Monthly Archives: March 2015

Have you ever heard an older relative talk about having trouble getting around without pain due to a corn or a callus? Have you ever had one yourself? If so, you know that in some cases they can get to be pretty painful. Here at Socks4Life, we want to promote happy, healthy feet and it’s pretty hard to have happy feet if you can’t walk on them because you’ve rubbed them the wrong way.

Let’s break down what exactly corns and calluses are. Ultimately, corns and calluses are made from the stuff, dead skin cells that have built up from repeated friction. The biggest differences are where they form and how they’re shaped. Corns can form anywhere on your feet, but tend to form around the toes. When they form they’re cone shaped where the cone points inward and can push on things inside your feet like nerves or on bones and cause pain just from walking around. A callus tends to form on either the ball or the heel of your feet and are just an excessively thick bit of skin that cause pressure to build up on that one spot. If you’re diabetic, calluses can be a sign of ulceration and should immediately be checked on.

Both corns and calluses form the same way and are often treated the same way. The biggest tip for treating and preventing future corns and calluses is to wear shoes that fit properly. Poorly fitting shoes are going to rub in places against your feet and are going to cause new ones to form. Soaking corns and calluses does a good job of softening them to reduce the amount of pressure they put on your feet. Taking a pumice stone to corns that have been soaked is a good way to reduce the amount of tissue there that’s causing issues.

It’s March guys, we’re only a few weeks away from the official start of Spring, which means we can start to look forward to putting away out winter boots and wool socks. We can start to think of sandals and flip flops. Our socks can go back to being parts of our outfits instead of an extra layer against the elements that don’t understand they overstayed their welcome after the first time it snowed and well before whatever the umpteenth day of freezing rain we’re on now.

For all the women out there, the options to get playful with how you choose to combine shorts/skirts with socks are wide. You can team up a somewhat short skirt with a pair of over the knee socks to embrace the warming weather while still also staying covered for those days of cold mornings, warm afternoons, and cold nights. Now that they won’t be hidden under jeans and boots, show off your creative side with heavily patterned socks. We have a number of over the knee socks in a variety of colors for whatever outfit you want to match them with or we have low cut, no show socks.

I’m going to take a second here to go on a rant that is only slightly fueled by the fact that I am writing on the blog for a store that sells socks. This is mostly me. Guys and shoes without socks is something I will continue to argue against until I’m blue in the face. It has almost nothing to do with it style wise. It’s all hygiene and shoe care. Taking out the layer of the sock in a pair shoes means the moisture from your feet goes directly into the fabric of the shoe which causes both smells that are difficult to get out to occur and shortens the life span of the shoe due to the moisture breaking down the material.

Lots of things can cause pain in your feet. You can be on them too long during the day. It could be a new pair of shoes that you thought were broken in but aren’t. Or it can be a symptom of something bigger. It could be something like osteoporosis. Normally when we think of osteoporosis we don’t think of the impact it can have on our feet which is a problem because our feet are our foundation. Usually osteoporosis is found in post-menopausal women or men over the age of 75, but it can affect anyone, often as a secondary symptom of another illness.

When feet become affected by osteoporosis they become very weak and susceptible to breaks and fractures much more easily. Side effects of the beginning stages of osteoporosis can be things like pain while walking or swelling and redness of the feet. Often times people will ignore these symptoms as just being something that will pass or that they “tweaked” something. If things get bad enough, stress fractures can occur without an injury to cause concern. As with most things today, there are tests to find out whether or not it’s just a tweak or something more serious that needs treatment. Osteoporosis is something that can be treated to make sure that nothing serious happens because of it. Calcium supplements, orthotics, and the usage of athletic shoes with extra cushion are all treatment options while not causing a decline in quality of life.

It’s Tuesday and that means another look at some new piece of athletic tech that will hopefully make you run like a gazelle, jump like a kangaroo, and keep your knees in good enough shape that you can still walk at 50. This week we’ll be looking at the Mino. We all know that running shoes don’t last forever. They take a lot of wear and tear over the miles we put them so that our knees and ankles don’t. The general rule for replacing running shoes is every 400 miles and we can do a good job keeping track of that in our heads, but what if you had something that simply told you how many miles you had put on a pair?

Enter the Mino. The Mino is a small tab that fits in the bottom of your shoes and keeps track of the shape that your shoes are in. Using the average of 600 compressions in a mile, the Mino records how far you’ve gone and displays on a series of LED lights how close your shoes are to needing to be replaced. It’s less thick than a nickel so it’s difficult to feel in your shoes and is generally unnoticeable when it comes to actually running with it. It’s a neat little thing and will probably give you some surprising results when you realize how fast your shoes are actually wearing out compared to where you thought they were. Each Mino runs about $15 and lasts for one pair of shoes.

Last week we talked about how the weather is beginning to warm up and how we can finally start to leave our houses and venture across the permafrost for exercise. We gave some quick tips on how to get back into running without hurting yourself and our biggest piece of advice was to always make sure you’ve stretched. This week we’re going to go into more detail about proper stretching and some specific examples for running.

The biggest thing with stretching is to make sure you’ve warmed up before you do it. Stretching on “cold” muscles and ligaments can cause more problems than it helps solve. You don’t need to do anything strenuous, just some real light, quick warm ups like knees raises or a quick 10 minute jog will do the job.

Always make sure that you ease into a stretch, if you feel like you’re having to really force it you’re doing something wrong and you should stop. Your body has a pretty solid idea of what it can and can’t do, so make sure that you listen to it. Your typical stretch should last for about 30 seconds for each repetition of it.

Now for some examples stretches especially aimed at runners. Our first stretch is probably the easiest and most recognizable, the standing quad stretch. Simply take one foot and bend your knee back to bring it up behind you and grab your foot and pull until you can feel the stretch in your quad.

To perform the hip flexor stretch, start with standing up with your feet together and take one far step forward and then lean into it while keeping your torso upright.

Our last stretch for today is the groin stretch. Starting while sitting like you’re cross legged, but with the bottoms of your feet pressed together push down on your knees until you feel the stretch in your inner, upper thighs.