It’s finally nice enough to exercise outside! If you’re going to do any hiking, then you need a good pair of boots to support your feet and enable you to complete your walk as safely and as comfortably as possible.

Many people who are new to hiking for fitness or fun have real issues with completing their first adventure comfortably because the boots they are wearing hurt their feet and make the hike more miserable than enjoyable! 

If you don’t want that to happen to you, here are a few things you can do to make your new hiking boots more comfortable before you head out.

Buy the right boots

The best way to ensure that your hiking boots are as comfy as possible is to buy the best boots for you in the first place. Good walking boots fit your foot perfectly and help to support your arches well. It can be difficult to know which boots to buy when there is so much variety, but good outdoors companies like outdoorcommand.com will be able to help you with which hiking boot brands are best for wide feet or which will be more comfortable for people with flat arches, so do youtube research and ask the experts before you buy.

Break them in

Breaking in your hiking boots simply means wearing them for short periods so you can get used to them. Leather hiking boots will stretch and change shape to better mold to your foot very effectively - synthetic boots will stretch a bit but not nearly as much - so by wearing them for an hour here and there before you go off on your big hike, you can break them in and make them more comfortable for you when you need them to be on point. 

Heat the insoles

This might sound like a strange thing to do, but removing the insoles from your hiking boots, if they are leather,  and putting them in the oven at 120 degrees Fahrenheit for around ten minutes, is an excellent way to make them more pliable so that they will stretch and mold to your foot more easily. Once you have removed them from the oven, coat them with a layer of natural oil to make them supple, and then hike around your neighborhood for an hour or two. This will help to make them fit you better very quickly indeed.

Put newspapers in the toebox

If your toe area is wide but your boots have quite a narrow toebox, placing some balled-up newspaper into the shoes and leaving overnight will help to stretch it out a bit so that your toes can be more easily accommodated.

Wear double-layer socks

Socks that have two or more layers are great for boots that rub or chafe, so invest in a couple of pairs just in case you need them.

As you can see, there are lots of pretty simple things you can do to make your hiking boots more comfortable, and doing so will make those early hikes much easier and more enjoyable than they might otherwise be!