Dealing with Foot Blisters

When it comes to advice about foot blisters, I learned the hard way from experience.

My first summer in capoeira, I started intense training with no shoes on. Anyone could tell I had blisters from the way I hobbled around all day…especially leaving the academy!

That summer I learned how to take care of my sore, blistered feet and keep training until I eventually got calluses.

If you’re in the same situation I was, read some of what I learned below to save yourself the painful experience I went through…

Prevention

The best way to deal with blisters is not to have them in the first place!

You can easily reduce or eliminate the chance of getting foot blisters by taking some precautions before training. Here are a couple of methods for protecting your feet…

• Wearing shoes - This is the easiest and most straightforward way of avoiding blisters. Wearing a comfortable pair of shoes during training will keep you from getting blisters on your feet. Make sure you choose the right pair!
• Wrapping/Taping feet – Another alternative I’ve seen is taping the feet. This is usually trickier and more intensive than using shoes, however you get the benefits of training barefoot with foot protection. The chance of getting blisters with taped feet is greatly reduced from barefoot training.

These are the simplest methods to avoid getting blisters. But what if you don’t want to avoid them?

Dealing with Blisters

A lot of people prefer training barefoot. When calluses build up on your feet, it becomes extremely easy to train barefoot. However to get to this point, you have to go through the blistering stage; it’s necessary to build up the calluses.

The following are some simple tips I use to help me through this painful stage and get my feet hard and callused…

• Draining regular blisters – Foot blisters hurt the most when they’re full and you have to step on them. That’s why draining them is the key to relief. Use a sterilized needle (heat over flame) to pop the blister and drain it.

  It sounds worse than it is and feels better than it sounds ;)

• Draining blood blisters – Sometimes you get blood blisters, where the blister fills with blood. The advice I got to deal with these is to use a needle and thread. Pull the needle out, but leave the thread in the blister with the ends out. The thread soaks up the blood and drains out the blister.
• Warm water soak – The blisters will leave you with sore feet. To lessen the soreness, I find soaking my feet in warm water really helps to overcome the pain and aches after training on my feet. For that matter, warm water for the whole body helps too!
• Don’t remove skin – I learned this lesson the hard way. One time, after a blister popped, I used nail clips to remove the excess skin. I ended up cutting too close to the edge of the blister, and the next time I trained, my skin started to peel up by the blister.

  This honestly hurt like hell, and I learned to leave it as it is. Since then, I’ve never had that problem again.

If you continue to train capoeira, you’re sure to get at least a foot blister or know somebody who will. Try these simple tips and tricks to get over the discomfort and get back to training ASAP!

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