Foot Talk Fridays : Hard Skin and Exercise
Subtitles:
Welcome to Foot Talk Fridays!
Today we’re going to talk about hard skin on feet and why you get to it, especially if you’re quite active and you exercise.
So, most of the time you get hard skin along the side of your toe (along this area) and around the heel area here. The reason why you get that is because imagine weight lifting calluses if you’re always weight lifting and you get hard skin on your hands, that is in reaction to friction. The reason that you get calluses along these areas (these are the areas that push off) when you’re really exerting yourself. The more active you are, the more hard skin you have around your foot. If you have it in unusual areas like in the middle of your foot or just off to the inside here, that has to do with this arch collapsing, that’s a
different type of hard skin. If you ever have painful hard skin, that’s not good news but hard skin is an advantage, it’s your body working properly.
So if you have good sensation – then your body with friction feels a slight burn or twist of the skin and it will grow up thicker skin here and around the edge here to protect your skin. If you have no sensation to your feet (neuropathy), that’s why we say where memory soled shoes, because with memory soled shoes it absorbs the foot. The reason for that is when you have no sensation and you have high pressure you can get an ulcer into the foot because the body doesn’t know how to defend itself with hard skin. So, whenever you have hard skin I always say to everybody “why are we removing? It will literally grow back tomorrow or the next day because it’s there for a good reason”. It’s there as you push-off on your foot. So (just like cleaning your teeth) you can file your foot slightly just a little bit to take off the excess, but we always want that stronger layer.
Now, there are times when we are not that active, for example, if you go on a summer holiday and you are not fitting in your exercise regime like you would normally do, you might end up with softer feet because you’re not doing as much activity. Or, it could be that you are doing more activity in summer, so you end up with thicker, harder skin during the summer holidays. It just depends when you’re active – expect to get hard skin. Don’t be disappointed if you go for a pedicure and it literally comes back the next day or so, that’s good, it’s an advantage – it is supposed to be like that.
Also, for example, if you’re not very active at all and you have hard skin. If you’re overweight, the extra pressure and exertion of your foot will cause hard skin around the ball of the foot and hard skin around the heel just because you’re heavier. So, if you’re not active and have hard skin, look at your weight, if your weight is on the high side you will get hard skin with that as well. I hope this was all useful.
Enjoy you Friday!
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