Reebok easy tone trainers are part of a new breed of scientifically designed shoe,
The science behind the easytone is quite simple; if you slightly unbalance the foot then the muscles will work harder to compensate. Now the adjustment is so slight you will not notice, it’s not that you will feel that your walking over rocks or that you are on a boat in heavy seas, in fact the easytone feels just like a regular set of trainers meaning you can wear them all day and it won’t be a strain. In fact all of the reviews on the Internet have found them very, very comfortable.
Recently a study was done to compare athletes who run with trainers and those that run barefoot, slow motion stills and complicated very sensitive scales measured exactly where the foot and body weight landed. Surprisingly people who run with trainers land on a completely different part of the foot compared to barefoot runners.
This means over time we may have actually changed how we walk as a species just by wearing shoes, also It may be found in the future that a lot of medical disorders associated with muscles and bones might be tracked back to our trainers or shoes and the idea that our body which developed over millions of years might be struggling with wearing anything on our feet, it may be that chronic Knee and lower back pain which plagues western civilisation is due to what we put on our feet.
In the future much more research will be needed to see if this is true, but it may have huge implications on trainer and shoe design and probably a load of new converts to barefoot walking. In fact there are 28 bones in your foot, and if you break one it can affect your balance for life!
Unfortunately modern life means walking on very hard surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and paving slabs and walking on these without trainers might be a lot worse as our feet were not designed with these materials in mind, most barefoot people are living in the third world where easytone trainers have never been heard of (also lower back pain) the third world villages are absent from concrete and tarmac and even the houses tend to have dirt floors. At most you might see a pair of flip-flops and certainly trainers and shoes in the cities but generally poverty means barefoot is the norm.
There are other manufactures who have made ‘easytone’ style shoes and it seems for now they wont be going away, in fact if the easytone is a huge success watch everyone jump on the band wagon.
For now I wont be giving up on my shoes, even though I too have chronic back pain and Knee problems as well, although I do put my problems down to years of cycling I now consider that it might well be my years of wearing shoes that are the culprit.
Reebok and other shoe makers may find themselves with much more responsibility when it comes to our health and if it is true that shoes are upsetting our natural movement then maybe a few high costing law suits in the future will force them to radically re-think trainer design.
Just think, shoes are a relatively new addition to our way of life, maybe a few thousand years at most, but the human model has been around a few million years, quite a difference, and easytone trainers might just be a step towards simulating the uneven dirt ground that our feet were designed for.
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