- Golf shoes aren't just for looking the part while playing 18 holes, they also give you enough traction to stay balanced during your swing and are comfortable enough to avoid tiring your legs out.
- To find the best golf shoes, we tested models from Skechers, Adidas, Puma, and others to see which offered the best combination of fit, traction, comfort, and value.
- Our top pick, the Skechers Go Golf Elite 2 golf shoes, give you an incredibly high level of comfort, are made of waterproof leather, and feature grippy spikes and a TPU bottom plate for added traction.
Golf shoes have come a long way in the past few decades. For most of the 20th century, golfers wore what were essentially dress shoes with hard metal spikes molded into the soles. Though you likely have an idea of how uncomfortable they were by reading that sentence alone, golf shoes of old managed to be even more painful and unbearable than you'd imagine.
Thankfully, those days are long in the rearview as today's golf shoes have undergone a significant transformation. Metal spikes gave way to plastic spikes that aren't as sharp but have more contact points with the ground. The dress shoe style still exists but golf shoes resembling athletic shoes are preferred by PGA Tour golfers and amateurs alike.
But above all, they're far more comfortable than their yesteryear counterparts - and they've taken design cues from the shoes used by runners. When you consider golfers could be walking the equivalent of almost a 10K road race each time they play 18 holes, borrowing design elements from runners (a much more comfortable shoe) isn't all that surprising.
Just as the shoes themselves innovated, the number of available shoe styles multiplied in variety. With great variety, however, comes the stresses of making sure you're buying the right pair suited to your game. To help, we've rounded up pairs from brands like Adidas, Puma, Skechers, and others to find the pairs worth buying.
Here are the best golf shoes you can buy:
Updated on 3/6/2020 by Rick Stella: Updated the introduction with more information on the benefits of golf shoes, reformatted the related links section of the article, checked each pick for availability, and updated the prices, links, and formatting.
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