Anyone who takes up archery as an adult, perhaps after years behind a desk, sooner or later wonders whether anything happens to their body. I do not mean their aim but their heart, their blood pressure and their muscles, the things a doctor or a gym can measure. It is a fair question, because archery is often presented as something that does you good, and a handful of studies have tried to measure it. Before the numbers, though, it helps to know what kind of studies these are: almost all of them take a snapshot of people who already shoot and compare them with people who do not, or with population tables, so they describe what archers are like rather than what shooting has changed in them. The studies that took sedentary people, had them shoot for a few weeks and measured them again are few, and involve a few dozen people. What follows are differences measured in groups of people, not guidance on the reader's own health.
For the heart and the metabolism, archery is a light activity, while people starting from nothing gain strength in their arms within three months. On the cardiovascular system the results point two ways: in the only study that had sedentary people shoot, heart rate variability changes only in part, and in the less expected direction, and in archers the aorta is narrower than in runners or swimmers, while the radial artery is among the widest.
How hard the body works when you shoot
To understand what might change in the body, you have to start from the load. The first measurements come from a Japanese laboratory in the early 1980s: six university archers shot ends of three arrows at 30 m and ran to collect them, and each end cost an average of 11 kilocalories in just over three minutes, about 3.6 a minute, with heart rate rising from 71 to 99 and returning to rest within two minutes. Three years later, with ten archers, the same group separated the shooting from everything else. One arrow shot standing still cost between 0.47 and 0.73 kilocalories in men and between 0.27 and 0.40 in women, and in men twenty-four arrows in a row without moving gave a metabolic index between 1.6 and 2.2, against 2.3 to 2.9 for six arrows with the run to collect them; in the tables the authors used, running at that pace is worth 5.0 on its own. Much of the bill, then, is paid on the way to the boss.
More recent measurements reach the same point from another direction. In eight archers of the Brazilian national team, over a simulated 144-arrow competition, blood lactate stayed around or below 3 millimoles per litre, the level of light effort. This is why in the registry the claim that archery training is light-intensity physical activity is reported, as is the claim that the energy cost of shooting is low, and what little there is grows with the archer's size. One measurement does not fit: in nine young Indonesian archers the pulse counted during a session was between 140 and 160 beats a minute, which is not light intensity, although it comes from a one-minute count on a handful of people. If you want the calorie count, the details are in the article on how many calories archery burns.
Heart rate variability in sedentary people
The only study to have sedentary people take up shooting and then look at the heart was carried out in Malaysia in 2019. Thirty-four young men who did less than 150 minutes of moderate or vigorous physical activity a week were randomly divided: seventeen did eight weeks of traditional archery, three sessions a week of 42 arrows with a 40-pound bow at 10 m, and seventeen carried on as before. Before and after, the authors recorded heart rate variability, that is, how much the interval between one beat and the next changes, which is usually read as an index of how the nervous system regulates the heart.
In the group that shot, two indices moved a great deal: the low-frequency component rose from 2,019.7 to 3,418.1, and the ratio of low to high frequency from 2.9 to 6.4. Two others stayed where they were, as the standard deviation of the intervals went from 81.9 to 82.6 milliseconds and the high-frequency component from 1,127.7 to 1,114.6. In the controls the ratio rose from 2.8 to 3.7, without a significant difference.
The study therefore points two ways, and this is why the claim that a few weeks of archery change heart rate variability in sedentary people is contested. Three further things keep it there. The authors compared before and after within each group, never setting the two groups against each other, which is exactly the comparison randomisation is for; the young men were overweight, with a body mass index around 29 and a third of their mass as fat; and a ratio of low to high frequency that doubles is usually read as a shift towards sympathetic activity, although that reading is debated. In other words, the result does not support the idea that archery calms the heart.
There is also a step that is often taken for granted, namely that higher heart rate variability is a good sign in itself. In general physiology higher variability goes with better aerobic fitness, and the methodological recommendations point out that even high vagal tone has its exceptions; in archers, moreover, nobody has measured it, and in the registry the claim is transferred from other populations. How heart rate variability is used in shooting is covered in the article on HRV in archery.
The arteries and heart of people who have shot for years
In 2002 a Japanese group used Doppler ultrasound to measure the arteries of 51 university athletes from six sports, seven of them archers, along with the mass of the left ventricle, and scaled everything to body surface area. The archers' aorta was the smallest of the six groups, and the sum of the diameters of the carotids, radials, foot arteries and aorta placed them fourth, behind long-distance runners, middle-distance runners and swimmers and ahead of weightlifters and sprinters. Across the six sport means, total diameter moved almost in step with left ventricular mass (r = 0.893), which was significantly greater in the endurance sports than in sprinting, weightlifting and archery.
The picture is not uniform, though. In the peripheral arteries the archers were not at the bottom: their radial artery, the one in the forearm and wrist, was the second widest after the weightlifters', and their common carotid was third. The authors conclude that arteries widen mainly with endurance work and, on top of that, in the regions a sport uses. This is why the claim that an archer's arteries do not widen the way an endurance athlete's do is contested: it holds for the aorta and the total, not for every artery, and it comes from seven people compared with other sports, with no before and after. It describes the people who shoot, and does not measure what shooting has done to their arteries.
Heart rate, blood pressure and metabolism at rest
On resting values the data are purely descriptive, and no study places archers next to peers who do not shoot, measured in the same way. In thirty-two young Malaysian archers aged 13 to 24, heart rate taken before the warm-up was 84 a minute, ranging from 61 to 101, and blood pressure was 119 over 75. In thirty-two archers at a residential sports institute in India, twenty-two years old on average, heart rate measured seated at rest was 59, just below the usual threshold of 60, as often happens in trained athletes, with blood pressure of 115 over 64; measured before the warm-up like the Malaysians, however, the same archers reached 89, so much of the difference comes from when the measurement is taken. Finally, in eight Turkish national team archers maximal oxygen uptake was 47.9 millilitres per kilogram per minute in men and 40.9 in women, the values of trained athletes but not of an endurance sport.
In the registry the claim that at rest young archers have normal cardiorespiratory values is reported as a description: none of these values is out of the ordinary for a young athlete, and without a comparison group it cannot be said whether archery shifts them one way or the other. The same goes for resting energy use. In sixteen Japanese archers, measured in two studies in the 1980s, basal metabolic rate did not differ from what was predicted for their age, with 38.3 kilocalories per square metre per hour against the 37.5 of the tables in the first group.
On blood pressure there is also a small intervention study, but it is not about shooting. Thirteen Korean university women archers, with eleven years of practice on average, did twelve weeks of progressive muscle relaxation, three times a week, with no comparison group. Resting systolic pressure went from 116.7 to 113.0 millimetres of mercury, a difference that was not significant, and heart rate from 73.8 to 69.7, again without significance; only diastolic pressure fell slightly, from 69.8 to 67.5. The registry therefore records that twelve weeks of progressive relaxation do not change resting systolic blood pressure in women archers, with the status reported and nothing more: with thirteen people a small effect would not have shown up anyway and without controls even the fall in diastolic pressure may come from the season or from getting used to the measurement.
Strength, mobility and balance
The clearest mark archery leaves is on the muscles that hold the bow. In a second experiment the same Malaysian group randomly divided thirty-four sedentary young men between twelve weeks of shooting, three sessions a week of 42 arrows with a bow of 35 to 40 pounds at 10 m, and no activity. In those who shot, the strength of the muscles tested rose by between 17 and 46%, while in the controls it moved between minus 4 and plus 6%; the largest gain was in the elbow flexors, from 33.6 to 49.1 pounds-force, while in the knee extensors and hip abductors the gain could not be told apart from the controls'. After a further twelve weeks of complete rest that strength fell, but stayed above the starting point: in the elbow flexors it was still 41.7 pounds-force.
Together with other, weaker studies, such as university courses and groups of teenage beginners measured before and after, this experiment means that the claim that archery builds strength in people who start out sedentary is reported, as is the claim that the strength gained from shooting is partly lost when you stop. The gain applies to people starting from nothing, though: in twelve Turkish university archers with at least six months of practice, eight weeks of shooting alone changed neither grip nor back and leg strength.
The same twelve Turkish archers also provide the figure on mobility, and almost by chance, because they were the control group in a study of resistance band exercises. After eight weeks of shooting alone, the distance between the hands behind the back had improved in all twelve, and the claim that a few weeks of shooting alone improve shoulder mobility is reported with precise limits: a before and after with no group that does not shoot, a measurement that can improve simply through repetition, and statistics in the table that do not agree with one another. What can be said is that the people who kept shooting for two months did not lose mobility.
On balance there is a conference abstract: sixteen children who shot for forty minutes three times a week for eight weeks swayed less both standing normally and in the shooting stance, especially in the latter. The claim that a few weeks of archery improve children's balance is reported, with the doubt that part of the gain may be learning the stance they practised. At the other end of the age range, eighteen competitive archers over fifty, compared with 1,628 senior athletes from other sports in the same screening, had stronger grip, a quicker walk and better balance on one leg; this comparison between senior archers and other athletes is reported too, but it is cross-sectional, the abstract gives no means and the archers reported more hours of strength training than the others.
On bone, finally, the only study runs against the common idea. In thirty-three Malaysian teenagers aged 15 on average, split into eleven archers with about three years of practice, eleven badminton players and eleven who did no sport, the speed of ultrasound through the radius and tibia did not differ between the three groups. The claim that archery makes young people's bones stronger is therefore contradicted, although the null result carries little weight: eleven teenagers per group are not enough to rule out a small difference, and ultrasound is not densitometry.
Where the measurements stop
These studies share three limits. The first is design: apart from the two Malaysian experiments, the only ones with a randomly assigned group that did not shoot, they are comparisons between people who shoot and people who do not, or before-and-after measurements with no control group or with one whose data are not shown, so they cannot separate the effect of shooting from the effect of who chooses it, of the season or of simply repeating a test. The second is numbers, because no group of archers goes beyond a few dozen people and in several cases there are seven or thirteen. The third is what gets measured: laboratory indices such as heart rate, strength or the diameter of an artery, taken once or a few weeks apart. What happens to the health of people who shoot over the years is a question nobody has put to the test.
There is also the other side of the coin, which is risk. Archery is often described as a safe sport, but in the registry the idea that it is a sport with a low risk of injury is contested: injuries are almost always minor, while overuse problems, especially in the shoulder, are common among competitive archers. They are covered in the article on injuries in archery. The line of research that uses archery as an intervention, in schools, with sedentary people and elsewhere, is traced year by year in the article on archery and children's attention.
What I take from it
Back to the question I started from: if I take up archery, will anything measurable change in my body? With the data available, the firmest answer concerns the arms. In the only randomised experiment on strength, people who started out sedentary and shot regularly for three months got stronger in the muscles that hold and draw the bow, and lost part of that strength after they stopped. The rest is less clear-cut: the shot itself is a light activity, and how much the body moves in a session depends a great deal on how many times you walk to the boss; on the heart and blood vessels the measurements do not show the adaptations of endurance sports, and the only study in sedentary people finds heart rate variability changing in some indices only, in a direction that does not point to more calm.
For anyone starting out, two things follow. If you expect aerobic fitness from archery, the measurements suggest it does not come from the arrows, and work away from the range is the subject of the article on archers' physical condition. If instead you start for the pleasure of shooting, within three months the strength of your arms and shoulders changes in ways that can be measured, at least if you start out sedentary, and the rest depends on how you organise your week. In any case, these studies describe groups of people and do not say what will happen to any one person: for a question about your own health, the person to ask is still a doctor.