It was Only a Matter of Time

So yesterday, in the wake of the big response and share-fest of my post 75 Ways Deadlifting Just Plain Rocks, I was checking some of the major news outlets and stumbled across this little story about how Sketchers is now having to refund about $40 million due to their unsubstantiated claims that their “toning” shoes could actually reduce body fat and increase muscle activity.

Now the funny thing is their advertising said that they had clinical research trials that showed a greater muscle activity in the hamstrings and greater calorie burning capacity versus normal shoes, but there’s been a lot of studies, one being on the American Council on Exercise and available HERE that shows there’s no real benefit in muscle activation in any muscle, caloric burn, or even the ability to cook a ham sandwich by wearing the shoes.

This just goes to proove my theory that anything Kim Kardashian walks over turns into a liability. Let’s look at the examples:

Ray-J

Reggie Bush

Kris Humphries

Sketchers

Ryan Seacrest

Kanye West better be praying to Jesus or Buddha or Jay-Z or who ever is writing his life story that her gypsy curse is coming to a close or he’ll have a lot of material for another angry album.

Now as much as I would love to continue ripping on Kim Kardashian and her inability to produce anything as beneficial to public consumption as a monkeys fart in a windstorm, this is about the Sketcher toning shoe debacle.

Having worked with a few clients who have developed tendinitis from wearing these contraptions for a few weeks, I can pretty much tell you that the physiology of “toning” shoes is completely out to lunch. The concept was that by standing on thick soft cushioning that your muscles would have to work harder to to maintain balance and stability, which would give you more of a chance to work your muscles through low intensity exercise.

The downside to this logic is that the area that is getting worked more is the neural receptors throughout the ankle and knee, not the muscles. The receptors that maintain balance would be activated long before the muscles, seeing as how the receptors are what tells the muscles to work.

After a few minutes of wearing these midevil torture devices, the receptors would begin to fatigue which would lead to more muscle DE-ACTIVATION than anything else, which would have a great impact on destabilizing the ankle and knee and creating some sweet compensation patterns, which would help develop some good tendinitis issues in the prime movers as they try to keep you from shearing the hell out of your big joints.

To give some more info on this, THIS ARTICLE from Hiemstra et al in 2001, showing that a large body of research indicates that receptor fatigue leads to muscle downregulation and joint destabilization in the knee which can increase the likelihood of injuries.

This makes sense as muscles themselves don’t contract on their own, as evident by people who have had spinal injuries or suffered paralysis. The nerve tells the muscle to fire, and if it gets tired from always suffering embarrassment from walking around in those gawd-awful shoes, the nerves won’t be able to tell the muscles to fire.

Here’s a simple test to replicate this feat. Find an extremely long set of stairs and run up them at full speed. I’m not talking about the set that takes you from the first floor to the second floor. I’m talking about the of stairs that makes you feel like you’re going to touch clouds when you get to the top.

If you can feel your left arm and can actually feel feelings by the top of them, see if you can stand on one foot and do a very small jump without falling to the floor as your neural receptors and muscles ability to support your ass has just packed it in and gone on hiatus for a few minutes while they contemplate organizing a coordinated effect of making you simultaneously have to cough and fart, and not providing an adequate line of defence against the certain unhappy ending that will result.

I can’t say I’m really happy that this company had to repay this much money, because that means there was that many people who were stupid enough to buy into the fact that a pair of shoes could replace hard work, dedication, and deadlifts as a way of getting stronger, leaner, and a more sexified build that would be the envy of every friend and foe they had.

Until the day comes when people stop buying crap with absolutely no merit to their claims, we will always have to be vigilant and on guard, because one day there will be a pill capsule that claims to help people lose crazy amounts of weight, and will instead create a race of sub-intelligent zombies, hell bent on eating brains from people in health clubs, simply because they contain the two things the zombie-tards desire most: brains and hot bodies.

Be wary, my friends. Be wary of the zombie gym apocalypse.