Tips for training bare feet to walk everywhere you want!

My personal experience is that it takes only about ten to fourteen days if you try to barefoot one or two hours a day to train your feet to an extent so that you should be able to walk on pavement, sand, forest floor, grass, gravel, and plain dust and dirt without feeling pain. An interested beginner should follow a few tips to make his or her first steps into an unshod world a pleasurable one...:

• Begin your first barefoot trips early in the year, on a warm Spring day, for instance. Starting walking barefoot in hot mid-Summer, when the sun heats up the ground to boiling temperatures. might scorch the untrained bare sole, and that means pain...!
• As soon as you start feeling uncomfortable, stop! Take a break, or put the shoes you carry with you back on. It won't take you long to leave those shoes at home and walk around barefoot a whole day... from getting up until going to bed.
• In case you might get into a cool rain shower, be prepared: rainproof clothing and an extra pullover should be part of your equipment... it may sound illogical, but the best thing to do when bare feet get cold, is to put on extra clothing. Why...? Because by putting on a warm pullover, the core body temperature stays high enough to make up for the loss of warmth in your hands and feet... As far as temperature tolerance is concerned, anything goes... (my personal low limit at the moment is +5°C - about 41°F - and at the time I wrote this - mid-September - the ground tended to get rather cool at first touch!!). The only thing about temperature limits: Avoid walking barefoot when temperatures drop to 0° or considerably below 0°!! (-2°C are now believed to be the magical number, as far as I have heard. But I'll have to check for verification of that figure.) Frost can severly damage your bare feet, and you should get to wearing shoes again, as soon as your toes start to feel numb, losing colour and staying pale... If your toes are rosy pink when walking barefoot in cooler weather, fine. That indicates, that circulation is still running as it should.
• The utmost safety rule: Watch your step! It may sound painfully obvious, but this is an essential part of walking barefoot. Beginners as well as 'professionals' have to follow the rule to watch out for possible dangers on their path, to ensure that their pastime remains a fun and healthy one. This does not mean, of course, that a barefooter's eyes have to be glued to the toes, but it is advisable to take looks at the path two or three paces ahead, watching out for objects like glass splinters, thorns, or the unpleasant little (or sometimes really huge) smelly surprises left by our four-legged friends.
  Walking barefoot often (or ideally: constantly) will train the feet sufficiently enough to turn stepping into a small glass splinter into a harmless affair. The barefooter will notice that (s)he stepped onto something sharp, but the bare sole is now so well-trained, that the little javelin will not impale.
• When walking barefoot, walk this way (Aerosmith pun... :)):
  Always step down straight, bringing the front part of your foot down first, then bringing down the heel to stabilize. Since the ball of your foot is the broadest part of it, it's just logical, that it should take the main weight of your body. The heel is only there to stabilize the step, so that we won't have to topple and fall from failing a balance act... Do not try to think constantly about how to walk... it will become a habitual act very soon - in fact, you are likely to walk barefoot the right way, as soon as you hear a stomping sound, indicating that you brought down the heel first, putting too much weight onto it.
  Is it healthy to walk like that, when we have been told to bring the heel down first, and then step on by letting the weight roll from heel to toe...? Yes, it is. The aforementioned movememnt is almost simultaneous. Women wearing high-heel shoes do it all the time... When walking barefoot you should avoid, bringing your heel down first, as the heel bone is only protected by a layer of skin instead of the high-tech suspension of a $359 sports shoe (the figure is just a guessed one, no actually known one...). Slamming your heel down onto the ground unprotectedly will after some time result in pain, in the worst case in having splinters cracking loose from the heel bone, and - most of all, it is loud! A barefooter's step should be discreet and sometimes even totally unheard... When you find yourself 'stomping' rather than walking comparingly soundlessly, check yourself, and change your walking style.
  Another health aspect of not bringing down the heel first is that the tendons and ligaments in your ankles and knees are not stretched and strained as much. Every shock to the heel bone sends shocks to the ankles and knees, straining muscles, tendons and ligaments. I, personally, had quite some problems due to overstretching my ankles, when walking shod, in my ankles and knees... (due to my overweight...) I haven't lost much weight since then, but since walking barefoot, the strain has become less, and I haven't suffered from sore ankles and pain in my knees since.