Here's a liberating fact about archery stance: there is no single correct one. Square stance, slightly open stance — champions have shot both. What every one of them shares isn't a stance; it's a stance. One base, chosen on purpose, built identically under every arrow they shoot.
Most self-taught archers have it backwards. They've read the debates about open versus square, and meanwhile their actual feet land somewhere a little different every end — a bit wider after a good arrow, a bit more open when the wind picks up, toes migrating as the session gets long. The debate they're following matters far less than the drift they're not noticing.
The baseline
Start here and adjust only with reasons. Feet about shoulder width apart — wide enough to be stable, narrow enough that your hips stay free to settle. Weight even between both feet and centered front-to-back, not rocked onto heels. A square stance means both toes on a line to the target; slightly open means the front foot pulled back a touch so your body opens a few degrees toward the target. Both are perfectly fine. Open buys some archers a clearer feeling of the chest staying out of the string's way; square is simpler to reproduce. Pick one and let it be yours.
Above the feet, the posture rule: tall spine stacked over the hips, ribs down, standing over your skeleton rather than leaning on your muscles. The stance isn't just where your feet are — it's the platform that decides whether "tall and stacked" is even available to the rest of the shot.
Why the base multiplies everything
Every checkpoint in the shot is built relative to the one below it. The T of your alignment sits on your hips; your hips sit on your feet. Move the feet a few centimeters or open the stance a few degrees, and the same "identical" draw now anchors a shoulder line pointing somewhere slightly new. You'll feel nothing — the shot feels the same from inside — but the arrows launch from a rotated platform.
This is why stance drift is such a quiet thief. It doesn't produce one visible fault; it produces a low-grade inconsistency across all of them, the kind that gets blamed on focus or fatigue. Consistency downstream starts at the floor.
The drill — Stance Tape Lines
Put two short tape lines on the shooting line where your feet belong — about shoulder width, slightly open if that's your stance — and build every single shot from that same base for two weeks. Feet to the tape, weight even, tall over the hips, then the shot begins.
The tape does two jobs. It removes drift outright — your feet can't wander when the target is on the floor. And it converts your stance from a feeling into a decision: after two weeks of tape, you'll know exactly what your base is, which means you can finally experiment honestly. Want to try more open? Move the tape, shoot a week, compare. Without the tape, you were never comparing stances — just noise.
Stance is also one of the easiest things to verify on camera. Film one arrow from the front-side angle — phone on a tripod, behind the shooting line, whole body in frame head to feet — and CoachVision measures your stance width against your shoulders and how quiet your base stays through the shot. Two tape lines, two weeks, one filmed arrow to confirm. It's the least glamorous fix in archery and one of the highest percentage: every arrow you shoot this season launches off this platform.