"How much should I breathe before I draw, and at what pace?" I am asked this often, and the question usually comes after someone has already handed over a recipe: two deep breaths before raising the bow, breathe in during the set-up, breathe out or hold during the aim, and between ends breathe at six breaths a minute. Each part has its own logic, but not the same support, and some parts have none that concerns archers.
To answer it I have gathered what the registry holds on the subject: one measurement taken on the range with two archers, one study linking breathing to anxiety in a group of beginners, a few programmes of breathing exercises done away from the line, and the physiology of slow breathing, which comes from adults who do not shoot. The mechanics of breathing, meaning the diaphragm, the rib cage and the mobility of the upper back, are covered in the article on thoracic mobility and diaphragmatic breathing; here I look only at the minutes and seconds before the draw.
What has been measured on the range
Measurements of breathing taken while an archer is shooting are very scarce, because almost any instrument that records it gets in the way of the very movement under study. The attempt closest to the question comes from an Italian biomedical engineering group, which in 2019 built a chest band with fibre optic sensors that measures breathing and mean heart rate with small errors, and that an archer can wear while shooting. On volunteers, checked against a reference instrument, the band estimated breathing rate with a mean error below 2%; on the range there was no reference, and so the claim stays at reported: it is a feasibility test with a single study behind it.
The band was then worn by two archers, who shot two ends of six arrows at 70 m, one practice end and one scoring end, each in five minutes. From the chest signal the authors worked out the breathing rate in the seconds before each shot, and the figure sets out the twelve values for each archer.
The first archer breathed at between 20 and 26.5 breaths a minute, in the practice end and in the end that counted alike, with no trend. The second started at 15.2 before the first practice arrow, was down to 8.4 by the sixth and stayed between 7.1 and 9 in the scoring end, about a third of the other archer's rate. The same task changed one archer's breathing and left the other's where it was.
In the registry the claim that pre-shot breathing rhythm varies from one archer to another is reported, and it cannot go further. There are two archers, the study does not say whether each one's rhythm stays the same from one day to the next, and it does not relate breathing to the score, because it was designed to test a sensor rather than to study the shot. What it does show is that two trained archers can reach the draw at rhythms where one is three times the other, and in these data there is no sign of a single rhythm that suits everyone.
The number six, and where it comes from
The figure heard most often is six breaths a minute, one breath every ten seconds, and it rests on solid ground, though not ground that comes from archers. When you breathe in, the heart speeds up, and when you breathe out it slows down; with slow breathing this oscillation grows, and it peaks at around 0.1 Hz, which is exactly six breaths a minute, a value that is refined towards 5.5 breaths when inhalation and exhalation last the same time. At that rate heartbeat and breath come into phase, and a systematic review of fifteen studies in healthy adults finds that breathing below ten breaths a minute increases heart rate variability.
That is why in the registry the claim that breathing at around six breaths a minute brings heart rate variability to its maximum is transferred: the basis is sound, but there is no measurement at all on people who shoot. Two details matter on the range. The exact rate differs from person to person: the authors of the review on the mechanism insist that the resonance rate is individual, so six is an average, a starting point rather than a target. And nobody has looked for that rate in an archer, still less with a bow in hand; in the seconds of the shot the breath is held, so slow breathing can only happen between arrows.
In the figure the second archer, in the scoring end, was close to the six-breath line and the first well above it; the study does not say which of the two shot better, though, so being close to the line cannot be read as an advantage.
Breathing and anxiety before shooting
The idea that faster breathing goes with tension is widespread, and only one study on archers has measured it. Thirty-nine Turkish students, just out of a fourteen-week course, filled in a competition anxiety questionnaire, sat for four minutes with their breathing and heart recorded, and then shot ten arrows at 18 m. Before the task, those reporting more cognitive anxiety, the kind made of thoughts and worries, breathed faster (a correlation of 0.49), and those who felt more confident breathed more slowly (−0.33). Heart rate variability, on the other hand, was not related to any part of the questionnaire: in this group anxiety showed in the breathing, not in the heart.
During the shooting the picture gets more complicated. Across the whole group the sign reversed, and more cognitive anxiety went with less frequent breathing; in the half of the group more prone to worry, though, the same correlation turned positive and strong (0.73), and there faster breathing went with a lower score. In the registry the claim that the more anxious an archer is before the shot, the faster they breathe is reported and the entry remains a draft: it is an association measured at rest, in beginners, published in a journal with questionable editorial standards, and nobody has repeated it on experienced archers or in competition. Nor does it say that slowing the breath takes the anxiety away, because the study never asked anyone to breathe differently.
Training the breath away from the line
The studies that have tried to change something do not work on the breathing of the shot itself, but on exercises done separately over several weeks, and they look at three different things, anxiety, attention and score, with answers that do not carry the same weight.
Competition anxiety
On anxiety there is only one study on archers that isolates the breathing, small but with a comparison group: twenty para-archers training with the Indonesian National Paralympic Committee, half doing two months of 4-7-8 breathing (in for a count of four, hold for seven, out for eight) in twenty-four fifteen-minute sessions, and half not. In the trained group the sport anxiety score fell from 29.0 to 21.2 in the standard bow division and from 27.8 to 19.2 in compound, a little under a third lower, while in the controls it stayed put or rose slightly. Before that there was only a Korean programme on three women archers in contention for the national squad, in which abdominal breathing came together with progressive relaxation and heart rate biofeedback: anxiety went down, but with no statistics and no way of separating the breathing from the rest, which is why the registry counts it as context.
In the registry, then, the claim that deep breathing reduces an archer's competition anxiety is reported, with that single study behind it. The weakness lies in the measurement more than in the design: five people per division, a regional journal, and anxiety from a questionnaire filled in before and after the programme, not on competition day. We do not know whether the exercise reduces the anxiety felt on the shooting line or only the anxiety written on the form, and no study has checked whether lower anxiety goes with better shooting.
Attention
On attention there is one study on archers, the same one that measured the score, which I come to below. Thirty-six Turkish beginners aged 14 to 18, split into three groups of twelve, added fifteen minutes of alternate nostril breathing, or imagery, or nothing, to their training for eight weeks. On the Bourdon attention test, a pencil-and-paper task, the breathing group improved by 8.6 points and beat both imagery and training alone. An earlier study on thirty-nine healthy office workers, using diaphragmatic breathing at about four breaths a minute, had found a gain of 6.7 points against 4.2 for those who simply repeated the test.
In the registry the claim that training slow breathing improves sustained attention is reported. In both studies the controls improve as well, so part of the gain is familiarity with the test; the groups were not randomised; and the attention measured is that of a test lasting a few minutes, not the attention needed for the last end of a qualification round.
Score
The Turkish study is also the only one that measured the score, and its result has to be read alongside that of the other intervention group. After eight weeks, over nine arrows at 18 m, the alternate nostril breathing group went up by 2.25 points, the imagery group by 4.92, and the group that only trained went down by 0.4.
The claim that slow breathing exercises improve the score is therefore reported: the gain is there and it is small, measured on beginners, with groups not randomly allocated and over a number of arrows that is enough to record an effect but not enough to rely on it. In the same groups balance, measured standing still with eyes closed, also improved, by 13.7 points out of a hundred with breathing and by 15.1 with imagery, which is why the claim that breathing or visualisation exercises improve an archer's balance is reported too. The study does not check whether those who gained most balance also gained most points, and it cannot tell whether the gain comes from the breathing rhythm or simply from stopping for a quarter of an hour before shooting.
What top archers say
That leaves the question of how much breathing matters to archers at the top, at least in their own accounts. The eight archers of the 1996 Italian Olympic team, interviewed a month before the Games, all described mental control of the shot sequence, while slow, deep breathing was mentioned by only one of them, even though the interview asked specifically about breathing. Sixty-five high-level Korean archers, describing freely how they had shot an X, mentioned deep breathing only once in the preparation phase, while confidence and a positive mindset came up 25 times and a mind clear of thoughts and of the score 17 times.
In the registry the claim that high-level archers mention breathing and imagery among the last of their shooting strategies is contested. On breathing the two studies agree; on imagery, which the claim places alongside breathing, they do not: among the Italian Olympians imagery came up in several accounts and only one archer avoided it, while the Korean archers barely mentioned it, twice. The count, moreover, shows what archers put first when they talk about the shot, not what they do: in a questionnaire given to two hundred young archers at the European youth championships, 57% said they used breathing exercises in training. Breathing is there, but archers at that level tend not to present it as the thing that decides the arrow.
The only data on the breathing pattern of experts come from kyudo, and they are very old. Among fifteen students in a Japanese university club, the four highest-graded, from second to fourth dan, ended their imagined shot with a slow exhalation of four or five seconds, while in the others breathing changed with no fixed moment or shape. The claim that in expert kyudo archers breathing follows a fixed pattern even when they only imagine or watch the shot, in less experienced ones it does not is reported: nobody was shooting, the senior grades were only four, the traces were compared by eye, and in recurve and compound the question has never been measured.
Reaching the line out of breath
A related question concerns reaching the line out of breath, after a climb on a field course or a dash to make your turn. Here too there is a single study, a conference abstract, and it does not really answer the question. Fifteen experienced archers, using two compound bows provided for the test, shot at 20 yards at rest and then straight after an uphill walk and a run: the first arrow after the effort landed about six centimetres from the centre of the group shot at rest, with both bows, and with no link to heart rate. The abstract, though, compares the two bows with each other, not the first arrow after the effort with a first arrow shot at rest, which is the comparison that would be needed; the spread between archers is huge, and on recurve there is nothing. That is why the claim that arriving at the shooting line out of breath spoils the first arrow, as you hear at the club, is not studied in the registry: the data that exist neither support it nor go against it.
What I take from it for the shooting line
Taken together, these studies do not point to a rhythm that suits everyone, and the only measurement taken on the range shows two archers with rhythms far apart. I take three things from them, bearing in mind that none has been tested in an experiment on the scores of competitive archers.
The first is to know your own rhythm before changing it. In training you can count your breaths in the minute before the draw, or film yourself from the side and count them afterwards, over several ends and on different days. The number tells you where you are starting from, and no study says which rhythm brings more points: of the two archers measured on the range, one was above twenty breaths a minute and the other at around eight.
The second concerns slow breathing exercises. The studies tried them away from the line, over several weeks and in quarter-hour sessions, and the results on anxiety, attention and score point the same way, but they rest on beginners, para-archers and small groups. For those sessions six breaths a minute is a reasonable starting point, because it is the average rate at which the heartbeat oscillates most in healthy adults; it remains an average, and each person's own rate may sit a little above or below it. The studies on archers, for that matter, tried different techniques, alternate nostril breathing and 4-7-8, not a fixed rate of six breaths. In the same study on scores, moreover, imagery did more than twice as much: anyone with a quarter of an hour per session to give to the mental side has more than one option.
The third concerns the shot itself. Among the studies collected in the registry, none has compared guided breathing during the aim, for example holding the breath on full lungs or halfway through the exhalation, with the archer's natural breathing, and none has linked the breathing of each arrow to where it landed. The recipe taught on courses, breathe in during the set-up and out or hold during the aim, remains a teaching habit the data have not yet tested. If an archer already has a pattern of their own that repeats the same way, the available measurements give no reason to change it; if they do not, the place to build one is the pre-shot routine, together with the other steps that come before the draw.
What is missing
We would need twenty or thirty archers measured over several sessions, to know how stable breathing rhythm is within the same person and how much it varies between people; we would need the resonance rate measured in archers, to know whether it stays the same under the load of the draw; and we would need breathing recorded arrow by arrow in competition, alongside the score. Finally, there is no trial with competitive archers, allocated at random, in which the comparison group does an activity of the same length without slow breathing. Until then, the answer the data allow is this: your own rhythm needs to be known first, and exercises done away from the line have small studies in their favour that all point the same way.