Do Toning Shoes Work?
Can a pair of shoes do away with your big thighs, cellulite, weak legs, let you burn more calories, build more muscle, and get in shape faster at the gym? According to the manufacturers, yes they can. There’s a type of shoe available these days called toning shoes. Reebok and Sketchers are amongst a couple of the many companies producing these “wonder shoes”.
The concept is not revolutionary. They simply have an nonuniform support structure thus supposedly allowing the wearer to engage different muscles than they would normally should they be working out in traditional gym shoes. This initially doesn’t sound overly far fetched when you consider for a moment that high heels, for example, absolutely change the angle of your feet in the shoe and thereby increase the engagement rate of the calf muscles. If the heel is big enough, you could easily see a difference in calf development within a relatively short period of time with regular wear. To prove this point, all one would need do is walk on the balls of their feet exclusively for a day. The engagement of the calf muscles would be almost immediate as well as very noticeable.
On the other hand, it has also been well documented that the wearing of high heels causes imbalances within the hips, glutes, and quads. Anytime you overly accentuate one muscle group, the related ones will be used in a way other than they were intended and you’ll quickly have imbalances and tightness’. Naturally, the wearing of toning shoes, which reduces support in some areas and adds more in others, can result in the same imbalance causing effect that the wearer of high heels will experience.
When a company claims to have made a seemingly magical breakthrough with a product and they have a good marketing drive behind it, people flock to it and swear up and down that this is the new sliced bread. Further scrutiny, however, often times reveals a different reality and such was the case with toning shoes.
There were numerous studies conducted by independent, non interest groups seeking to validate or disprove the claims made by the manufacturers of these shoes and in every single study, the shoe maker’s claims were refuted and proven to be works of fiction. While some wearers of the shoes reported great results, those results were never substantiated scientifically in the aforementioned studies as it was reported in trial after trial that there was no increased weight loss, no increase in calories burned, muscle building, or area specific benefits such as spot reduction incurred from wearing toning shoes.
I’ve been an Austin personal trainer for over 20 years, and a gym owner for 8, having founded the Austin Fitness Center back in 2007. In that time, I have seen a great many fads, diets, “revolutions”, and “breakthroughs” occur. People jump on the latest bandwagons and set off in search of “unprecedented results with a minimum of effort”. The bottom line always holds true. If you want to get in better shape, you’ll need to eat better, workout consistently as well as correctly for your body and your goal, and furthermore, you’ll need to stick with it day after day, week after week, and year after year. I’m sorry to say, but there’s no magic pill and there’s no magic shoe.
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Andy
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