- Welcome to boot spot. My name's William and today I'm going to show you how to break in your boots properly. I just got a brand new pair
of Wolverine 1000 Mile boots. I'm super excited to wear these. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to break these in or walk you through it and I'm going to show you
exactly the tips and tricks that I use to make this process as easy and quick as possible.
So let's get into it (slow music) Guys, welcome, I'm so
grateful to have you here. If you haven't already,
please hit that subscribe button down below and give me a thumbs up. It is super helpful for the channel, and I really appreciate it. As I said, I just got the
Wolverine 1000 Mile boots. I'm super excited to get out there and try them on and kind of get started going into that break-in process. Now for some boots, this can be a really
long, painful process. The most recent pair I got was a pair of Redwing Iron Rangers and
that was pretty torturous for the first few days, but it's a lot better now. And I've learned a lot about
breaking in boots and I've got this new pair that I
thought would be, you know, Wolverine 1000 Miles. I've heard mixed reviews
in terms of how these are breaking in. So I'm just going to go
through the whole process of what I do to make sure that I'm
breaking in my boots properly. So I'm not getting weird creasing. And so that I'm not getting
like gnarly blisters on my heels and like ruining my feet forever so that I'd have to hobble around like a cripple or something like that. You guys know what I'm talking about. So the first thing that you're
going to do, and I already, I already did this, but the first thing you want
to do is just make sure that the boot fits your foot. A lot of times, if
you're shopping in store, you have that down, it's no problem, but you want to have
enough room in your toe, at least a half inch at
very, very minimum half inch. But a lot of times people will
leave a full inch at the toe. You want to have enough
room in the instep. It's okay, if the sides of
your feet fit a little snug, but it shouldn't be tight. You shouldn't ever feel like
if you leave these on for an hour, it shouldn't feel tingly. If any of those things are
happening to you or you have too much heel slip, then that means your boot is too small if you don't have enough
room in the toe you know, any of those problem
areas, if it's too small, then you need to go get a larger boot because there's no amount of
breaking in or wearing that is going to solve that problem. The first thing I'm going to
do with these boots after I've made sure that the fit
is good and on these, I know that the fit is good. I'm going to wear them for a
few hours inside the house. The reason being, once
I go outside, you know, if the sole starts to get scuffs
at all and there's any dirt in there, I can never return them. These, you know, once you go outside, you're committing to the boots.
So I want to make sure just, just to double-check for
one to two to three hours, just kind of get a couple
of creases in there, relax the leather and just
make sure that I'm not feeling any of that like my foot falls
asleep or anything like that. I don't want to feel any of that. Otherwise I'm going to have to, you know, I need to return it if it
was too tight in an area, any area, and for that reason, I'm not willing to commit to them yet, I might need to exchange
them for a different size. So I don't want to wear them
outside one of the best ways to relax the leather while you're
inside is to just kind of rock back and forth, especially around the toe
here and around the instep and ankle, that's going to help
break in the sole a little bit, kind of loosen that up. It's going to loosen up some
of the leather fibers around those areas and that's just going to help
you understand whether or not you have the right fit. You can take, if you have stairs in your
house or just right outside of your apartment or house. I have a couple of stairs
out there that I do this on, but I'll put my foot on the
stair and I'll just rock it back and forth. That really helps kind of add
a little bit of weight to help crease the leather. All right, guys, it's my favorite part of breaking in a new pair of boots. I'm taking these Wolverine
1000 Miles out into the world, and then I'm going to
walk to the local brewery. It's about a mile and a half
there, mile and half back. So it's three miles in total. And I found that that is a
really good first walk to really break in the boots. And then I'm going to give
the boots a days rest, and then I'm just going to
keep wearing them. I mean, the name of the game is just
wearing the boots as many times as possible to get them
broken in. Before you have to, you know, go on like a six, seven mile hike or go for a day of work, something that could
really mess your feet up. But I find like a mile and a
half walk or three mile walk is a great way of just getting
that first break in done. Plus you end up with a beer at the end. (upbeat music) (rock music) All right, guys, so I have taken these Wolverine 1000 Mile boots
on their maiden voyage. Honestly, they weren't really
hard to break in at all. I did not get any blisters. I thought these were going
to be a little bit tougher, but they weren't. So I'm
really happy with that. I'm glad I don't have sore feet today. First thing I did when I got
home is I popped in a couple of shoe trees and I'm not
going to wear these today. I'm going to give them a day of rest. That is kind of the typical
protocol for breaking in boots, wear them one day for a good
walk and then let them breathe for another day. I always recommend getting
a pair of shoe trees. Cedar, that really helps with
just the odor and keeps that under control, but also
helps keep the leather shape and it's just a good practice. So when I went out, I
wore thick wool socks. I just kind of generally wear that this style of sock for any boot but that really helps,
especially on the first time you wear them, because it can seriously rub in the heels or
around the ball of your foot. Those are kind of the
typical problem areas. So if you are going out and
your boots are really hard on your feet, you know, my
Redwing Iron Rangers, again, definitely always wear a pair
of thick wool socks the first time, but you can kind of
take those target areas use some band-aids, especially
for me, it's on my heels. So I would put one on, put a bandaid on my heel and
then put the socks over that that helps a lot. If
they're super, super tough, you can wear two pairs of socks
that would get really hot, but it's a good way of just
initially breaking that leather in and getting those creases
and softening it up while without like completely
destroying your feet. A couple of other ways to
soften up the leather is use something like a shoe
cream. This is Venetian. This really just helps soften the leather. It's a good shoe care policy
to use something like this. This is Horween Chromexcel leather. And so Venetian is a great
product for that. So I'll, I'll go ahead and use that. That's going to continue to
soften leather as I wear it, you know, three, four or five more times, that's gonna be really
helpful moving forward. I'm going to continue to wear
these every other day until they're fully broken in. Guys, if you have any tips
for how you break in boots, let me know in the comments below, I'm always interested in hearing
what you guys have to say. If you enjoyed this video, please hit that subscribe
button down below. Give me a thumbs up and until
next time put your best foot forward.
