| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
The Shoe To Shape All Of You
What do Heidi Klum, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and a certain Dan’s Papers writer have in common? $240 sneakers that tone our legs, tummies and tushies while we walk. Really. I first decided to join the ranks of these miracle-shoe-wearing celebrities when, much to my dismay, I found that the soles of my trusty old gym sneakers were peeling apart like black rubber pastries. I bought them about seven years ago and I haven’t really thought about sneakers since. When they fell apart, I tried to deny it, but when I started to feel the breeze between my toes, I knew it was finally time to retire the hardworking old geezers. I tried going to a sneaker store, but the rows upon rows of specialized shoes terrified me, so I turned to my trusty source of all information, the Internet, to help me choose my next pair.
A search for the “best running shoes” yielded little useful information, but as I browsed the articles, one shoe sparked my interest. True, it cost about three times more than I was willing to spend, but the MBT was cited again and again as a miraculous, fat-burning sneaker. And, best of all, each article promised that even if you only walk in them, you would look better than you did before. Having recently moved up a dress size or two, this sounded too good to be true, and too good to pass up.
MBTs, or Masai Barefoot Technology sneakers, are manufactured by a Swiss company previously known for manufacturing orthopedic shoes. Their website and instructional DVD (yes, the sneakers come with an instructional DVD) state that, “In the early 1990s, Swiss engineer Karl Müüller realized that both shoes and backache are unknown to the Masai tribesman– and that there is a causal connection between these two facts.” Now, although the assumption that an entire race of people have never heard of shoes sounds racist to my politically correct American ears, the theory that walking on flat pavement in flat-soled shoes when our bodies were designed to walk on the naturally uneven ground gives us backaches made sense to me. And the promised 9% increase in buttock muscle activity, 19% increase in lower limb-muscle activity, and 18% decrease in joint pressure sounded like a dream to my horseback rider-cum-newspaper-writer’s constantly aching muscles. Best of all, the shoes are said to improve posture, which stays even when you are wearing other shoes. So, I took the plunge. And one week after punching in my credit card number, I received my brand new $240 MBTs.
In their handbook, MBT refers to my black, grey and lime-green sneakers as “orthopedic devices,” not sneakers, and I suppose that they are right. When I first put them on, I was torn between the feeling that I was standing on pillows, and the feeling that I was going to fall over. The sole is curved like a rocking chair, which is how the sneakers tone your muscles. You can never really stand flat-footed in MBTs; you have to balance. So, in order to plunge myself into them, I decided to (gasp) go for a run in them. I put some inspirational Reggaeton on my iPod, and away I went. After the first few steps, I was no longer at the mercy of my rocking-chair shoes, and felt springy and comfortable. Then, halfway down the road, something strange happened. I was gasping for breath. My muscles burned, and sweat poured out of my skin. I was exhausted. As I limped back to my house, I thought about what could possibly exhaust someone who can get on the ProCor machine at the gym for an hour at 80 RPM in less than ten minutes. And then it hit me; it was the sneakers.
Thrilled with my new discovery, I started wearing them all day, every day. And, every night before bed, I felt that nice post-gym burn in my legs, lower abs, and buttocks. Best of all, my backaches and leg cramps, which I have had to remedy with Advil twice a day ever since I started spending hours at a desk and riding horses, vanished. After wearing them for three weeks, the comforting post-gym burn vanished too, but I suppose that is just because my muscles are used to the workout now. However, the disappearance of my backaches, coupled with the fact that I can now walk all over New York City in sublime comfort, without ever needing a taxi, has made me an MBT devotee, and I will probably remain one for life. To get the scoop on MBTs straight from the source, visit www.swissmasaius.com.
– Sabrina C. Mashburn
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