Foot posture and sway in archers: Gohil 2025 study

In 30 archers aged 20 to 30 from archery schools in Pune, India, foot shape was not associated with postural sway. The authors classified each foot as normal, pronated or supinated with the six-item Foot Posture Index, assessed balance on a Neurocom Balance Master platform, and then split the archers into those who showed sway and those who did not.

On the left, 19 feet were normal, 4 pronated and 7 supinated; on the right, 13, 8 and 9. Among normal feet, sway was present in 68.42% of cases on the left and 76.92% on the right, among pronated feet in 25.00% and 37.50%, and among supinated feet in 42.86% and 44.44%. With Fisher's exact test the differences were not significant: p = 0.2411 for the left foot and p = 0.1649 for the right.

The archers had at least one year of experience and were selected at the researchers' discretion; anyone with lower-limb surgery, concussion, visual or vestibular problems, respiratory or inner ear infections, or repeated lower-limb injuries in the previous six months was excluded. The FPI-6 adds up six clinical observations made standing, with weight shared between both legs, each scored from -2 to +2: the total runs from -12 to +12, with negative values towards a supinated foot and positive values towards a pronated one.

Balance was measured barefoot with the M-CTSIB protocol: standing still with eyes open and closed, on a firm surface and on foam, with three 10-second trials (the paper does not make clear whether per condition or in total). The test involved neither the bow nor the shooting stance. Sway was then treated as a yes or no variable; the paper does not say what threshold was used, but notes that the platform provides reference values only from age 20 upwards, which is why younger archers were excluded.

The main limitation is that balance was measured standing barefoot with the feet on the platform's markings, not in the shooting stance or with the bow drawn: the finding concerns these archers' general balance, not their stability while shooting. Reducing sway to yes or no, with an unstated threshold, throws away most of the information, and with 30 archers split into three very unequal groups (4 pronated left feet) a moderate association would not have shown up anyway.

The authors write that Cramér's V is below 0.1, so the association would stay weak even with larger samples. From the counts in their own table, however, V comes out at around 0.33 for the left foot and 0.36 for the right: an effect that is not negligible, and that this sample cannot estimate with any precision. The abstract describes the archers as professionals, whereas the methods describe archers from local schools with at least one year of experience; level, discipline, scores and dominant side are not reported. The closing recommendations on core and proprioceptive training do not come from the study's data.

For archers, the study gives no reason to worry about the shape of their feet, but no reason to rule it out either: it finds no association between pronated or supinated feet and sway in a clinical balance test, on a sample too small to show that there is none. It says nothing about stability while shooting or about score, and insoles, footwear or foot correction lie outside what this paper can support. If a foot problem is causing discomfort, it needs to be assessed by a health professional.