How Can I Stop My Toes Hurting When Hiking?

Are your toes hurting when hiking? Having painful toes when you hike is an absolute nightmare, and it can be a major factor to your hike having to be abandoned, or worse still, in a worst case scenario, it could even end up with you having to be rescued. If this ever happened to me, think I would curl up and die from the shame.

Thankfully, there are ways to deal with painful toes on a hike, and we’re going to learn them in this post, but firstly we need to know what’s causing the problem.

There are several different reasons for your toes hurting when hiking. Let’s have a look at the main one’s then see how we can treat and avoid them.

Contents

• 1 Why Are My Toes Hurting When Hiking?
• 2 How Can I Deal With a Stubbed Toe When Hiking?
• 3 How Can I Deal With Painful and Crushed Toes When Hiking?
• 4 How Can I Deal With Blisters When Hiking?
• 5 How Can I Deal With Cuts On My Toes When Hiking?
• 6 Can I Still Hike With Athlete’s Foot?
• 7 Hiking With Previous Foot Injuries
• 8 Recap and Summary to ” How Can I Stop My Toes Hurting When Hiking”?

Why Are My Toes Hurting When Hiking?

Your painful toes, or possibly just your painful toe, will be caused by one, or a combination of the following reasons:

• An Impact Injury – From a Stubbed Toe or from when you have dropped something on it.
• Crushed Toes – From poorly fitted boots, bunching socks or boots being too small.
• Rubbing Injuries – Blisters and Hot Spots from poorly fitted boots or boots being too big.
• Cuts – From walking around the camp site without boots while resting your feet os something stabbing through your sole.
• Infections and Diseases – Athletes Foot, Immersion Foot and many others.
• Previous Injuries and Conditions – Arthritis, Mis-shaped previously broken toe, Bunions or Gout

Each and every one of the above could have a devastating effect on your hike, so we’ll have a look at each of them, their symptoms, any associated short term fixes and how to prevent them occurring altogether.

How Can I Deal With a Stubbed Toe When Hiking?

Stubbing your toe badly when Hiking could be catastrophic to your hike. A stubbed to can be excruciatingly painful and can take weeks of rest to heal.

Symptoms – If you stub your toe, you will know about it pretty quickly. You will first get a high level of throbbing pain, followed by swelling and bruising on the affected toe and possibly bleeding from the bed of the toenail. If you remove your Boot you may find it impossible to get back on and walking on it could be next to impossible due to the high levels of associated pain. Read more...