Is archery a physical sport? The question comes up whenever someone watches a competition for the first time, and archers usually reply that holding a bow at full draw through a whole day of competition is another matter. The two sides are talking about different things: one is about what the shot costs the body, the other about how fit the people who shoot actually are, and both have been measured, from blood lactate during a simulated competition to magnetic resonance imaging of the trunk muscles and fitness tests set against age norms.
Taken together, the measurements say that shooting, as an activity, is light; that people who start out sedentary and take up archery get stronger, mostly in the arms, while for those who have been shooting for months shooting alone adds no strength; and that club and youth archers compared with reference tables often fall below average, strength above all, while the little data on top-level archers says something different. In the registry these are all rated reported: there is evidence in favour from archers, but it is limited.
What shooting costs
The first measurements of what shooting costs came from a Japanese group in the early 1980s. In six university archers, an end of three arrows at 30 m, including running out to collect the arrows, cost an average of 11.07 kcal over a little more than three minutes, and the heart rate rose from 71 to 99 and was back to resting within two minutes. Three years later the same group separated the two parts of the work: twenty-four arrows shot in a row without moving sat between 1.6 and 2.2 on the relative metabolic rate, only a little above rest, while six arrows with a run to collect them reached between 2.3 and 2.9. Fetching the arrows cost more than shooting them.
More recent studies look at lactate, which rises when the muscles work harder than aerobic metabolism can cover. In a simulated competition of seventy-two arrows it stayed between 1.6 and 2.9 mmol/L, but in two archers only; in eight recurve archers from the Brazilian national squad, over a hundred and forty-four arrows at the four distances, it rose compared with a rest day but always stayed at or below about 3 mmol/L.
That is why the claim that archery practice is a light-intensity physical activity is rated reported in the registry. One finding points the other way: in nine young archers measured in training, the pulse sat between 140 and 160 beats a minute, which is not light intensity. It is weak evidence, taken over a single minute as a secondary measure, but it is a reminder that the heart and the muscles do not always tell the same story.
An indirect clue points the same way: the shot on its own does not train the aerobic system. In an Indonesian study of club archers, the control group carried on for six weeks with their usual shooting practice and nothing else, and their aerobic endurance stayed where it was: from 1.89 to 1.90 km on average in the twelve-minute run.
Shooting and strength in beginners
The shot costs little energy, but every arrow asks the shoulder and arm muscles to hold a draw, and anyone starting from scratch feels it. The only study with a group that does not shoot is a randomised trial on 34 sedentary young men: half shot for twelve weeks, three sessions of 42 arrows with a 35 to 40 lb barebow at 10 m, and half did nothing. In the group that shot, the strength of the muscles tested rose by between 17% and 46%, while in the other the values moved between minus 4% and plus 6%. The biggest gain was in the elbow flexors, from 33.6 to 49.1 pounds-force, while the knee extensors and hip abductors rose no more than in those who did not shoot: shooting mainly strengthens the arms.
The other studies point the same way with weaker designs, before and after with no control group: in 1967, for example, in 49 students on a university course, maximum draw strength rose by five or six pounds over 24 lessons. That is why the claim that shooting a bow builds strength in people who start out sedentary is rated reported.
The limit that matters to people who already shoot comes from a 2026 study: in twelve university archers with at least six months of traditional archery behind them, eight weeks of shooting practice alone changed neither grip strength, thumb strength nor back and leg strength. What is gained at the start is also partly lost on stopping: in the randomised trial, after twelve weeks off, the elbow flexors had dropped to 41.7 pounds-force, still above the 33.6 at the start, and this is the finding behind the claim, rated reported, that the strength gained from shooting is partly lost when you stop.
Archers and peers who do no sport
If shooting strengthens the arms, archers should be stronger than people who do no sport, and most cross-sectional comparisons find that they are. The measure repeated most often is grip strength. In twenty young state-level Malaysian archers, the dominant hand gripped a median of 35 kilos against 25 in sedentary peers; in thirty-eight Chinese university archers, a mean of 44.0 kilos against 38.8, a medium effect. The Chinese study also had a group of basketball players, though, and against them the difference was not significant.
These comparisons have two limits. The first lies in the groups themselves: in the Malaysian sample the archers weighed 14 kilos more than the sedentary peers and carried more fat, and a heavier body can account for part of the grip on its own. The second lies in the shoulder, exactly where the clearest advantage would be expected: in eleven young Malaysian archers set beside eleven non-athletes, isokinetic knee strength was greater at medium and high speeds, but shoulder strength did not differ at any speed.
The claim that archers are stronger than non-sporting peers is therefore rated reported, with a limit none of these studies can get past: a cross-sectional comparison cannot say whether shooting makes people stronger or whether the young people who keep shooting were stronger to begin with.
Physical condition against the norms
Being stronger than sedentary peers is not the same as being fit. Finding that out means comparing archers with an outside reference, and almost all the studies have done so with Indonesian age-based fitness tables, since much of this work comes from Indonesia. The results point almost entirely the same way. Among twenty children aged 10 to 12 taking up archery at a school in Yogyakarta, nobody reaches the good level on the national test and 60% fall below average; among fifteen university archers, 73% start in the lowest strength category; among sixty youngsters aged 12 to 13, 88% of the boys and 61% of the girls have a grip below the threshold used in the study, which was published, though, in a journal with questionable editorial standards. Finally, among twelve district-level archers nobody reaches the good band for overall condition, and all of them are below the norm for leg strength and aerobic capacity.
That is why the claim that archers often have poor general physical condition is rated reported. The picture has three limits, though, and each one changes how that "often" should be read.
The first concerns which quality is measured. Among the same fifteen university students who nearly all started in the lowest strength category, nobody started in the lowest muscular endurance category, and eight out of fifteen were in the fair one; among the twelve district archers, below the norm on almost everything, back strength was the test on which 42% reached the good band. "Poor", then, applies mainly to strength.
The second concerns level. Six world-class recurve archers from the Turkish national team carried 8.5% body fat and had a VO2max of 45.0 ml/kg/min, an average aerobic capacity rather than a poor one. Even among children the picture is not uniform: 160 children aged 10 to 12 being started in archery in Manokwari, Indonesia, had a VO2max above the references quoted by the authors, although those come from another city and another age band.
The third concerns the yardstick. Almost all of these comparisons are made against general-population norms, often Indonesian ones, in small groups and in regional or questionable journals, and no study has put archers and non-archers of the same age through the same fitness test battery. A group of club archers sitting below average shows where it stands against a table, not that it is worse off than peers who do not shoot.
The trunk muscles
The trunk deserves a separate look, because it holds the posture throughout the shot. Here there is a single study, but a large one using a precise instrument: a Japanese group measured the trunk muscles of 352 national and international athletes with magnetic resonance imaging, 88 of them archers, dividing the cross-sections by height squared. Adult male archers had a smaller psoas, erector spinae and lateral abdominal wall than wrestlers, and the gap was already complete at 16 to 18: 50.4 cm² of lateral abdominals against 62.9, and 53.4 of erectors against 58.7. Female archers had smaller lateral abdominals than table tennis players and gymnasts. Between the age of 12 and adulthood, moreover, archers' trunks hardly changed, except for the rectus abdominis in the men, from 11.9 to 15.6 cm².
Archers come off worse against other athletes, however, not across the board: against values published elsewhere for students who do no sport, the young athletes in the study, archers included, had cross-sections 50% to 66% larger in the lateral abdominals, the psoas and the erectors. The claim that archery does not build the trunk muscles the way other sports do is rated reported: a single cross-sectional study, with some very small subgroups.
How much room conditioning gets in training
If shooting alone neither trains the aerobic system nor lifts strength above the norms, what matters is how much physical work archers do besides shooting. At a Malaysian national sports school, three sessions per sport were filmed: in archery, ten archers aged about twenty, 82% of the time went on technical work, the highest share among six sports, and 1% on physical work, warming up and cooling down included. The filming took place only on the shooting range, though. In a questionnaire of 75 German club-level competitive archers, who trained 2.4 times and 4.3 hours a week, only 22% did strength work related to shooting.
The claim that physical conditioning takes up a minimal share of an archer's training session is rated reported, with the limit of that one word, session: the 1% does not rule out physical preparation at another point in the week.
When physical work is done, it goes mostly to the upper body. Among 200 archers aged 13 to 20 at the European Youth Championships, 84.5% strengthened the upper body, but only 49% trained the lower limbs and 49.5% did aerobic work; in 18 young Indonesian recurve archers, fitness tests found only 3 athletes with a balanced profile between the muscles that hold the posture and those that hold the bow. The claim that in archers' physical preparation, the legs are neglected is rated reported, and it covers only the legs, because on the trunk these data fall short.
Physical condition and score
That leaves the question archers care about most: does a fitter archer score more? The data are few and almost all cross-sectional, and the largest set is also the oldest. Between 1982 and 1984, at Olympic training camps and national championships in the United States, 188 recurve archers ranging from beginners to an Olympic champion were tested, and the tests were set against the average of their official scores for that year. Quadriceps strength in the stronger leg, divided by body weight, had the highest correlation among the strength measures, 0.48, while grip strength did not clear the significance threshold. Men and women aged 12 to 74 were pooled, however, and leg strength went hand in hand with more self-confidence and less dwelling on mistakes: it may mark better general condition rather than cause the score. The claim that in archers, more leg strength goes with higher scores is rated reported, on that single study.
A second link comes from fifty young Malaysian archers aged 13 to 20, with six fitness tests and a shooting test of six arrows at 50 m: in a regression with all the tests, the vertical jump was one of the two associated with the score, with a coefficient of 0.39, but the standing broad jump, which measures a closely related quality, had an almost identical coefficient, 0.31, and did not reach significance. The claim that archers who jump higher score higher is rated reported as well. On aerobic capacity, four studies of archers split down the middle, and the claim that better aerobic capacity goes with higher scores is rated contested.
Whether training the body raises the score is a separate question, with intervention studies of its own: a dozen programmes on archers report a higher score afterwards, but often without a control group, and in one experiment ordinary shooting practice alone raised the score of every archer in the control group. The claim that physical conditioning improves shooting accuracy is therefore rated reported.
Where the measurements stop
Some questions remain open. Beyond grip and a few other tests, no study has compared archers with peers who do not shoot on the same fitness test battery, so nobody can say whether club archers fall below average more or less often than their peers. On top-level archers there are six Turkish recurve archers and the Japanese comparison, and little else. Nobody has trained the legs of a group of archers to see whether scores rise, and almost all the samples are young or club-level archers from a handful of countries.
What I take from this for the shooting line
On the data we have, the answer to the question in the title has two sides: shooting costs little energy and, in beginners, enough of the arms to make them stronger, while the archers who have been measured, young and club-level ones above all, often fall below average for strength. I draw three conclusions from this, none of which promises a higher score.
The first is that shooting practice does not replace physical training. The measurements show that shooting keeps energy expenditure only a little above rest, that six weeks of shooting alone leave aerobic endurance unchanged and that, in people who already shoot, shooting alone adds no strength. Anyone who wants better physical condition has to train for it separately.
The second is that it helps to know where you stand. The tests used in these studies are simple (grip strength, pull-ups, the plank, the vertical jump, a twelve-minute run) and, repeated a few months apart, they show whether anything is changing. A comparison with an age table tells you where you sit, not how much better you will shoot.
The third concerns the legs and aerobic fitness, which archers' physical preparation most often leaves behind and which, in the district group, were the two tests on which every archer fell below the norm. Nobody has shown that training them raises the score, so I treat them as a matter of general condition before they are a matter of points. Archery-specific exercises are on the page about specific strength for archers, and work on balance and the trunk is on the one about balance, core and proprioception.