Do Toning Shoes Really Work?

Despite the odd appearance, the fitness craze” Toning shoes” are a huge hit for many major brand shoe manufacturers. The shoes promise to help tone your legs and buttocks through nothing more than simply walking.

The design is not very appealing and at first has many looking like Bambi on ice, from the instability.

Sketchers was the pioneer for the design, introducing Shape-Ups a few years back. Other large shoe Corps. such as Reebok, New Balance and Crocs, followed suit by introducing their own version of the rocker-soled shoes.

The standoffish price that comes along with these shoes has many wondering if they are worth upwards of $140 price tag or is this just another ploy to make the consumer think they are getting away from typical exercising.

And Now Introducing Science…

Dr. Mercer, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, recently decided to test the Toning shoe, after running into a friend who worked at a local shoe store, who asked him if he knew if the product really worked. He explained that he was uncomfortable about suggesting the shoe because he was skeptical of the promised benefits.

Dr. Mercer didn’t know, either. So he recruited a group of healthy young female students (toning shoes are marketed almost exclusively to women) and had them walk on a treadmill for 10 minutes at a time while wearing, alternately, a walking shoe or a toning shoe — in this case, the Skechers Shape-ups.

He and his colleagues attached sensors to the women’s legs to measure the electrical impulses generated as their muscles contracted. They also determined the women’s oxygen consumption, to see if they worked harder and burned more calories with one shoe rather than the other.

So Do They Work? The Tests Don’t Lie…Or Do They?

But as it turned out, according to results presented in June at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, muscle activation and oxygen consumption were almost identical whether the women wore walking shoes or Shape-ups. The finding “was a little surprising,” Dr. Mercer said, since his volunteers commented that the toning shoes, with their bowed, unstable bottoms, felt different underfoot from the walking shoes. But that difference didn’t change how they moved in the various models, he said.

Dr. Mercer is not the only medical team to test the toning shoes claims. There is a small but growing number of science teams taking on the boasting promise of a chiseled backside.

A study conducted last year by exercise physiologists at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, for instance, found that muscle activation and calorie burning did not change whether people wore ordinary athletic shoes or any of three different models of toning shoes. “There is simply no evidence to support the claims that these shoes will help wearers exercise more intensely, burn more calories or improve muscle strength and tone,” the authors concluded.

So How Can The Companies Claim They Work? This Is Where The Lying Comes In..

Other results have been a bit more equivocal. A 2009 study showed greater muscle activation when women wore the Reebok toning shoe, but it involved only five women and was financed by the shoe company.

Meanwhile, in perhaps the most telling and longest-term study of the shoes, Canadian researchers at the University of Calgary last year had volunteers wear a rocker shoe throughout the day for six weeks.

In the beginning, the volunteers wobbled in the unstable shoes, activating and strengthening small, underused muscles in the feet and ankles that stabilize balance. But after six weeks, the swaying had diminished and those stabilizing muscles were not being exercised to the same extent.

The toning shoes, in other words, had provided benefits, but for a limited time.(Both the University of Puget Sound and the University of Calgary studies were financed in part by shoe companies.)

So The Results Are In…Well Kinda

I guess the conflicting reports of whether or not the toning shoe is a empty promise, is still a on-going debate. Seems like to me there definitely is some bias when it comes to the shoe companies providing the public with test results that they funded.

The positive way to look at it is if the shoe motivates people into exercising or encourages walking you to get out there and walk, then the shoe is a success in my eyes.