If you love to exercise, but are plagued by blisters on your feet, listen up. Emergency room physician Dr. Grant Lipman once treated athletes who ran 25 to 50 miles a day and found their most common complaint was blisters on their feet. He found the best way to prevent them, and it's simple and inexpensive: paper tape.

"What I kept hearing was, 'Doctor, I'd be doing so well, if only for my feet,'" said Lipman, of Stanford University Medical Center. "Their feet were getting decimated."

Lipman said that many methods of preventing blisters have been tried, including powders, antiperspirants, lubricants, tapes and adhesive pads. But regardless of scientific studies done on the subject of preventing blisters, until now there was little evidence to show that any worked well.

In a study, Lipman found that when inexpensive paper tape, the kind available at most drugstores, was applied to blister-prone areas prior to exercise, it reduced foot blisters.
Lipman and his colleagues recruited 128 runners participating in the 155-mile, six-stage RacingThePlanet ultramarathon.

Paper tape was applied by trained medical assistants to just one of each of the runners' feet. The untaped areas of the same foot served as a control. The paper tape was replaced at various stages of the race.

The medical assistants followed the runners for 155 miles over seven days.

For 98 of the 128 runners, no blisters formed where the tape had been applied, whereas 81 of the 128 got blisters in untaped areas.

"It's kind of a ridiculously cheap, easy method of blister prevention," Lipman said. "You can get it anywhere. A little roll coasts about 69 cents, and that should last a year or two."

Paper tape won't help just runners — it can also help everyone prone to blisters from hikers to women in heels.

In addition to being painful, untreated blisters on toes and feet can become infected, which can be especially dangerous for diabetics. According to diabetesdaily.com, even small blisters can turn into ulcers that can lead to amputation.

The study is published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.