Preventive Foot Health: What the Public Can Learn from the Boy Scouts
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More Awareness Needed
All of the discussion points that pertain to Scouts—taking care of your feet daily, making sure you wear the right footwear, properly fitted, knowing how to prevent and to handle common foot conditions such as blisters and plantar fasciitis, and training appropriately for your activity—are relevant to everyone who wants to participate in walking and hiking and other outdoor activities. But this information, unfortunately, is not routinely available.
Some retail stores that carry outdoor gear may teach customers how to properly fit a hiking boot that they’re selling, or ask you what kind of socks you think you need. Or if you go on an excursion through the National Outdoor Leadership School, or other high adventure kind of activity such as mountaineering with a guide, those who are running the trip will spend time with participants to make sure they don’t leave the parking lot without equipment and good knowledge of what they should be doing to take care of their feet.
If you go to a national park, you will learn about “leave no trace” principles, which are wilderness guidelines for managing trash and human impact—but there’s very little available about how to take care of your feet on the trail. If you want to sign up for a park adventure on a particular day, you will need to sign up months in advance. Between the time you sign up and the day of the event, ideally you would get educated on how to train for the trip, including how to take care of your feet. When we go on hiking trips with Scouts to local parks, we often see people on the trail with sandals or flip flops or tennis shoes and no socks. With a little research and better planning, those folks could improve their chances of a safe and injury-free adventure and be ready to come back for more.
Meanwhile, these helpful resources are available from IPFH:
Foot Health for Hiking and Backpacking
How to Practice Good Foot Hygiene
How to Prevent Skin and Soft Tissue Injuries to the Feet
Integrated Approach to Selecting Padded Socks and Shoes that Fit
Here are some other useful resources:
How to Manage Blisters from Podiatry Today
How to Get in Shape for Hiking from Backpacker magazine
The Leave No Trace Seven Principles