On the shooting line the feet are the first thing you set, and usually you set them once and for all. Archers are taught to find a position, mark it on the ground and repeat it exactly on every arrow, because even a small change is supposed to cost points. On weight there are two schools: some want it split evenly between the feet, others want a little more of it on the front leg, towards the target. The question that follows is a simple one, which stance to use and how much load each foot should carry, and there is no shortage of instruments to answer it: force plates, pressure plates that read the load under the sole, video from World Cup events.
The answers are less clear-cut than the rules. Among the strongest archers in the world two different stances sit side by side, and the only study that had qualified archers change their foot position did not see the score drop, even with a stance that made balance much worse. On how the weight is split the studies disagree, and the reason seems to be the foot position itself, which moves the load from one leg to the other. In complete beginners, on the other hand, the position did make a difference.
The foot positions
Not everyone uses the names of the stances in the same way, but the common reference is the line running from the archer to the centre of the target. In the square stance the toes of both feet sit on that line and the body is side-on to the target. In the open stance the front foot moves back and the hips turn a little towards the target; in the closed stance, by contrast, the front foot moves forward; the oblique stance also turns the feet diagonally towards the target. The Russian study I come to below adds two variants with names of their own: the V stance, with the toes turned out, and the T stance, with the front foot pointing at the target and the back foot parallel to the shooting line.
How the best archers stand
The most direct evidence on the people who win comes from competition video. A research group analysed, phase by phase, the shot of the thirty recurve archers in the world top fifteen, fifteen men and fifteen women: eighteen shot from a square stance and twelve from an open one, none from a closed stance, and the difference between the two common ones was not statistically significant. In the other phases of the shot too, from the bow raise to the follow-through, each movement came in at least two styles, and that is one of the reasons why the registry rates the claim that elite archers share one single correct shooting technique as refuted.
An Australian paper looked at something else: where the feet sit relative to the shooting line. In the finals of two World Cup stages in Berlin, in 2017 and 2018, 99 recurve and compound archers were photographed: 64% stood astride the line, 24% further back and 12% further forward. The Koreans were all central, the Americans mostly forward. Neither observation comes with a score, so they say what top archers do, not what makes them win.
What happens to the score when the stance changes
For experienced archers there is a single experiment, from a Russian academy of physical education. Eleven archers aged 17 and 18, ranked from candidate master to master of sport, six compound and five recurve, shot one end of six arrows in each of five positions: their usual one, one with the front foot at 45 degrees, a square one, a V and a T. They stood on two stabilometric platforms, one per foot, while electromyography recorded eight muscles of the arms, shoulders and back.
The author expected an unfamiliar position to make balance worse and the score with it. Balance did suffer in part: in the four experimental stances the quality of the balance function, an index that summarises the stabilogram, tended to fall, and in the T stance it fell significantly, by 38.56% in compound and 64.83% in recurve. The score, however, did not drop substantially, and in the unfamiliar stances it came out slightly higher than in the usual one. The muscles stayed where they were too: compared with the usual stance their activity in the two seconds before the release changed by 1 to 27% in compound and 3 to 36% in recurve, with no significant difference. The author draws the hypothesis that, in archers of this level, keeping balance and executing the shot behave as two separate technical elements.
In the registry the claim is written in the direction of the result, in experienced archers, changing the foot position does not lower the score, and it is rated reported, no more. The limits are concrete: six arrows per condition are barely enough to tell one score from another, the score values can only be read from a graph, with no statistical test reported, and the journal is a regional one. Above all, each stance was tried for a single end, so the study says nothing about what happens when an archer changes position and shoots with it for weeks, with the time it takes to adapt.
The only study that finds an effect of foot position on the score concerns people who had never shot. Sixteen adults, eight men and eight women, were randomly assigned to four foot positions and two string grips, and after thirty practice arrows they shot eighty that were measured: the square position gave the best scores and the oblique one the worst, with open and closed in between. The video showed that those shooting from the oblique stance found it much harder than the others to keep still, and that their sway grew over the session. With four people per position it is a small hint, and the authors read it as the limit of someone who does not yet have an archer's musculature; for a beginner, though, it is the only comparison available, and it points towards the simplest position.
How much weight on each foot
On how the weight is split at full draw, the studies are divided. Three papers support a greater load on the front leg. In four elite Turkish women archers on force plates, the front leg carried 39.0 kilograms before the release and the back leg 32.6; the sum, however, is well above the archers' stated average body weight of 54 kilograms, so the direction can be read and the measurement cannot. In fifteen university compound archers, on a flat insole over a pressure plate, about two thirds of the plantar pressure sat under the bow-side foot, and 43.7% of the total under its heel. Finally, in the eleven Russian archers, in their usual stance with the toes slightly turned out, the load asymmetry leant towards the front leg, by 7.83% in compound and 29.50% in recurve.
Two weaker papers point the other way. An experienced archer weighing 84 kilograms, with the force plate under his front foot only, reached at most 44.12 kilograms on that foot, just over half his weight, and the authors inferred a greater load on the back foot. A study of 27 recurve archers of three levels, all made to use the same foot position, reads more load on the back foot during the draw and at full draw, but it derives this from a horizontal force and from graphs without values. With three studies on one side and two on the other, the claim that at full draw more weight sits on the front leg is contested.
The Russian study suggests why the measurements do not agree. Turning the front foot towards the target, in the T stance, moved the asymmetry onto the back leg with both bows, reaching 58.15% in compound and 46.77% in recurve; turning the toes out into a V, on the other hand, pushed it a little further towards the front leg, but only as a trend. How the weight is split therefore depends on how the feet are placed as well, and two careful studies with different stances can find opposite results. None of these papers, for that matter, sets the weight split against the score.
Keeping still on your feet
You often hear that the shooting stance is unstable in itself, and that is one reason why balance gets trained on its own. The measurements say it depends on who is shooting. In sixteen children, before an eight-week basic course, the sway area of the centre of pressure went from 1.56 square centimetres standing to 12.26 in the shooting stance, about eight times as much, and after the course it was still about seven times. In elite archers the only comparison, on four Australians and 240 arrows, is far less tidy: on poor arrows the sway when shooting reached up to 3,326 square millimetres against 242 for the same archer standing, but in other sessions every arrow sat at or below the standing value. The comparison is not like for like, because standing sway was recorded without the bow and over longer windows, and so the claim that the shooting stance is far less stable than ordinary standing is contested.
Within the shooting stance, movement grows the further you get from the ground. In 37 pre-elite recurve and compound archers, with inertial sensors on the ankle, the lower back and the wrists, the ankle turned at under 2 degrees per second in the half second before the release and the lower back at 3.4 to 4.1; a tenth of a second after the release the lower back rose to 19.8 to 29.3 degrees per second and the drawing wrist to 215 to 271. The registry rates the claim that during the shot the legs and hips move far less than the arms as reported, because the data come from studies designed for other questions, which do not compare archers who move more with archers who move less.
Almost still, though, is not still. In thirteen recurve archers, six elite and seven sub-elite, with one foot on each of two plates, the centre of pressure swayed by 1.9 millimetres while aiming and at the release moved 15 to 20 millimetres away from the target; in 67% of shots the shift began before the string went, as if the body were getting ready for the recoil. The load changes at the release as well: all three studies that measured the forces under the feet at that moment see that at the release the load on the feet drops suddenly, and the claim is reported because none of them measures it well. In the Turkish archers, moreover, the drop was almost the same on arrows scoring 8, 9 and 10, at 7.0, 6.8 and 6.4 kilograms, with no significant difference: the release shakes the base of support on every arrow, good or bad.
That leaves the underlying question, whether keeping stiller makes you shoot better. The claim that the less the body sways while aiming, the better the shot is reported: the force plate studies nearly all point that way, but the moment you measure also matters, and the Russian stance study is precisely the one that complicates it, with balance down by more than a third and the score unchanged. The same study finds a large difference between the two bows: in the usual stance the quality of the balance function was 69.9% in compound archers and 40.3% in recurve archers, and that is the figure behind the registry's claim that compound archers hold their balance better than recurve archers in the seconds before the release, rated reported and resting on that one comparison, with no statistical test between the two groups.
How far forward on the line
The rules only require the body to be over the shooting line, so with a torso about forty centimetres wide an archer can gain around twenty centimetres of distance by putting the feet forward. The Australian paper that photographed the Berlin finals also calculated what that is worth in points, with a model that keeps the group the same size and moves it closer to the target: between 0.25 and 0.42 points over 72 arrows outdoors, and between 0.36 and 1.08 over 60 arrows at 18 metres, with a larger gain for weaker archers. It is a calculation, not a measurement on archers actually shooting, and nobody has tried the two positions on the same archers. That is why the claim that standing forward on the shooting line, closer to the target, gains points is rated transferred, and it remains to be seen whether the stability lost in a less natural position eats up those few tenths.
Insoles
If the weight goes through the feet, it is natural to think about what is under them. The only study that has tested an insole had fifteen university compound archers shoot first on a flat insole and then on one with arch support, fifteen arrows at 30 metres in each condition. With the second, the mean score per arrow rose from 9.58 to 9.74 and the centre of pressure moved less, mainly under the back foot; the total sway area of the two feet, however, did not change, the effects were small and the two conditions always came in the same order, so the gain cannot be separated from getting used to the test. A measurement of thirty Indian archers, moreover, finds no link between foot shape, normal, pronated or supinated, and sway in a balance test. The claim that insoles with arch support improve stability and scores is reported on the strength of that single study, and it has not been tested on the recurve.
What I take to the shooting line
These studies do not point to one correct stance. At the top the square and the open stance sit side by side, and in qualified archers a change of stance for one end did not lower the score; in complete beginners the square stance gave the best results, and those in the oblique stance struggled to keep still. I draw three conclusions from this, bearing in mind that none of them comes from an experiment lasting weeks.
The first concerns the choice. For a beginner the square stance is the simplest place to start, and it is also the one that gave the best scores in the only comparison between beginners. An archer who has shot for years and is comfortable with an open stance has no reason, as far as the measurements go, to change back: in the world top fifteen four archers in ten shoot that way.
The second concerns the fear of changing. Marking your feet on the line and putting them back the same way every time remains a good habit, because it takes one variable out of the shot and is part of the repeatability of the movement; the data, however, do not say that a shift of a few degrees ruins an end. If a stance is uncomfortable on long days, trying another one in training has not shown a cost in the score of an end, at least in the experienced archers who were measured. What it costs over the weeks of adapting has not been measured, which is why I would make the change well away from competitions.
The third concerns weight. Since the split changes with foot position and nobody has set it against the score, I would not chase a percentage. I care more that the weight stays the same from one arrow to the next and that the body moves the same way at every release, and a video shot from behind or from the side, always from the same spot, is enough to see whether the hips shift. How balance is trained, and how much is known about it, is covered in the article on posture and stability; insoles, on what we know today, are worth a try without expecting much.