Foot arch in archers and other sports: Resmana 2024

Forty university athletes in Jakarta, ten from each of football, futsal, archery and pencak silat, left a wet footprint on a sheet of paper. Among the archers, three in ten had flat feet and seven a normal arch; in pencak silat four in ten had flat feet, in football and futsal one in ten. Nobody in any of the four sports had a high arch.

The archers were on average 20.87 years old, weighed 63.16 kg and were 168.16 cm tall, with a BMI of 22.3. The study does not relate the footprints to score, to stability in the shooting stance or to injury: it stops at the count. In the discussion the authors suggest that in archery the shape of the foot arch may matter little for performance, provided the archer has enough stability and strength to hold the stance, and they call for more detailed analysis.

The study is observational, with a single measurement session. The athletes were aged 19 to 23, studied at Universitas Negeri Jakarta and had competed at least once at regional or national level; smokers and anyone with a history of cardiovascular disease or asthma were excluded. Foot type was classified with the wet footprint test: the foot is dipped in water and pressed onto a sheet of paper, and the shape of the print is judged as a flat, normal or high arch. The paper does not say which index or cut-off was used to separate the three categories.

Height was measured with a stadiometer, weight and BMI with an electronic scale. The analysis is purely descriptive, counts and percentages in Excel, with no statistical test between groups. Neither the participants' sex nor the archers' discipline (recurve, compound or barebow) is reported.

Ten archers are too few to estimate a prevalence: three flat feet in ten against one in ten in football is a difference of two people, and no test says whether it goes beyond chance. The group comes from a single Indonesian university and is not described by sex, years of practice, discipline or exact level. The wet footprint test is read by eye, and the authors themselves flag it as a source of subjectivity; the paper does not say how many people read the prints or whether they knew which sport each athlete played. Nor is it clear whether the result refers to one foot, both, or the worse of the two.

There is also an inconsistency in the text: the abstract names an Omron scale, the methods a Xiaomi one. Finally, the design cannot tell whether archery changes the foot or whether people with flat feet are more likely to choose static sports: the authors speak of different biomechanical demands across sports, but that is their reading.

For archers this study says little. It shows that flat feet were present in a small group of university archers, and that those who had them still competed at regional or national level. It does not say whether flat feet affect stability while aiming, how weight is shared between the legs, or score, because none of these was measured.

The recommendations in the discussion, foot and ankle exercises and orthotics for flat-footed athletes, come from the literature on other sports, not from the data collected here. Finding out whether foot shape matters in the shooting stance would need measures of body sway or score alongside the footprint, and this paper has neither.