As a very confident teenager in the early 90s on Lightning TRS in a size 8, I was swimming in my blades, but grew into them. Those frames were long also.  I just picked up THEM 909 Mediums as I'm a 9.5-10 shoe size, wide feet 100-106mm wide, and only 265mm long, but bigger boots always felt good for me.  No issues with control.  It's been a long time since then, and I haven't had many sessions on these yet, but they feel much better than the 9.5 Rollerblade NJ Teams I bought 8 years ago.  So that's that.  Downsizing sounds crazy, not sure how 275-280mm foot size are squishing into SHMEDIUMs.  Anyhoo' enjoy your videos, thanks for the info!

Thanks for the spenco tip.

I'm experimenting with insole cutouts as patches around key areas over a given liner (sides /top at the heels / toe area) that might have too much space and wiggles sideways or frontally. Just in the same way some liners have velcro bits for the heel/cuff areas.

I place them with normal mask tape (the beige one) and really does the job. I had to put one cutout of about 5cm x 10cm (2mm thickness) at the part where, say DC shoes have their logo, to prevent the liner from sliding forward and crush my pinkie toes when doing backwards Lions (IQON AG10).

I always use an underliner sole,  under my intuition in the medium 909

Now I am in the gang! Thank you for the inspiration of many years 🖤 this nerd talking is what I needed and it helps me very much 🫶🏼🔥

Thank you rid god for the spenco insoles. changed my life

I had a problem with my ridders intuition. The right foot tongue ripped the foam right at the top of the foot. I can still skate them, but the tongue keeps falling to the side unfortunately

15:30, I was just having a conversation with someone on here recently about this. How the whole downsizing trend... I think it's not a good thing for most people especially if it's forcing your feet and toes to scrunch in the boot, I think it's not healthy for most people, and yes I agree with you... I'm starting to see it, people skating skates that are clearly too small, they look like they are too small, they look like they are skating such that they're trying to not make their toes/foot jam into the shell for any impact, they don't look comfortable skating, I'm talking pretty decent at the very least intermediate skaters too, I'm seeing it. People want their skates to look as small as possible right now I'm noticing, for sure a trend. Tip...if you want your skates to look smaller, and you're wearing pants or jeans...go pants over cuff and the skate will look a little smaller, blousing boot style will make your skate stand out more, it presents the entire boot on your foot. Shorts, just gotta deal with it. When it comes to skates, comfort trumps everything to me, I can make damn near anything work at this point, but if it's painful, I'm not skating..and we know the difference in normal break in pain compared to like actual ok that skate just doesn't fit pain. I had the Rollerblade estillo Rob G's years ago the clear shell ones, that skate was a torture device on my feet, I tried to make them work for several sessions, never worked ended up giving them away. Life is too short to be skating painful and uncomfortable skates, having to take them off every 20 min really sucks. Thank you for doing this, helped me decide I'm not going with smedium in these if I decide to get them, you noted it's clearly a thinner boot and that's exactly what I needed to know.

I just copped the mediums today, you’ve put my mind at rest.

What spenco insoles did you get ?

If im a 10.5 US could i fit in a medium with the intuition liners?? Im new here and trying to order this week.

Im a size 9.5/10 should I go medium?? On Ssence they only had xs/s/m/l

Was literally about to hit up mcgarry on instagram about this stuff. Thanks Joseph!