How Much Does a Foot Sweat?

Publication date

5 May 2024

Estimated reading time

2 min read

I tried to figure out how much sweat a foot pro­duces during a one-hour run.

I read the study „Design Data For Footwear: Sweat­ing Dis­tri­b­u­tion On The Human Foot”¹, read the arti­cle „Find­ings on Foot Sweat”², which are, in fact, the same source. From them, one can con­clude that one foot pro­duces an aver­age of approx­i­mately 30ml of sweat during a one-hour run.

I don’t really under­stand how they arrive at these fig­ures when they cite other num­bers nearby: „0.3–0.5mg per cm² per min”. Which equals 30 mg/cm² per hour. Which equals 0.03 ml/cm² per hour. From which it should follow that one foot has an area of 1000 cm² to get 30 ml.

But the figure of ~30ml per foot per hour is also cited by other sources.

Another amus­ing fact: a shoe pre­vents the foot from sweat­ing. A bare foot pro­duces 22% more sweat than a foot in a shoe.