expectancy, Nurrv says the soles should last for the equivalent of three pairs of running shoes. Based on the perceived wisdom that running shoes last 300-500 miles, Nurvv’s lifespan should be anywhere between 900 and 1,500 miles.
If you run an average of 40 miles per week that’s 22 weeks (worst case) and 37.5 weeks (best case). You can buy new soles for £59.99 but if Nurvv’s own numbers are true, that’s a serious annual top up on an already considerable investment.
When it comes to water, dirt and dust resistance, the tracking units are IPX7 rated but the soles haven’t been rated. We ran through some serious mud and puddles in our tests – including one shin deep dive into muddy clay – and that didn’t seem to phase the soles or the trackers.
Nurvv Practicality: How easy are they to use?
As with most smart soles, Nurvv are a bit fiddly to fit. You slide the soles under your regular insoles and clip the tracking units to the outside wall of your shoe. Nurrv has tried to create a clip system with a velcro pull to help make this easier, to keep them in place on your shoes and ensure there’s no risk of rubbing on the ankle, but they’re still quite tricky to secure.
On shoes with more padded collars, getting the velcro hooks to stretch to fit is a bit of a squeeze. At the same time, if you have a thin-collared shoe – like the Nike Next% – you’ll also need a special adaptor. Moving from a padded shoe to a thinner shoe, we also found that once the metal clips had stretched, they didn’t sit as well on the thinner shoes.
Over time the clips became increasingly hard to secure in place effectively. We had some runs where one tracker came loose and rubbed a little under the ankle and we had to stop to adjust. Nurvv also told us it was important to have the trackers positioned correctly to guarantee the accuracy of the data the trackers collect. So this was a concern too.
If you care enough about running form to spend £249.99 on smart soles, then it’s likely you’ll be the kind of runner that rotates your footwear for different runs. Moving the whole set up between shoes is a chore. Much as I thought it wouldn’t bother me, it’s just another thing to do before you head out.
Good tech needs fit seamlessly into your routine and if you run in different shoes for different sessions, this just adds another thing you have to do – and often don’t.
Removing the trackers for charging can be tricky too. You have to apply a lot of force to get them on and off the clips and the charging unit. At times it felt like the charging unit was going to pull apart and it feels like over time this could be a trouble spot for durability.
Both trackers have one small power/control button on the inside to fire them up and the right shoe also has a large round depressed Activity button that’s used to initiate a phone-free run. Having the power buttons on the inside makes it harder than it needs to be to switch them on and off when the trackers are clipped to the shoe.
There are two tiny LEDs on each tracker and eight different combinations of light colours, flashes and pulses that tell you what’s going on with the trackers covering connectivity, charging and running. It’s a common problem with Bluetooth devices that don’t have a screen but these take a bit of learning. They’re also quite small and sometimes not that easy to see.
Controlling the Nurvv is mainly done on your phone and initial pairing is app-guided, straightforward and takes a few minutes. Each time you run, your trackers should auto connect when you power up and launch a run. There’s always a 30 second pause prior to each run where the app prepares the sensors and locates GPS. If you’re someone who hates waiting for your watch to connect to GPS, this will irritate.
When we tested, there was also an annoying bug that meant you had to wait a few seconds after countdown had finished before locking your phone and putting it away. Otherwise the tracking failed.
Nurvv Run Features: What it tracks
We’ve grown used to our GPS running watches packing a huge range of features to support training, racing and recovery, and while Nurvv takes an interesting approach to run monitoring, you can’t help but notice how sparse the feature set is. And that’s a huge problem here.
There’s no heart rate connectivity or data, so that means no heart rate zone training; no training plans; no recommended technique training runs; no running power; real-time coaching is limited to one feature – the Pace Opimiser runs – and indoor runs. There’s no training effect, recovery insights or fitness progress. Even simple things such as elevation data in your post-run stats are missing. It also doesn’t currently sync data to Strava or work with Zwift.
We wouldn’t necessarily expect Nurvv to feature all of these things but it’s significantly under featured compared to other more useful tools like the Stryd and direct competitors like Arion.
Nurvv is keen to point out that lots of these features are on the road map but if we could take a minute off our marathon PB for every time a brand promised us coming-soon features, we’d be worrying Eliud Kipchoge right now.
After each run you get readings for cadence (steps per minute), step length, training load (7 day average versus your 28 day average), pronation, footstrike and calories, along with mile or kilometre splits.
For footstrike, you also get heat map style feet diagrams that show you the percentage of time you spent on your fore, mid and rear foot. This is initially interesting but unless you’re serious about changing your footstrike – and lord knows there’s enough debate about whether that’s a good idea – it quickly becomes just another stat.
We also did a test where we ran a mile deliberately forefoot striking to the point we were almost on tiptoes and we still got 86 per cent midfoot-heel strike readouts.
With pronation, we also had two runs where we hit 88% and 78% neutral pronation, but interestingly Nurvv still chalked those up as a “low level of neutral pronation”, suggesting this was something we may wish to improve. This is a great example of where the Nurvv feedback isn’t as clear as it might be.
For a start the description doesn’t match the Bad, Poor, Average and Good spectrum in the Running Health section. But even the way it’s phrased feels confusing, particularly as it doesn’t say what a high – or good – level or neutral pronation might be. There’s a lot of this in the app that asks you to work harder than you should to interrogate and interpret the data.
You can run and track phone-free and that’s a bonus, though you won’t get audio cues. That information is handled by your phone and beamed to your Bluetooth headphones. You can, however, send some of the info to your Garmin or Apple Watch. There’s also an indoor mode for track and treadmill.
With it’s really limited features, Nurvv is very firmly an accessory. It’s not a replacement for your running watch, and in terms of general run tracking, it doesn’t even do enough to replace your favourite running app.
So is it a good enough accessory to warrant that £250 price tag? Let’s take a closer look at the key features.
Running Health
Easily the most useful and interesting thing Nurvv offers, Running Health aims to make it easier to avoid overtraining and injury by tracking key injury-related metrics over time.
There are four metrics: Training Load, Pronation, Cadence and Balance. You get a High, Good, Average, Poor or Bad reading for each based on the last two month’s run data and you can dig deeper into each area.
There’s also an overall Running Health Score out of 100 and a well-presented chart that makes it easy to spot areas for improvement at-a-glance.
It’s worth noting that something like Under Armour’s HOVR Machina connected shoes offer all of these stats – aside from training load. And Arion’s smart soles and the Stryd footpod offer many similar stats too. You can also buy a Garmin Running Dynamics pod or chest strap and get some of the key stats.
Here’s how Nurvv treats each area.
Running Health: Training Load Score
Training Load Score monitors your load over time, and gives you a recommended mileage for the next seven days to minimise injury risk. However, this is based simply on how many miles you’ve run in the last seven days compared to your 28 day average. There’s no heart rate or muscle load insights like you’ll find from a Garmin or Polar watch and without this physiological data taken into account, it becomes a pretty blunt instrument.
Nurvv can’t tell how hard you worked to clock the miles you ran, or in fact how well your body has responded since your last training session. Or factor in things like illness and outside daily stresses. While the Garmin and Polar offerings in this space aren’t perfect, they’re infinitely more advanced in the data they use to monitor your load. And Nurvv’s training load score feels sadly lacking by comparison.
In our tests, we also found the immediate post-run read out often contradicted the training load reading we got in the Running Health section. Another point of confusion in the app.
Running Health: Pronation and Balance
After every run you get a pronation percentage score. In the Running Health section you also get an 8-week average pronation reading that shows your percentage of under, neutral and over pronation for each foot. That’s accompanied by an overall pronation score, a bad-to-good chart of your progress and some fairly basic recommendations for steps you can take to fix any issues.
In running health, you also get a seperate reading for balance. This looks at cadence, foot strike, pronation and step length and shows you if you have any imbalances in the way your right and left sides behave. The charts are detailed but are pretty hard to decipher unless you’re well versed in biomechanics.
These are both useful for flagging up any potential issues, and there is some in-app advice to help work on problem areas, but it feels too limited. This was something the Lumo Run did really well offering recommended video drills that you could do to improve, immediately post run. Next time out you’d be able to do a coached run to try and work on that specific metric or area for concern. So you could see if the drills had worked.
Nurrv’s experience feels disconnected. There are no video drills, no direct recommendations of areas you should focus on in a training run and you can’t yet do coached runs for any metrics outside of the clunky Pace Optimiser feature.
Running Health: Cadence
The final piece of the Running Health puzzle is cadence with the emphasis on the risk of injury from running at a low cadence.
In theory, being able to monitor your running health using all these stats is an interesting idea. And if your shoes had this capability built in you’d be really happy to have it. But there’s not enough value here, in terms of the insights and the actionable steps you can take to improve, to make you feel like it’s worth wearing the soles on every run. Oddly, at the same time, the limited information it presents often feels too complex for a beginner.
Pace Optimiser
The other big feature is Pace Optimiser. The idea is quite simple. You run a benchmark run and then try to beat it by improving your cadence and stride length. This is a very confusing feature that doesn’t really know what it’s for.
Is it a tool you use to train technique? Is it a way to see if the work you’ve done in training is improving your technique? Or is it just about trying to hit a PB over a course you run regularly? It’s really not clear and Nurvv doesn’t offer any guidance as to what role a Pace Optimiser run plays in your running training.
There’s also no advice in the app about how to construct your benchmark run. What distance is best, what kind of run you should do, how fast should you run it? You’re just asked to do an Outdoor Run and then try to beat it. It all feels a bit rudderless.
You can only do pace optimiser runs for complete distances you have previously run with Nurvv. So the app is not currently smart enough to take your fastest mile performance from the middle of past runs and then allow you to use that as the benchmark run to beat in an optimiser run.
Each time you choose to do a Pace Optimiser run, Nurvv provides a recommended target score, with an incremental improvement on how you ran it last time. There’s a 0-100 sliding scale from Easy to Pro and this increases the target cadence, step length and pace.
For example, I ran a 1:09 mile run in 08:14 at an average pace of 07:34 min/mile. Nurvv then suggested I do my next Pace Optimiser run for that distance at a Run Score 55, estimating that this would give me a finish time from 07:54 – 08:36 and an average pace of 07:16 – 07:54 mins/mile.
A couple of things jump out here. Firstly that’s quite a wide target pace window but I could hit the targets with a big chunk of the potential performance slower than my benchmark time. Which makes little sense.
On another occasion, following a 2-mile Pace Optimiser run with a Run Score of 62 and an average pace 6:29 mins/mile, Nurvv’s next recommendation for the same run leapt up to a Run Score of 69. That took my target mile pace to between 5:39 and 6:05, my stride length from 3.9ft to 47.5 – 4.93 feet and my cadence up by 6-10 steps per minute. All of which feels like quite a reach.
I had another run where Pace Optimiser’s real time coach barked at me constantly during the run and according to the post-session screen I only spent 6 percent of the run in the target cadence zone and only 37 per cent in the target step length zone. But the post-session screen said I’d ‘Nailed it’ and I beat the target Run Score. All very confusing.
Though Pace Optimiser might be based on solid science, it also ignores the fact that most people’s understanding of how to run faster will be based on improving fitness rather than tweaking stride patterns.
Nurvv completely sidelines the role of cardiovascular fitness in this equation. While it’s not possible to run faster without seeing improvements in cadence and/or stride length, in order to maintain a higher cadence and longer stride length, you will need increased aerobic capacity, not to mention strength and power improvements.
No matter how much I wish to be able to run a sub-5 minute mile, changing my cadence and stride length alone are not going to get me there. Tying cadence and stride length training to pace in this way feels counterproductive, and that’s before we get into the real-time coaching element.
Real-time coaching
For some reason Nurvv has limited it’s real-time coaching to Pace Optimiser runs and indoor runs. There’s no option to do a run that focuses on one metric, for example a cadence-improving run outdoors.
Pace Optimiser requires you to simultaneously hit stride length and cadence targets and in our tests we found it incredibly hard to hit the sweet spot. Even when deliberately running at a slower pace where my cardio fitness was not in question, I found it almost impossible to find the groove. And that results in the robocoach nagging at you a lot.
Over a 2 mile run it was virtually non-stop at around 20 second intervals. That’s around 45 interjections in a 15 minute run. And it makes for an incredibly negative experience. You can’t change the frequency of the coaching advice and it’s definitely going to be too naggy a go-to for a lot of runners.
There’s also no data in the app that shows your Pace Optimiser run progress over time, you can’t edit the names of any runs to make them easy to locate and the overriding feeling having used this for a while is that it just doesn’t feel like a useful tool in its current format.
Nurvv Run: Accuracy
On its website, Nurvv is very keen to suggest that relying on your GPS running watch to improve your running is basically flawed because the data it provides is inaccurate.
By contrast, it claims to have ‘world leading accuracy’. This comes from what Nurvv describes as “a careful fusion of top-line GPS data with an advanced inertial navigation system using complimentary onboard sensors”. Basically, the sensors in the soles plus GPS data and intelligent crunching of that data = the highest fidelity pace and distance accuracy.
On most of our test runs, it performed well by comparison to a Garmin Fenix 6 and the Stryd footpod. However, in our 13.1 mile half marathon test, on an official marked course, it clocked just 10.64 miles against 12.97 miles a Garmin Fenix 6 and a Stryd footpod’s 13.11 miles. Interestingly it seemed to spasm when we went into a tunnel, something it claims it manages better than a regular running watch.
Nurvv Run: Connectivity and connecting to third party devices
Nurvv’s trackers are ANT+ enabled so you can connect to ANT+ devices and it’ll fire out distance, stride count, cadence, speed, calories and time.
That also means you can beam stats from Nurvv, direct to in-run data fields on your Garmin watch. At the time of writing this was limited to cadence, calories, pace and splits.
There’s also an Apple Watch app that gives you a nice visual view, haptic and audio cues on the watch for Pace Optimiser runs which is a nice addition if you can’t or don’t want to run with headphones.
As we’ve mentioned Nurvv does not currently support any inbound heart rate data, doesn’t sync data to Strava and won’t play nice with Zwift. These are all noticeable omissions here that detract from the usefulness.
Nurvv Run: Battery Life
Nurvv claims you’ll get more than 5 hours runtime on a single charge and we found that to be accurate. Though one sensor always runs down quicker than the other.
Most runners will need to charge them at least once a week. By contrast Stryd’s footpod clocks 20 hours and Under Armour’s HOVR Machina connected shoes never need charging.
There’s supposed to be an auto power off feature when the Nurvv are not in use but in the product we tested we discovered this only works if you fully close your app so it’s not running in the background. Which is easy to do but even easier to forget to do. You can of course switch them off manually with the power buttons on the trackers but again this is quite easy to forget.
Nurvv Run review verdict: Is it any good?
This is a product with big ambitions, good intentions but sadly very limited features, important omissions and a somewhat confused approach.
Nurvv says it’s aimed at ‘any runner who wants to improve’ but it’s hard to see who would really benefit. There’s not enough data and features here to satisfy serious athletes and it’s almost too complicated and involved for beginner to intermediate runners.
The biggest problem is that it doesn’t really offer much more than existing, more convenient products you’ve probably already splashed out on, and the unique things it does offer currently are not particularly well implemented. For most runners, there are just many more immediate ways to improve your running that are much simpler, less intrusive and less expensive.
Yes, it’s more durable than the Arion Run but offers less data and features. It’s not as simple to use as Under Armour’s connected shoes that give you similar data without having a hulking great tag stuck to your shoes – or having to invest extra money. And it’s miles behind the Stryd in terms of being a genuinely useful tool for more ambitious athletes.
Perhaps most crucially, everything you need to do to improve the key areas Nurvv flags up isn’t dealt with in the app or by the trackers. Fixing pronation, balance, foot strike all require a great deal of additional outside knowledge and training that you just don’t get here.
All things considered, it’s hard to see the Nurvv as good value for money and if you want to run faster and avoid injury you’d be much better off paying a coach.
Nurvv Run price and availability
The Nurvv Run is available to buy now for £249.00 or $299.00.
For comparison, a Stryd Wind power footpod is £199 and ARION’s smart insoles are around £226. The Under Armour connected shoes such as the HOVR Machina are £149. And you can pick up a running watch and Garmin Forerunner 245 and footpod combo for a little over £300.
