• New York Times, Monday, September 20, 2010 10:45 AM

Toning shoes have been on the market since at least 1996, Andrew Adam Newman reports, but the segment really took off last year with the introduction of Skechers' Shape-Ups and Reebok's EasyTone. The pitch is that they "tone" your extremities or help you "get in shape" with no more exertion than simply wearing them when you put one footsie in front of the other.

Now New Balance is out with a Truebalance line that purports to be more stylish than its competitors. The thought is that it will appeal to women.

It's a yet another "transformational" concept for the category, claims SportsOneSource analyst Matt Powell, right up there with running shoes in the '70s and cross-training sneakers in '00s. "Now we're in toning, and that's grown faster than any of those other categories grew," he says.

But the category may -- or may not, as is often the case -- have to jump a truth-in-advertising hurdle to sustain itself. At least one study say that the performance claims made by toning shoes are balderdash. "Across the board, none of the toning shoes showed statistically significant increases in either exercise response or muscle activation," a study by the American Council on Exercise recently concludes.

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