As a skateboarder or longboarder, your toes are important for balance, for pushing, for carving, and for tricks. If you hurt or break a toe, can you keep riding?
Skateboarding with an injured or broken toe is typically not a good idea. Riding requires a lot of foot movement with great pressure on your feet, especially for street or freestyle tricks. Skating with an injured or broken toe can delay the healing process or even make the injury worse.
Even if you’re able to ride, a toe injury will likely affect your riding abilities and increase the risk of falling. If you’re on a street deck, the vibrations can also be painful and prevent healing.
Note: I’m NOT a medical professional, so don’t take this post as medical advice. The goal of this article is simply to share my own and other skateboarders’ experience. If you have serious or lasting pain around your toe, you should definitely have it checked out by a doctor.
What does a broken toe look and feel like?
After an impact on your toe while skateboarding, you’ll likely feel severe, sharp aching pain for a while. Skaters generally see bruising and discoloration around the broken toe(s). The area around it is all swollen up and purple, which can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
In some cases, your broken may look misaligned or crooked compared to the other toes. You may find it difficult or painful to move the injured toe, particularly bending or flexing it, making it very painful to get on your board.
Even after the pain is gone, some skaters report not feeling their toe and the area around it at all any more. This keep you from feeling the edge of your board with your foot, preventing you from doing any pop and kick tricks.
Skateboarders’ advice for a broken toe
Again, this isn’t medical advice but things skateboarders tend to do.
Skateboarders often apply ice on their toe to help reduce the swelling. The RICE approach (rest, ice, compression, elevation) helps a lot for many boarders.
Many skaters tape their broken toe to an adjacent toe (or two). It’s recommended to have an X-ray taken to know which toe(s) to tape it to.
“Double-taping” tends to work well: in addition to taping your toes together, add another tape layer around the complete front part of your foot.
With a broken toe, many skaters will take a break from riding for at least a month until the pain is minimal.
Depending on how bad the injury is, the smartest thing to do is to take a month or two off skateboarding (incredibly frustrating) to avoid having a weak toe that will keep being injured, potentially impacting other areas of your foot and affecting your riding for life!
Skaters also recommend avoiding inflammatory foods (fats, sugar etc), alcohol, and tobacco, as they find diet is an important part of healing.
During the healing period, you might find other skateboard-related activities e.g. filming other skaters at the skatepark and interacting with them so as to stay connected with the community.
Some skateboarders will do cortisone shots to reduce the pain in order to continue walking or riding. However, these only provide temporary relief, and once the effect dissipates the pain may be even worse.
Skaters who continue to ride with a broken toe sometimes end up with a toe that will no longer bend even after healing, which creates other foot problems as well.
How long does a broken toe take to heal for skateboarders
Toes and fingers are the furthest body parts from your heart, so they get less blood flow than others. This is why a dislocated or broken toe can take a long time to heal correctly, 3 to 4 weeks for most skaters and injuries.
To ride pain free though, it might take up to 6 weeks, possibly sooner depending on how well you take care of yourself.
In some cases, e.g. when the fracture extends into the joint, the healing can take several months. Likewise, a dancer’s fracture – not exactly the toe but the long bone on the outside of the foot that connects to the small toe – will take longer to heal.
Again, if you don’t let your toe heal properly before getting back on your skateboard or longboard, you may delay or forever prevent the healing.
Tips for skateboarders / longboarders with a broken toe
Here are a few good tips from the community:
- If you’ve broken a toe and healed, make sure you get some good skate shoes with protection in the area of your toe injury.
- While you’re off from skateboarding because of a broken toe, you can keep working on your core strength, essential in skateboarding and longboarding. Get a yoga ball or balance board, or do pilates exercises to build your core.
- You can also do exercises to build leg strength without straining your foot e.g. through elevated bicycle kicks. Lie down on your back with your feet in the air and pretend you’re pedaling a bike. You can add ankle weights for resistance.
Final thoughts
If you think you may have broken a toe, and the pain and discoloration don’t seem to recede after a few days, you should go to the doctor’s and get an X-ray. Be smart and put that skateboard or longboard away.
A broken toe not set or healed properly can have dire consequences on your riding life! Oh and on your health too.