When the shoulder starts to make itself felt, or when a coach says the shoulder blade "isn't holding", the next question is a practical one: what exercises should I do for my shoulder, and what actually works? There is no shortage of answers, from the lower trapezius to resistance bands, from kinesiology tape to a massage after the session. Some of these have been tested in archers, in small studies using different measures, and the results do not all point the same way.
Reading them properly means keeping in mind that "works" can mean three different things. An exercise can change a measure of the shoulder, such as the strength of a muscle, the way the trapezius muscles share the work or the angle of the arm at full draw; it can change the score; or it can reduce the pain of someone who already hurts. Studies of archers have found the first more often than the second, while the third concerns treatment, which is a job for a doctor or a physiotherapist and something the registry does not use as evidence. I cover how common shoulder pain is in the article on injuries in archery.
Which shoulder muscles shooting loads
Before choosing an exercise it helps to know which muscles shooting actually loads, and the only comparison between disciplines offers a clue. Thirty-seven pre-elite Taiwanese archers, 19 recurve and 18 compound, were tested with a hand-held dynamometer: the recurve archers were stronger in the horizontal abductors on both sides, 19.0 against 15.4 kilograms-force on the drawing side and 19.1 against 15.4 on the bow side, in the horizontal adductors on the drawing side and in the lower trapezius on the bow side, while the upper trapezius was almost the same in both disciplines.
The claim that recurve archers have stronger shoulders than compound archers is therefore reported, but it holds only for these muscles, which are the ones that keep the draw open. One possible explanation is that with the let-off of the cams the compound archer has far less weight to hold while aiming. The recurve group, however, had more men and weighed more, strength was not scaled to body weight, and a comparison made at a single point in time cannot say whether the bow creates the difference or whether it comes with the people who choose it.
The lower trapezius and the work of the trapezius muscles
The lower trapezius is the first muscle people mention when they talk about the archer's shoulder, and it is also the one tested most often. The programme in the Korean study I come to below is typical: four exercises lying prone, including Y and T raises, with a load that rose from 50-60% to 60-70% of the one-repetition maximum over the eight weeks. The idea is that if the lower part of the trapezius works harder, the upper part can work less, and the shoulder blade stays lower and steadier during the draw.
The trial the registry counts comes from fourteen Taiwanese university recurve archers: seven followed twelve weeks of exercises centred on the lower trapezius and seven changed nothing, with the groups formed by preference rather than at random. On the drawing side the ratio between upper and lower trapezius, measured with electromyography in the last second before release, fell from 2.2 to 1.1, and on the bow side the upper trapezius dropped from 95% to 69% of maximal contraction. What is interesting is where the change came from, because the lower trapezius worked just as before and it was the upper trapezius that worked less. A second study, Korean and randomised, in thirty-one elite archers, saw the same ratio fall from 3.47 to 1.43; its archers, however, reported shoulder pain and the programme was also meant to reduce it, so on this question the registry keeps it as context.
This is why the claim that lower trapezius exercises rebalance the work of an archer's trapezius muscles is reported and no more. The measure itself is fragile: in the Taiwanese study the ratio between the two parts of the trapezius had a coefficient of variation of 60%, and with repeatability that low a halving could be largely noise. In the Korean study, the exercise group started with a ratio more than twice that of the controls, so part of the fall may be a drift back towards more typical values.
The angle of the draw force line
The Korean study also measured something that matters a great deal to anyone working on technique: the draw force line at full draw, that is, how far the line running from the bow hand to the drawing elbow strays from the arrow. Before the programme it was about ten degrees off; after eight weeks it had fallen from 10.1 to 7.9 degrees in the exercise group, while in the controls it rose from 9.2 to 9.7, and over the same period the shoulder blade on the drawing side had dropped by two and a half degrees. In the Taiwanese study, by contrast, the shoulder angles measured in three dimensions during the draw did not change, even though the strength of the lower trapezius had increased.
The first is an angle read from video in a single plane and the second is three-dimensional kinematics, but they are the only two data points and they point in different directions: the claim that strengthening the lower trapezius brings the draw closer to the line of force is contested.
The score
This is the less comfortable part. In the Korean study, the soundest in design, eight weeks of lower trapezius work left the score over fifteen arrows at 70 m exactly where it was, 132.1 before and 132.1 after, while the controls went from 132.9 to 129.8, a difference between the groups that did not stand up statistically. The shoulder had changed, from the trapezius ratio to the force line, but the change did not show up on the target.
The other studies point elsewhere. In the Taiwanese study the score of a simulated 72-arrow round at 70 m rose from 628 to 639 in the exercise group, while the controls fell from 617 to 601; all seven trained archers improved, against two out of seven controls, but the final comparison between the groups stopped at a p value of 0.062, above the threshold. In 2025 a Turkish study randomised thirty archers aged 15 to 24 into three groups, and with eight weeks of scapular stabilisation six arrows at 18 m went from 46.7 to 55.2 points, against 44.7 to 47.4 in the group that simply carried on training. It is the clearest result in favour, with two reservations: the controls improved too, so part of the gain did not come from the exercises, and six arrows are too few for a stable score. That study, moreover, did not measure the shoulder blade at all.
With studies pointing in opposite directions, the claim that scapular stabilisation exercises improve score is contested. Two trials of different shoulder exercises complete the picture. In twenty-two teenage barebow archers, adding four weeks of Flexi-bar exercises to kinesiology tape did not change accuracy compared with tape alone. And in 2026 a randomised trial in twenty-four Turkish traditional archers compared those who added eight weeks of resistance band exercises to their shooting with those who only shot: grip, thumb pinch and back and leg strength rose more in the first group, but the score improved equally in both. This is one of the reasons why the claim that elastic band exercises improve the score is also contested.
The same study has a finding for anyone worried about stiffening up from shooting a lot: in the group that only shot for eight weeks, shoulder mobility, measured as the distance between the hands behind the back, improved in all twelve archers, and by the end the two groups could not be told apart. It is a before-and-after comparison in twelve people, with statistics in the table that do not agree with one another, so the claim that a few weeks of shooting alone improve shoulder mobility is reported: the archers who kept shooting did not lose mobility, but that does not show that shooting is what produced it.
Pain and prevention
The Korean study also measured pain, which its archers were already reporting at the start. In the exercise group pain fell from 4.56 to 2.88 out of ten, in the controls it rose from 3.20 to 3.67, and perceived shoulder instability also decreased. The result goes the way many would expect, but it concerns a programme aimed at reducing pain that was already there, which makes it a clinical intervention, and the registry does not use treatments for pain as evidence. That is why the claim that strengthening the lower trapezius reduces shoulder pain in archers is not studied. A painful shoulder needs to be examined, and in that case the choice of exercises belongs to a doctor or a physiotherapist.
Prevention has not been put to the test. The idea that rotator cuff strengthening prevents shoulder injuries is not studied: the most recent systematic review of exercise in archers gathered fifteen studies published between 2015 and 2025, and none of them reports how many injuries occurred, how severe they were or how many training days were lost. The preventive benefits people talk about are inferred from strength, balance and postural control.
Kinesiology tape
Elastic tape on the shoulder is a common sight on the range, and in archers there are two studies that count for the registry. In the first, thirty female club archers in Tehran shot three arrows at each distance before and half an hour after tape was applied to the deltoid and supraspinatus of the drawing arm, and the median scores out of 30 rose from 26 to 28 at 18 m, from 23 to 27 at 30 m and from 23 to 26 at 50 m. In the second, among twenty-two Indonesian teenage barebow archers, the tape-only group scored 26.4 out of 30 with three arrows at 18 m after four weeks; the study does not report the starting values, however, and to take part archers had to score 25 or less on the first test, so some improvement was to be expected anyway.
Neither study compares the tape with a sham tape, and in the first the tape always came after the first set of arrows, so the effect of the tape cannot be separated from expectation and from the order of the tests. The claim that kinesiology tape on the shoulder improves scores is reported: there is evidence in favour, and it is weak.
The same two studies measured shoulder position sense, that is, how well the archer finds a given angle again with eyes closed. In the Tehran archers, at 60 degrees of external rotation, the error fell from 5.91 to 0.99 degrees with the tape; at 30 degrees the average error was already close to zero, 0.60 degrees, and did not change. In the Indonesian teenagers the error after treatment was lower, but with no starting values and with archers chosen precisely because their errors were larger. With a null result in archers alongside those in favour, the claim that kinesiology tape improves an archer's sense of shoulder position is contested.
Position sense and the score
Whether a finer sense of position helps you shoot better is another matter, and the studies do not show it consistently. In seventeen children at the end of a basic Olympic recurve course, the ability to reproduce 60 and 90 degrees of abduction had no relationship with the score of six arrows at 10 m. In thirty professional compound archers in Cyprus, followed through twelve weeks of balance work on a BOSU, those who reduced their error most in finding the bow shoulder raised to 125 degrees improved their score most, but at the other five angles measured there was no relationship, and at the start of the study, comparing the archers with one another, no measure of position sense was linked to the score. The claim that a finer sense of shoulder position goes with better scores is contested.
Massage and manual therapy
With massage there are two separate questions. The first concerns a shoulder that hurts, and there massage is a treatment: as with the lower trapezius, the registry does not draw claims from studies of archers in pain, and the decision lies with whoever is treating them. The second concerns the recovery of a healthy shoulder after a long session, and that is the one that matters to someone in training.
A Polish group tested it twice on the same twenty trained archers, using a session of shoulder manipulation by a physiotherapist, which is manual therapy rather than massage. After a hundred arrows and the session, the electrical activity of the deltoids and trapezius did not return to resting values: the lower trapezius peak stayed above its starting level, 551 microvolts against 313, and after the therapy the infraspinatus was more active than straight after the arrows, 170 against 110 on average, which the authors read as fatigue carrying on. In the second paper, using a myotonometer that measures the tone, stiffness and elasticity of six muscles at rest, no change survived correction for the thirty comparisons.
The two papers cover the same sample and count as a single study for the registry, with no control group and with recovery defined as a laboratory number, leaving out pain, score and how the archer felt. The claim that a session of manual therapy after shooting did not help the archer's shoulder recover is reported. It does not follow that manual therapy is useless; what follows is that, where it was looked for, the effect did not appear.
Where the research stops
Taken together, these studies have a good deal in common. The intervention studies involve between fourteen and thirty-one archers, last from a single session to twelve weeks and often appear in regional journals; for the tape, none has a sham tape to compare against, and none of them counted injuries. Shoulder measures change often, the score changes in some studies and not in others, and the step from one to the other has not been put to the test: nobody has shown that an archer shoots better because their trapezius muscles have been rebalanced.
There is also the question of who was studied: young recurve archers, at university or elite level, for the lower trapezius, female club archers and teenage barebow archers for the tape, trained adults for manual therapy. About a masters archer, or a compound archer working on the lower trapezius, these studies say nothing.
What I take from it for the shooting line
The first thing I take from all this is to keep the questions apart. If the question is how the shoulder muscles work, lower trapezius exercises lowered the trapezius ratio in both studies that measured it, although the registry counts only one of them and the claim remains reported. If the question is the score, the evidence is contested, and the best-designed study saw no difference: a programme for the shoulder blade can be done for the sake of the shoulder, but the studies do not allow anyone to promise points in return.
The second concerns shooting itself. In the group that only shot for two months, shoulder mobility did not get worse, and the score rose as much as in the group that added resistance bands; in the data we have, band work added no points to those that came from shooting, so if you add it, know which measure you are trying to change. I discuss which kind of strength an archer needs, and how it is measured, in the article on specific strength for archers.
The third concerns tape and massage. Tape on the shoulder has never been compared with a sham tape, so nobody knows how much of the extra point comes from the tape and how much from expectation; manual therapy after shooting, in the two sets of measurements that looked for it, did not bring the muscles back to their starting values. Archers who use them because they feel better have no reason from the studies to stop, but no solid evidence either for expecting anything on the target.
The last concerns pain. What the studies say about exercises for a painful shoulder concerns treatment, and it gives no criterion for deciding on your own. For pain that does not settle, that comes back every session or that forces you to change your shot, the people to see are a doctor or a physiotherapist, and it is for them to choose the exercises.