Teen Athlete Health Facebook ad: “Safe Hygiene for Football Players”

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1385945536286972

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Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads

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0

EU reach

20

Niche

Sports & Training

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Ad text

A youth football coach pulled me aside three years ago and tried to tell me something about my son's feet. I didn't listen. I should have. My son Jake was 12, playing tackle football, on a development squad doing extra sessions twice a week. He was a good player. The coach was a man called Ray who'd been coaching kids for thirty years. After a game one Saturday, Ray asked if he could have a word. He told me Jake had been favoring his left foot through the second half. He asked if Jake had said anything about it. I said no. Jake hadn't told me anything. Ray said: "Listen, in thirty years of coaching, I've watched maybe four or five real talents not make it past 16. Twice it was injury. The rest of them, it was their feet - chronic stuff that nobody around them treated seriously until it was too late. Just check his feet tonight." I didn't think much of it at the time. He was a coach, not a doctor. I figured it was a passing comment. That night I asked Jake to take off his shoes. Between his toes, on both feet, the skin was raw and pink and peeling. He'd had it for months. He hadn't told me because he didn't think it was important. We got cream. The cream worked for two weeks. The infection came back. We did cream again. It worked for three weeks. It came back. This cycle ran for about a year. By the time Jake was 13, he was getting it about every five weeks. He'd stopped wanting to take his shoes off in front of his teammates in the locker room. He still played, but the limp Ray had spotted got worse during weeks when his feet were actively flared. At 14, the fungus moved into the nail of his big toe. Toenail fungus - onychomycosis - is far more serious than skin fungus. The standard treatment is six months of oral antifungals with monthly liver function tests because the medication is hard on the liver. That's when I went looking for what was actually happening, because the cream-and-wait-and-hope approach was not getting us anywhere. Three things I found that I want every parent of a teen athlete to know. One. A 2021 paper measuring the microclimate inside athletic shoes during exercise found internal relative humidity of 96 to 100%. Tropical rainforests run at 75 to 90%. The inside of a football cleat during a game is wetter than a rainforest. That same study found bacterial growth on the foot's skin in direct positive correlation with internal shoe humidity. Two. Athlete's foot fungus can survive in the lining of an unwashed sports shoe for one to two weeks between wears. Which means the cream you put on the foot heals the foot, but the cleat - sitting in an equipment bag in a hot car for the week - re-seeds the infection the next practice. Three. A study in Clinical Infectious Diseases found athlete's foot present in 83% of cases of hospitalized cellulitis. Cellulitis is a deep skin infection that can become life-threatening. The athlete's foot makes the cracks. The bacteria walk through. Three things, taken together, told me something I had not understood for a year and a half: Jake's feet were never going to heal as long as we were only treating the skin. The cleat was the reservoir. We had to treat the cleat. I bought a set of natural shoe fresheners that did three things at the same time. Activated bamboo charcoal - passively pulls moisture out of the shoe, day after day, for nine months. One gram of it has 32,000 square feet of internal surface area. Drop it in a wet cleat and it just keeps drinking the wet. Montmorillonite clay - a volcanic clay that traps bacterial cells onto its molecular surface. Bacteria stop multiplying because they stop circulating. Fragrant plant oils - a blend including sandalwood, lemon, and lavender. A 2018 paper in the journal Molecules screened sixty fragrant plant oils for antifungal activity. Sandalwood ranked in the top ten most active. Three things at once. Pull the wet. Trap the bacteria. Hit the fungus where the cream can't reach. That was sixteen months ago. Jake's skin has stayed clear. The toenail has grown out and is finally normal again. He plays without limping. He doesn't avoid the locker room. I called Ray last winter and told him what had happened. He laughed, the dry kind. He said in thirty years of telling parents to check their kid's feet, I was the third one who'd ever come back and thanked him for it. Three. If you've got a kid playing sport right now and they sweat into closed footwear, please look at their feet tonight. Not because of vanity. Because the inside of a football cleat is the wettest environment on earth and the cream you've been buying isn't reaching where the problem actually lives. This is what we use → https://www.aromaarmour.com/products/shoe-freshener Bamboo charcoal, volcanic clay, fragrant plant oils. One pair, nine months. Money-back guarantee. Ships worldwide. If you're going to buy something else, fine. But please don't keep treating the foot while the cleat re-infects it. That cycle has cost real kids real seasons. Ray has watched four or five of them. I almost let Jake be the next one. Don't let yours be the one I should be writing about next year. P.S. - If you know a coach like Ray, thank them next time you see them. Most of them know things about kids' bodies that the kids' parents will never hear unless they're paying attention. → https://www.aromaarmour.com/products/shoe-freshener

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aromaarmour.com

Safe Hygiene for Football Players

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