Among the questions I get from beginners, and now from experienced archers with a watch that counts calories, one comes up again and again: how much do I burn in a session, and will shooting help me lose weight? The short answer is that an arrow costs very little, less than one kilocalorie even with a heavy bow, and that the most expensive part of a session is the walk to the target rather than the shot. The long answer is more interesting, because the numbers behind it come from a handful of studies, some forty years old, and change a good deal with what is being counted.
Here I set out what has been measured, from a single arrow to a whole tournament day, and leave the question about weight until last, since it is the one the studies answer least.
How an archer's energy use is measured
The direct measurements of energy use during shooting in the registry all come from a laboratory in Osaka, which in the early 1980s followed the archers of a Japanese university club. The method is the classic one in exercise physiology: the archer breathes into a bag that collects all the air exhaled during the test, and the energy spent is worked out from the oxygen consumed. The same archer is also measured at rest, so that the cost of the activity can be separated from what the body would spend anyway.
From this comparison the authors derived a relative metabolic rate, an index used in Japan at the time, which relates the cost of an activity to basal metabolism. For reference, in the tables the same authors used, running at a hundred metres a minute is worth 5.0.
What one arrow costs
The laboratory's second study, published in 1984, comes closest to answering the question. Ten university archers, five men and five women with two or three years of experience, shot with three different draw weights: 32, 42 and 51 pounds for the men, 25, 35 and 45 for the women. In one of the tests they shot twenty-four arrows in a row without leaving the line, so that only the shooting went into the total.
Net of rest, one arrow cost the men 0.47, 0.59 and 0.73 kcal, from the lightest draw weight to the heaviest, and the women 0.27, 0.33 and 0.40. The cost rose almost in a straight line with the pounds, with a correlation of 0.70 in the men and 0.84 in the women, and the rise held when the cost was scaled to each archer's body weight. The twenty-four arrows, in the measured total that also includes resting metabolism over the time taken, cost the men 20.3, 23.8 and 27.3 kcal and the women 14.2, 15.4 and 17.1. Heart rate went up as soon as shooting began, stayed up for the whole series and was back at rest about two minutes after the last arrow.
In the registry the claim that more pounds raise the energy cost of each arrow is reported. The design is sound, because draw weight changes within the same archer, but there is only one direct study, of ten people, with draw weights set in absolute terms rather than relative to each archer's strength. A second study, from 1990 and on four elite archers, points the same way: when shooting, heart rate rose by about 3 beats a minute in the compound archer, whose bow held 30 pounds at full draw, and by 6 to 25 in the recurve archers. The authors link the rise to the load held at full draw, without testing that link.
The 1984 authors also suggest a way of estimating the cost of a session: multiply the cost of one arrow by the number of arrows and add resting metabolism. In the men the sum came out almost exactly, at 98 to 99% of the measured value, while in the women it gave 116 to 123%, an overestimate. The method starts from the cost of arrows shot without leaving the line, so it leaves out the most expensive part of a session: collecting the arrows.
The walk to the target weighs more than the shot
The first Osaka study, from 1981, had measured six archers in a different setting: three arrows at 30 metres, then out and back at a run to collect them, the sequence of an ordinary practice session. The series lasted 186 seconds on average and cost 11.07 kcal, or 3.58 kcal a minute, with a relative metabolic rate of 2.2 that the authors classed as moderately heavy work. Heart rate went from 71 to 99 and was back at rest within two minutes.
That 2.2 needs reading with care, because it lumps shooting and running together. Of the 186 seconds, around forty went on the run out and back over 30 metres and on pulling the arrows from the boss, and in the tables the authors used, running at that pace is worth 5.0 on its own. The 1984 study separated the two: in the men, twenty-four arrows shot in a row without moving sat between 1.6 and 2.2, while six arrows with the retrieval done at a run came to between 2.3 and 2.9. Collecting the arrows cost more than shooting them, as a study on kyudo that the 1981 authors drew on had already argued.
In the registry the claim that the energy cost of shooting is low, and what there is grows with the archer's body size is reported. The first half is the firmer one. The second comes from a correlation in six people, in whom the cost of the series rose with body weight (r = 0.73) and body surface area (r = 0.76) and fell with years of experience (r = -0.68); and in 1984 the gap between men and women remained even when scaled to body weight, a sign that draw weight and sex matter too.
A tournament day
For a whole day there are two studies by a group that followed the Turkish national team, and here the number changes in kind: it is no longer measured but estimated, with an equation that starts from the resting metabolic rate predicted from weight, height and age and adds the typical cost of the day's activities. During competition the rules did not allow the archers to carry measuring devices.
In the first study six world-class recurve archers were followed over the four days of an outdoor European Grand Prix. The estimated expenditure ranged from 2,527 kcal on the lightest day, with 38 arrows in 27 minutes of competition, to 4,067 on the busiest, with 180 arrows in 335 minutes and 4,200 metres on foot between the line and the target. Between the two came the third day, 162 arrows and 3,467 kcal, and the fourth, 72 arrows and 2,964 kcal.
Two things stand out in the table. The first is that even the day with 27 minutes of competition comes to 2,527 kcal: most of the figure is the resting metabolism estimated for archers averaging 67.5 kilos, not the arrows. The second is that the figure follows the volume of the day: on the busiest day the archers spent more than five and a half hours on the field and walked more than four kilometres, about 140 metres for every end at 70 metres. In the second study, of eight archers from the same national team, four men and four women, at a World Cup stage, the estimated expenditure fell from the first day to the last, from 3,406 to 2,493 kcal in the men and from 2,856 to 2,031 in the women.
In the registry the claim that at a tournament an elite archer's day costs between 2,000 and 4,100 calories, and food intake covers them is reported. Both studies come from the same group, on the same team and with the same estimate, and in both the diet was run by a nutritionist: food covering expenditure holds for athletes looked after in that way. I go into food and water on competition days in the article on hydration and nutrition. What is missing is a comparison between a competition day and a training day in the same archers: the only study that measured them in both settings, of sixteen Ukrainian archers, does not compare the two with a test, and in the registry the claim that a competition day loads the archer more than a training day is still not studied.
Light for the muscles, not always for the heart
Calories tell you how much is spent, not how hard it is to spend it. For intensity there are other measurements, taken on different archers in different laboratories, and nearly all of them point the same way. In a simulated competition of 72 arrows at 70 metres, blood lactate in a sixteen-year-old elite archer stayed between 1.6 and 1.9 millimoles per litre, while in a beginner of the same age it reached 2.9. In eight archers from the Brazilian national squad, over a simulated competition of 144 arrows across the four distances, lactate rose compared with a rest day but stayed below 3 millimoles. In sixteen Ukrainian archers of national standard, an ordinary training session did not raise lactate in the urine.
These values are a long way from hard exercise, and in the registry the claim that archery practice is a light-intensity physical activity is reported. It goes no further for two reasons. The first is that the samples are small, from two to sixteen people, and that the same Ukrainian laboratory, on the same group, found urinary lactate up by 14% after training a year later: a small rise, which does not move shooting out of the light band but has to be stated. The second is that the heart tells another story. In nine young Indonesian archers measured in training, the pulse sat between 140 and 160 beats a minute, which is not light intensity; the figure is weak, taken over one minute as a secondary variable in a different comparison, but it is a reminder that an archer's heart rate does not depend on effort alone.
The load of a whole competition also looks low for a trained archer. In the 72-arrow simulated competition, the elite archer's perceived exertion rose from 1 to 3 on a scale from 0 to 10 and his grip strength did not drop, while the beginner reached 5 and lost almost 11% of grip strength in his dominant hand. The Brazilian archers, however, rated each shooting series as more tiring than the matching point of the rest day, and their cortisol rose after every distance. That is why the claim that shooting a full competition puts little physical strain on a trained archer is contested, and the cost seems to depend more on the archer's level than on the competition format.
And weight?
This brings us to the second half of the question, the one that research on archery answers least. None of the numbers so far was collected to find out whether shooting makes people lose weight. The study that comes closest followed twenty-five Turkish university students who had never shot an Olympic recurve, through an eight-week course of three hours a week: each session had 45 minutes of shooting with 24-pound bows, plus exercises with a soft training bow, push-ups and resistance bands. By the end, finger strength had increased and, in the men, back and leg strength too, while body mass index and chest skinfold had not changed significantly. With no control group, and a course that was more than shooting, the study does not allow much more to be said.
The other data are indirect. The basal metabolism of the archers measured in Osaka, sixteen in all, was what their age would predict, and in the registry the claim that an archer's basal metabolic rate does not differ from the value predicted for their age is reported: in those sixteen archers shooting had left no trace on resting energy use. At an Indonesian club, six weeks of shooting practice alone left aerobic endurance where it was, from 1.89 to 1.90 kilometres in the twelve-minute run test. And in twenty young Malaysian archers body fat was higher, not lower, than in twenty sedentary peers, 26.7 against 20.5%, in a small study published in a regional journal.
At the top the picture changes, but it should be read for what it is. The six Turkish recurve archers at the Grand Prix were lean, at 8.5% body fat, and on top of twelve shooting sessions of two and a half hours a week they did six one-hour sessions of strength and conditioning. The study describes them and does not say where that body composition comes from.
That leaves the question the other way round, which I often hear at the range: does an archer carrying a few extra kilos score less? In the registry the claim that more body fat goes with lower scores is contested, and the reason is telling. In the only large study, of 188 recurve archers of mixed level in the United States, a rounder build estimated from the somatotype went with lower scores (r = -0.31), while body fat percentage measured from skinfolds in the same archers was unrelated (r = -0.06). In twelve young Malaysian archers the better-shooting group carried a little less fat, a median of 18.6 against 24.3%, but the difference was not significant, and in seventeen Turkish beginners body mass index was not linked to score. Today one cannot say that fat costs points, nor rule it out.
What I take from this for the range
For work on the range I take two things from these studies. The first is that draw weight is not chosen on calories. In the men of the 1984 study, going from 32 to 51 pounds took the cost of an arrow from 0.47 to 0.73 kcal, a small difference, which mostly shows how economical shooting is even with a heavy bow. The reasons for choosing a draw weight lie elsewhere, and I have gathered them in the article on choosing your draw weight.
The second is that the bow does not set the total on its own. In all these studies movement counts alongside the arrows: the run to the target in the Japanese studies, which cost more than the shooting, and the kilometres on foot and the hours on the field at the Turkish tournaments. A calorie figure for a session, wherever it comes from, therefore depends a good deal on how far you walk, not only on how many arrows you shoot.
What is missing
The cost of one arrow comes from ten Japanese students measured in 1984, the cost of a competition day from an estimate on a single national team, and there is no direct measurement of the energy used in a full training session or a whole competition, counting arrows, retrievals and waiting, in archers of different levels, sexes and sizes. Nor is there a study that follows the weight and body composition of people taking up archery, with a control group and for longer than two months. Until then, the numbers say this: shooting costs little, draw weight moves the total only slightly, and the walk between the line and the target costs more than the shot.